Love Scotland podcast – Season 6

Transcript

Three voices: male voiceover [MV]; Jackie Bird [JB]; Richard Oram [RO]

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

[JB]
‘Take an egg. Make a hole in the top of it. Take out the whites and the yolk, and fill the shell only with saffron. Roast the shell and saffron together in embers of charcoal until the shell wax yellow. Then, beat shell and all together in a mortar with half a spoonful of mustard seed. Now, soon as any suspicion is had of infection, disillue the weight of a French crown in ten spoonfuls of posset ale. Drink it luke warm and sweat upon it in your naked bed.’

I think Meryl Streep can sleep easy in her bed! That concoction was from a book published in 1594, called Present Remedies Against the Plague.
Hello and welcome to the podcast. You join me in the very place that did a roaring trade selling some of the ingredients for that unlikely antidote. I’m at Gladstone’s Land in Edinburgh, not far from the castle at the top of the Royal Mile, which at the moment is heaving with tourists. This is one of the city’s oldest buildings, 500 years of history within its walls. And it’s been painstakingly restored by the National Trust for Scotland. Where I’m standing right now, a man called John Riddoch had a shop which sold the herbs and spices for those potions.

We think of history’s plagues as rare and fleeting. But surprisingly, plague was a frequent and terrifying visitor to Scotland over a period of about 300 years. Gladstone’s Land is on Edinburgh’s Lawnmarket, so-called because in those days it was a busy market. The buildings around it were crowded and unsanitary. It was a great place to do your shopping … and to catch your death.
So, how could they even try to combat this lethal disease in their midst? Well, as we all discovered recently, a pandemic isn’t just for the history books. Of course, COVID wasn’t a plague, but it seems that our efforts to control and contain it were remarkably similar to what our ancestors tried to do centuries ago. While I was researching this subject, I was constantly directed to Richard Oram, a Professor of History at Stirling University. ‘Scotland’s plague man’ they told me. So, we had a chat.

Richard, welcome to the podcast.

[RO]
Hello there, Jackie.

[JB]
Are you happy being widely known as ‘Scotland’s plague man’ because that seems to be the consensus?!

[RO]
Yeah, it’s something that’s stuck. I just happened to be working on it at the time when things began to kick off again, and so yes …

[JB]
This is COVID?

[RO]
This was COVID. It’s a reflection on something that I do in my research.

[JB]
We’re here to talk about plague – a terrifying but fascinating subject that evokes crosses on doors and the terrifying cry of ‘bring out your dead’. What lured you to the subject?

[RO]
I’m an environmental historian, and critical to everything that I do within that is trying to get an understanding of the interactions between people and the wider environment around them. Most folk think about this maybe in terms of climate change and weather impacts, but we’ve also got to remember that disease pathogens are affecting human and animal populations, and also trees and plants and things like that as well. You need to look at the environment in the round.

[JB]
Before my research for this, my knowledge of plague was scant. I’d heard, obviously, of the Great Plague of London, but I had no idea that for a few centuries plague was rife in Scotland. Why isn’t this better known?

[RO]
In comparison with a lot of other countries, that’s actually remarkably little written in the contemporary chronicles, for example. You have to do an awful lot more digging to get the information about the plague in Scotland. Much of it is in the records of the royal burghs, so it wasn’t up there in those big iconic texts that folk would tend to go to – things like John of Fordun or Walter Bowers’ Scotichronicon and things like that. Because they maybe only mention it in a couple of places, there’s a tendency to think it hit Scotland less than elsewhere.

[JB]
But as we’ll found out, it certainly hit Scotland. So, when does Scotland’s significant plague history begin?

[RO]
1349. People in Scotland had probably been aware that plague was spreading westwards across Europe for a couple of years prior to that. When it arrives in England the previous year, the Scots are absolutely dancing up and down with glee, calling it the ‘foul death of the English’.

[JB]
Oh dear. That doesn’t show us in a good light, does it?

[RO]
Well, remember this is the middle of the second phase of the Wars of Independence, so the enemy has been inflicted with this horrible disease and this is God’s judgment. Clearly, it’s God’s judgment; everybody knows that God’s on the side of the Scots …

[JB]
How bad was that first wave of plague here?

[RO]
Well, again this is one of the problems with the understatement that you get in a lot of the sources. John of Fordun’s chronicle, which is our earliest surviving text, speaks about a third – and all that really means is a huge number of people. He had no idea how many had actually died.

[JB]
So, he was implying a third of the population died?

[RO]
A third of the population died. And in a lot of the modern analysis, that type of figure is the one that tended to be bandied around until folks started to dig into things in other countries, looking at death registers (where they existed) and wills and testaments. And you began to get an indication that it was actually significantly worse. If only 30% of your population died, you got off lightly. You could be looking at upwards of 60/70%, and in some locations possibly even as high as 80%. Rare cases, but generally you’re looking at somewhere between 60 and 70% might have died in the first epidemic.

[JB]
Good grief! No wonder it was known as the ‘great mortality’. Now, as far as Scotland’s concerned, is it correct that the next wave, if you like, came about 12 years later?

[RO]
Yeah, it’s back in the early 1360s, and we actually know more about that – the second death as it’s usually referred to – than we do about the first one. And then after it, it’s coming back every 7–10 years through the remainder of the 14th century, and each time it’s given a number. And then suddenly in the early 15th century – because it’s quite obvious this is something that’s just going to keep on coming, keep on coming, keep on coming – they stop numbering them and it just becomes a fact of life and death. Another fact of life and death.

[JB]
You mentioned the fact that it was looked upon as something that came about if you were badly behaved or that it was God’s will, and I found something from the General Assembly from the Church of Scotland that really summed this up. It gave a list of the misdemeanours that caused plague. I’ll read you a bit:
‘through swearing, perjury, lies, profaning on the Sabbath;
with markets, gluttony, drunkenness, fighting, dancing, playing, rebelling against magistrates and laws of the country;
with incest, fornication, adultery, sacrilege, theft and depression;
with false witness;
and finally, with all kind of impiety and wrong.’
So, a bit of a catch-all there, I would imagine.

[RO]
But it’s describing a decent Friday night out in Glasgow! What you’ve got here is it is part of that whole Godly society and aspect that things that were seen as being even slightly morally dubious were seen as potentially opening the door to divine judgment. And divine judgment would mean plague. So, anything at all that is potentially exposing you to the suggestion that you might be behaving in a less-than-proper manner, that has to be clamped out. As historians, we have a tendency to look at the political and the social side of it, forgetting that the religious side of it is actually – in the medieval and through into the post-medieval period – as important, if not more important, in people’s lives.

[JB]
They were the top dogs, yes.

[RO]
But, it’s also the first thing that … if you look even in the original Acts of Parliament that are concerned about trying to control plague spread. Embedded into the parliamentary acts you have got religious processions, prayers, masses being said, the bishops to lead within the dioceses. So, it’s a spiritual cure that is being sought first and foremost and then everything else is the belt and braces: let’s clear up the mess, let’s get rid of vermin, let’s prevent people moving around, that kind of thing. But it’s the spiritual one is the first focus.

[JB]
Let’s get in among the people of the 14th and 15th centuries. They already had diseases to cope with. There was typhus, there was smallpox. When word got around that the plague had arrived, or the plague was back, how did they view it? Was it abject terror?

[RO]
Well, it’s one of the things again that we need to look at the sources we’ve got from other parts of Europe. And there’s a whole variety of responses. It is actually like looking at the way in which society dealt with COVID when it first began to impinge on our consciousnesses. There are folk who were in denial – there were folk who were thinking ‘it won’t affect me; I live a clean life. God won’t afflict me.’
There’s folk who began to look for scapegoats; in mainland Europe you’ve got identification of marginal communities. In parts of Germany, parts of France: the Jewish population. Clearly, this is well poisoning because it’s ‘find the other’, people who are potentially not being afflicted the same way because they may have a different lifestyle. They’re not mingling with the wider population, so at first they seem to be slightly protected from this. ‘They’re being protected – does this mean they’ve got some pact with Satan that is keeping them safe?’ It’s looking for those sorts of scapegoats that you can blame. Beggars – because they’ve got the jealousy of the rich; they’re poisoning the rich to get their wealth. You’ve got nurses – because it’s keeping them in employment! Grave diggers – again, the same kind of principle that there is some Satanic brotherhood of grave diggers out there who are trying to get more holes in the ground to keep them in employment! So, there’s all that kind of response to it.
And then, there are the folk who are almost numbed because they’re seeing very, very close family members contracting this disease, which they can’t explain, and dying horribly in pain in a very, very short period of time. The psychological impact must have been immense.

[JB]
Who did it kill? Can we characterise it? Was it the elderly, the young, the vulnerable? And how did it kill?

[RO]
That’s an interesting question, Jackie, because the accounts vary. One of the most interesting things is actually again looking at that second and then the third pandemics. It talks about, for example, the second one is the plague of young men. So, there seems to be a gender differential coming in there. Also, that it’s younger people. Now, this may be that somehow or other they are more vulnerable; their immune systems have somehow been compromised. But what we’ve got is, across the piece, it affected regardless of your age, your gender, your social status. The only thing that perhaps protected the rich more was that they could move. They could get away. They could perhaps run faster and further than your average townsman or country woman. You’re seeing a great leveller, I think is perhaps the best way to put it.

There’s a lot of suggestion that the impact in the first of the outbreaks in the late 1340s/early 1350s may have been worsened by the fact that that would have been the adult generation who’d lived through what’s known as the great European famine. Earlier in the 14th century, when the climate had really begun to deteriorate badly, there’s a pan-European famine. In Scotland we tend to call it just a dearth, because it was already bad here and only got slightly worse, but it still meant the folk are under-nourished. There is a possible correlation in that, that they may have been immunosuppressed or compromised, the same kind of way in which we saw people who were more at risk from COVID, for example.
So, across the piece, we’ve got a suggestion that people who may have had some underlying weaknesses, health conditions, general vulnerability – but it’s also affecting folk who we would regard as fit, healthy, young, active. And it kills them just as fast and just as efficiently as the elderly, as the sick.

[JB]
We’ve all seen the dramas. We’ve all seen the boils, the terrible boils. Is that representative? Is that what it was like?

[RO]
Yeah, yes. Almost without question, the sources are telling us that you’re getting these great swellings, the buboes – hence bubonic plague. These tend to be in the primary lymph nodes in the neck, armpit and the groin. Now, the big debate was whether the bubonic plague, as we know it, was what was around in the medieval period. That’s been hypothesised since the late 19th century, but it’s only just in the last couple of years that the DNA analysis has been done that has finally identified – the genome sequences have been identified – that demonstrate that the medieval plague was bubonic.

So, we can now with a degree of confidence start to look at the way in which the symptoms are being described in the contemporary sources and see it tallies. And where there’s deviation from that, as you said earlier, there are other diseases around as well and it’s quite likely that, alongside the bubonic plague when it’s floating around, we’ve got a whole cocktail of other things happening as well. The bubonic one is just the most terrible visitor out of a whole series of other unwelcome guests.

[JB]
Because there was pneumonic plague and septicaemic plague. If you got bubonic plague, was death automatic or did some people pull through?

[RO]
Some people pulled through and I think that’s the thing to … You can still contract bubonic plague nowadays – that’s something to bear in mind – but it is treatable.

[JB]
Thank you for that.

[RO]
It’s easily treatable – treatable and survivable. Even then, it was treatable and survivable. And it’s probable that some folk contracted it and may have developed just mild symptoms, and then it passed. Now, that’s bubonic. If you got the pneumonic or the septicaemic variety, they’re pretty much 100% fatal. Certainly, septicaemic is – that’s straight into the blood system, your entire system starts to shut down incredibly rapidly. Pneumonic is highly contagious and spread in the same way that COVID was – in droplets through coughing and sneezing and things like that. The only problem with it is it used to be thought pneumonic was the more likely one to be around but it’s such a virulent spreader and such a rapid killer that it would actually burn itself out because it would kill too many people too quickly, and then it’s not able to spread. The one that most folk would have been exposed to is bubonic.

[JB]
And if you caught bubonic plague and if you managed to pull through, did you end up with some immunity? Because as you’ve explained, it came in waves, so maybe you had 3 or 4 in your lifetime.

[RO]
There appears to have been, in the medieval variety of this, no acquired immunity. [Wow.] So, if you got it once and survived, you could get it again and die.

[JB]
Ok. And in terms of, we’ve spoken about how people then thought or why they thought it arrived, because they had behaved badly and they had transgressed, had they any idea back then how it spread?

[RO]
Theory changes over time. There’s a whole variety of theories floating around. In the 14th century you’ve got, as I said already, poisoning of wells for example. The main theory was these were darts of divine wrath, coming down from God. And so, you had to look for divine protection. There’s lots of imagery – again mainly from northern Europe – showing the Virgin Mary spreading her cloak over humanity to deflect the darts of plague coming down. You’ve got all these suggestions that it’s some kind of invisible, unseen force. Then you start to see ideas emerging in the later medieval period around about bad smells. This is the origin of what by the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries is the miasma theory. And so, you get references to people breaking open casks of strong-smelling onions, and in the smell, plague was released.

You’ve got a series of accounts as well where it’s believed that bad air – the miasma – is trapped in bales of cloth. When the cloth is unfolded in markets, it releases that into the atmosphere. There’s a development of an idea of contagion – you’re gaining the disease through touch. You’re touching something that is carrying this unclean-ness. And so, you start to see again a lot of development of cleansing ideas, so boiling money for example, before you handed it over to somebody. If you were giving change back, you had to put it into a cauldron of boiling water and scoop it out with a ladle, so that you’re not handling potentially contaminated goods. The whole thing is in constant evolution in terms of the understanding for how this is being spread, but it is really into the era of modern medicine before the awareness of the role of fleas, the role of a bacillus carried in the blood and then transmitted via the flea, as being the cause.

[[JB]
Well, let’s take a little bit of a break here, Richard, from the buboes and boils. When we come back, we will talk about how Scotland was ahead of the curve actually in using legislation to try to halt the spread of plague. Back in a moment.

[MV]
Treat someone special to a year of new experiences with a National Trust for Scotland gift membership. Gift them great days out and do your bit to help protect our amazing places. Gift a year of membership at nts.org.uk/gift

[JB]
Welcome back to the Love Scotland podcast. Today, we are talking plague with Professor Richard Oram. Richard, the act of 1456, tell me about that.

[RO]
This is the first piece of anti-plague legislation anywhere in the British Isles. It’s an act of a General Council of Scotland. It’s not a full parliament act; that’s just me being pedantic, but you’ve got this act that’s produced and it’s drawing on practices that had already begun to develop in mainland Europe, mainly in Italy and in France. Nowadays, we would think of them as public health and public hygiene enactments but there’s also the spiritual dimension included in there with the requirement for the clergy to be performing processions and all the rest of it. But this is a really, really important act. If you ever look at it, it’s unbelievably short because it’s what we would class now as a piece of enabling legislation. It sets out: right, these are the basic things you need to do; and then it says: local authorities, it’s your responsibility to deal with this. Because you need the local legislators, the local governors, to be empowered to actually take strong action to stop plague spreading nationally.

And what they’re looking at is, as I say, measures that have been tried and tested. The Italian city states have been at this game from the 1380s, 1390s. So, 60 years later the Scots have picked this up. But the emphasis as well is that it’s another 60 years before there’s similar legislation enacted in England, and England suffered much greater frequency and much greater intensity of plague in that period. But then again, they were having a civil war, so things do get in the way.
Scotland was very much ahead of the game and it’s partly to do with the way in which Scotland has got this strong relationship with Europe. A lot of knowledge exchange, back and forward along the communication routes down into Rome.

[JB]
As you say, the Act was quite short, and it was basically quarantine containment. Things which, and I’m sure listeners are the same, as you hear this, it’s not just from the pages of history because we’ve all experienced something very similar, at least in terms of the regulations, very recently. So, containment, quarantine – and this is when we get the human stories. This is when we start to find out about how people reacted because of the contraventions. Give me some of the human stories.

[RO]
First and foremost, you mentioned quarantine and bear in mind they were talking real quarantine – not 14 days, this was 40 days. If there was any indication of somebody within the household possibly, not even definitely, possibly having plague. If somebody developed an unexplained fever, that had to be reported and your entire household would be put into quarantine. This then had the impact on individuals that they can’t go about their daily business. There’s no state aid; there’s no support. So, how do you live? You’re having to draw on whatever resources you’ve got available to you. You’re not able to communicate with anyone outside your house except through the medium of the watchmen, who have been charged to look after the neighbourhood in which you are.

So, you get cases like there’s one early 17th-century case up in Elgin in Moray where the plague wasn’t in the burgh, it was in the villages outside the burgh. So, there’s a prohibition on communication between the country dwellers and the townsfolk. There’s a young woman in Elgin who has a boyfriend in one of these communities outside. She, against the regulation, sneaks out at night, goes to see him … and this is where everybody says, oh and of course she gets the plague and brings it back into town. No, she didn’t. That’s the saddest part of the story. She comes back in fit and well, but it’s discovered that she has breached the regulation. So, she’s flogged, branded and thrown out of the town permanently because she’s endangered the lives of everybody else.

The most extreme cases – the Town Council minutes of Edinburgh have got some really, really juicy stories. You’ve got two women who were publicly drowned in the quarry holes because they’d gone into a house where they had been plague deaths, removed bedding and were shaking the bedding out prior to selling it. And because they had again – because of that belief that cloth may contain this horrible disease, that they were releasing this into the air and endangering their fellow townsfolk – they’re drowned.

There’s a tailor who kept it quiet that his wife was in bed at home with plague, and then she dies. He still tells nobody. He goes to attend mass in St Giles, so this is the great chief mass of the day – you’ve got most of the burgesses in there. And it transpires afterwards that his wife’s dead, so he’s sentenced to be hanged at his front door. The rope breaks, so they hang him again. The rope breaks again and eventually they decide that clearly God doesn’t want him to die, so we’ll just brand him on the face, flog him and expel him from the town ‘with his bairns’, as the record puts it. And that’s him becoming a vagrant, economically destitute with children. But it’s the fact that he had endangered everybody else by his actions.

[JB]
And also the fact that people who were thought to have plague, they were taken outwith towns, outside villages – completely quarantined, left alone – and that families who were left back at home had no idea whether they lived or died.

[RO]
Yeah. Most of the big towns have got what’s by the late 15th, early 16th century being termed ‘the foul muir’. This is where the infected went out to live in temporary … basically a little shanty town. If you were lucky, there would be a chapel out there, so at least you’d be getting spiritual comfort from having that. If you go round Dundee, you’ve got St Roch’s at the west end of the town centre and the Roodyards at the east end – those are the two foul muir areas. Roch is one of the plague saints, so there was St Roch’s chapel in the middle of this. On the Boroughmuir of Edinburgh, again you’ve got the St Roch’s chapel and this is where the plague-afflicted of Edinburgh were put out. Very canny Edinburgh burgesses, of course. They provided the timbers to build the temporary lodgings and then, rather than burn it all at the end of the plague, they had it carefully disinfected and stored so they could bring it out at no extra cost the next time it came around.

[JB]
That’s public money, after all, isn’t it?!

[RO]
You’ll have had your tea! And then one of the ones that tends to be forgotten about is in Glasgow, where you come in towards Queen Street station from the north and come down though the St Rollox area, that again is the same Roch Chapel. That was Glasgow’s foul muir. Even small towns had them. Stirling had a really good one down at the south end of the old bridge, but little communities – there’s a greatly detailed story that took place basically just outside where Edinburgh airport is now, on the muir between Gogar and Ratho, where the infected from one community had been put out onto what was shared grazing land between the two communities. The other village believed that they were going to be driven off this land, so they went and actually destroyed the booths that the plague victims were living in and drove them away – they just drove them out to die in the terrible weather at the time.

[JB]
This will be very resonant with people listening. Weddings were restricted to a few guests. Schools were closed. Children – perhaps not so resonant – were thought to be super-spreaders, yes, but they were just described as dangerous, uncontrollable and dirty. And kids under 15 were ordered off the streets as well as dogs and pigs – an interesting grouping there.

[RO]
Yep. Children actually … there’s a very nice list where it’s vermin, which includes obviously rats and mice, dogs and cats and pigs – and children!

[JB]
Gosh. What were the medics doing during all of this? There were medics but not as we know them.

[RO]
Most of the medicine of the later 14th, 15th and even into the early 16th centuries is tending to be around about dietary control, purging the body. Fumigation is actually a major thing done, not just in terms of fumigating infected properties. This is what the mediciners are doing. They are also advising on the physical conditions, not just on the bodily health. If there’s houses potentially infected with plague, they would be fumigated with strong-smelling, smoke-producing plants and things of that kind, scrubbed with salt water. You were getting prescriptions of things that would actually probably kill you just as effectively as the plague itself would have done.
They are experimenting. You’re getting some folk who try things like lancing the buboes, to get the foul materials out of the body. Sometimes this works. We’ve got a few European accounts of folk who had their buboes lanced and lived.

[JB]
I’m grimacing. I mean, this is difficult – I’m making a podcast and grimacing! Go on!

[RO]
But some folk – the physical shock and then the potential re-release of all of this gunk (it’s the best way to describe it!) from your lymph nodes back into your bloodstream. Remember, they’ve got no idea about blood circulation. They have got no idea about microbe theory; there’s no understanding that this is a bacillus – just nothing like that.

[JB]
There were so-called plague doctors, weren’t there? We’ve seen maybe the drawings of the long beaks that they had, the masks?

[RO]
Yeah. That’s late though. That’s something that starts to emerge in the 16th and 17th centuries. They are still practising the medicine that was prescribed, believe it or not, in the 14th century. You’ve got Gilbert Skene, this mediciner in Scotland who makes a fortune out of producing his description of the pest and the various remedies that you could use. This becomes a multiple bestseller; goes into multiple editions. Rich man.

[JB]
I’ve got a line from that. He described it as ‘a corruption or infection of the air, or a venomous quality and maist hurtful vapour thereof’.

[RO]
Absolutely!

[JB]
Thanks for that, Gilbert – that’s a great help! But in terms of the doctors, they thought that if they had these beaks and filled them with herbs, that would somehow protect them.

[RO]
Sweet air. It’s the absolute antithesis of miasma. If you’ve got foul contagion, if it’s bad smell, if you’re breathing good smell, this is all part of that ancient system where it’s meant to be around about the bodily humours and things like that. So, you’re getting your body into balance and you’re purging or cleaning out the things that are actually going to negatively affect it. But that had been the 1380s, the Mandeville Tract. John Mandeville went to produce this literary tract about how to treat the pestilence. And it’s the same ideas being recycled – plagiarism on a grand scale! There’s very little advance.
The one big thing, and you nailed it when you were saying with these face masks, that is the emergence of our first real PPE. Because along with the face mask – if you see any of the surviving ones – they have got built-in goggles so that you cannot be coughed on and get droplets in your eyes. They have hoods. They’re wearing a full-length, heavy canvas coat, big thick gloves – all of which would be washed after you have been in contact with the infected. This is what we would understand as the equivalent of scrubs or the full biohazard-type gear that we have nowadays.

[JB]
When did plague die out in Scotland, and why?

[RO]
I’ll deal with the second bit first. We don’t actually really know why. It was in decline anyway through the 17th century. Scotland’s first indication that it was on the way out is the last epidemic that we know of, apart from a brief thing that we won’t talk about in Glasgow in 1900, but you’ve got the 1645–48 epidemic which occurs in the middle of the Civil War, and it’s really nasty. This is one of the worst outbreaks that had been for decades, and it’s made worse by the war. Everybody can see that it’s the movement of people, refugees, armies, lots of folk crowding together, so there’s a lot of concern that disease will be around for a long time yet.

And then the 1640s come and go. 1650s: there’s plague in England, doesn’t make it to Scotland. 1665: the Great Plague in London, doesn’t make it to Scotland. And people are beginning to think, hmm, something’s changing here. By the time you get into the 1680s/1690s, it’s clear that it’s not come back to England either but it’s still rife on the Continent. The last big epidemic in Western Europe: the 1720s, down in the south of France; 1780s in Moscow; but after that it becomes something that you get in North Africa, the Middle East. It’s just gradually receding and it’s not because we’ve done anything like develop antibiotics; it’s possibly because people are becoming much more rigorous about anti-plague enforcement, much more aware of different ways of dealing with those public hygiene aspects in terms of street cleansing and things of that sort.

[JB]
I know that during the famous London outbreak, Peebles banned immediately, as soon as they got wind of it, trade with England. We had really tightened things up. Now, you have mentioned the plague in Glasgow in 1900. Very briefly, tell us about that before we scare the living daylights out of our listeners. What happened?

[RO]
By that date, the British Imperial Medical Service in India had done a lot of work on identifying bubonic plague, how it’s being spread around, and had linked it with vermin and fleas being carried within vermin. It’s like an aberration in time but it’s a result of Glasgow, Second City of Empire, and the trade connections with India. Infection arrives with the ships’ unofficial passengers. It’s in small concentration down in one of the poorer neighbourhoods of the city. This is still even after the City Improvement Act. But, it is dealt with very efficiently; you have got very, very limited spread. It caused panic, but by that stage there’s a much greater understanding of disease control and infection control. Rather than a full-blown infection, it’s a localised outbreak similar in the kind of national concern it caused to the 1960s typhoid outbreak in Aberdeen. Thankfully, it remained contained and spreads is in the tens, rather than the thousands and millions of the earlier.

[JB]
Richard, looking back at how they dealt with plague 300 years ago from our supposedly sophisticated world now, I was surprised to learn that the measures they were taking were very much like our own in terms of COVID. But what I want to ask is that: 300 years of plague in Scotland is something that we know little of today. Is it possible that 400 years hence, what we’ve all gone through with COVID will likewise become just a footnote in history?

[RO]
I don’t think it will be a footnote in history because if you look at some of the wider ramifications of it, it has that economic knock on global conditions. It’s one of these situations, as a historian I’m bound to say, we need to give it a few years actually to see how this plays out, but no, I don’t think it’s going to be just a footnote in history. It will be one of these global phenomena in not quite the same level as the Spanish flu epidemic for example, but something that we need to be thankful in the UK that we got off as lightly as we did. If you look at some of the other countries around the world where the impact was much more significant, I don’t think we’ll be allowed to forget that COVID-19 was a transformative episode. Let’s hope that, certainly in my lifetime, we don’t have anything similar coming along again.

[JB]
Well, that is a wise note on which to end. Professor Richard Oram, plague man extraordinaire, thank you for your time.

[RO]
Thank you very much.

[JB]
Professor Richard Oram, plague man extraordinaire, taking us through a fascinating but terrifying chunk of Scottish history. If the walls here at Gladstone’s Land could talk, I bet they’d have a tale or two to tell. I’m off to do some more exploring – it is so worth a visit. Opening times and details of events can be found on the Trust website: nts.org.uk

Thank you for listening. Don’t forget to subscribe to the Love Scotland podcast. Just click the button and each episode will download for free and be there for you hopefully to enjoy whenever you feel like it. I will be back with another soon. Until then, 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

Four voices: male voiceover [MV]; Jackie Bird [JB]; Zahrah Mahmood [ZM]; Alasdair Eckersall [AE]

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

[JB]
Hello, and welcome to Love Scotland. And we do love Scotland, but sometimes love isn’t always a perfect pairing. You have to allow for the object of your adoration’s little shortcomings like, in Scotland’s case, its summers. You join me on a July day. It’s not the warmest; it’s a bit windy; rain is not far away – there’s a low heavy cloud base. But we’re out and about in one of the Trust’s most beautiful places: Ben Lomond. We are at the foot of the mountain, not far from Rowardennan, and I’m here to meet some people to talk about this iconic place and how you can enjoy it safely.

However, if you’d rather peel off your toenails one by one than set foot on a hill, I hope you’ll stay with us and maybe – just maybe – my guests will change your mind. So, first I’m off to find someone who really knows how to put her best foot forward as she’s recently become the President of the Ramblers’ Association: Zahrah Mahmood.

[audio of footsteps on a stony path]

[JB]
Madam president! Do you like that?! Madam president!

[ZM]
That sounds a lot more grand than it is in practice!

[JB]
Well, it’s lovely to be out for a stroll with you. We’re in the foothills of Loch Lomond. The rain looks like it’s going to stay away. We’re recording this on a Sunday afternoon – would this be a normal day for you to go out for a stroll, a walk?

[ZM]
Yeah, generally speaking it’s mostly weekends because I do work during the week, so it’s usually whenever the weather looks better – either the Saturday or the Sunday.

[JB]
You are an accountant; you are mum to a young son – how the heck do you find the time to do it?!

[ZM]
Well, do you know what, sometimes you just have to be a wee bit selfish because this is what restores me for the week ahead. It makes me calm, find my centre and recharge me for the following weeks in work and mum duties and all the rest of it. So, it’s actually me being a wee bit selfish!

[JB]
How are you enjoying your new grand role?

[ZM]
I am, I’m really enjoying it actually. Yesterday I managed to do one of my first walks as Ramblers President with the Glasgow Ramblers. They were celebrating the anniversary of one of the routes that they’ve come up with around Glasgow – an 11-mile route around Glasgow taking in quite a few of Glasgow’s parks, so I joined them for part of the walk yesterday, which was lovely. I got to meet some of the local members, so that was really nice. I’m still getting to grips with the role, understanding what it involves and trying to find where my interests lie so I can make an impact as opposed to spreading myself too thin.

[JB]
Yes, but I suppose in the main you’re trying to raise the profile of walking and spreading the word about the benefits?

[ZM]
Yes, definitely. I think that’s where naturally our ethos and our intentions and aims just cross over and complement each other quite nicely.

[JB]
How did you get into walking?

[ZM]
It would have been about 5 or 6 years ago now …

[JB]
Oh, hang on a second. Sorry to interrupt you. We’re just passing a gate post – Fort William, 68 miles. Fancy it? Well, let’s see how much we can cover! [Maybe not today!]
Ok! Sorry. Before I rudely interrupted you, how did you get into it?

[ZM]
It was probably about 6 or 7 years ago now. I was studying for my professional exams and I was finding them really difficult. I’d never been in that position before where you’re putting the work in but you’re not seeing the impact or the results that you want to see, so I was making myself quite unwell – physically as well as mentally. Two of my friends that I was studying with said ‘right, ok, for your birthday (which happened to be in a couple of weeks’ time at that time) we’re taking you out for a day out in the hills’. One of them was quite an avid hillwalker; the other keeps fit through the gym and all sorts – and there was me who hasn’t ever done any kind of exercise or fitness-related activity.

[JB]
So, nothing at all?

[ZM]
Nothing at all at that stage, no. And so, I naively agreed to go up Ben Lomond and then that was …

[JB]
Where we are today!

[ZM]
Yeah, exactly. It’s quite nostalgic! But it was totally naive of me because I thought ‘well, that’s fine – how hard can it be?! It’s just walking.’ And it turned out it was quite hard! That was my introduction to hillwalking. It didn’t last after that but what it did give me was that understanding that I needed to take a bit more care of myself, get more fit, physically fit … and I did notice that during the entire walk I didn’t think of anything that was stressing me out. It was just focused on the walk and that was it. I enjoyed the views, so I went away from that and did quite a lot of flatter walking. I signed up for the Kiltwalk, which I’m not sure if you’re familiar with?

[JB]
Yes, yes, very familiar. It’s a great charity.

[ZM]
I completed that, which was a great achievement, and then 6 months later after that, I found myself again needing that seclusion and just getting away up high in some hills. So, they took me out again but this time up Conic Hill, a smaller hill quite close to Ben Lomond but still has the great views that Ben Lomond has, so I thoroughly enjoyed that and that was it. That’s when I was hooked!

[JB]
So, for you, it’s a stress-buster [Definitely] and it brings you a peace, a deep peace. I think that’s possibly what a lot of people who haven’t tried it don’t know that those benefits are on offer.

[ZM]
Yeah, I think even from myself before I got into it, I thought people did it more for the physical benefits and were really physically fit and were challenging themselves and seeing what their body could achieve, which are all great reasons as well – but I just didn’t think that there was a mental aspect. Surely something that you’re going to struggle up is not going to help you mentally, but it’s amazing what it does for you. It does for me, even; it just resets me. It’s just my grounding force now.

[JB]
That’s a good way of describing it: it resets you. Now, you’ve earned in a short time quite a big social media following as the Hillwalking Hijabi. Tell me about this – how did it come about?

[ZM]
Basically, when I got into hillwalking, my family – sisters, my mum, my dad – all noticed the difference in me. I seem to be a lot more calm, a lot more peaceful, at peace just in general. So, they were just generally finding out a bit more about it, asking me how I was getting on and all the rest of it. So, I said, ‘yeah, I really enjoy it. The only thing is that I feel sometimes like I’m the only one that looks like me’. So, my sister – my older sister – said, ‘oh, just lean into it: you’re the Hillwalking Hijabi’. And that was it! It stuck from there.

[JB]
Because you don’t see many people of colour out in the hills. Why? Is that because there are barriers, like the rain which has just started to bucket (!), or just for cultural reasons?

[ZM]
I would say it’s probably a mixture. I think it’s maybe if you didn’t grow up with it, you’re not really going to know it’s something that you can get involved in. If you don’t see yourself represented, it’s not going to be something that you think is made for you. Again, if you didn’t grow up with it, you don’t have the knowledge, you don’t have the knowledge of knowing where to go, what to wear, navigation skills – all the rest of it. You just don’t maybe know all these things. I would say that since the pandemic, and even maybe before the pandemic, a lot of people you are seeing outdoors now, you’re seeing a variety of people from different backgrounds and it’s really nice to see now.

[JB]
I think that’s really true because it’s not just about ethnicity; it’s about people from all different backgrounds, for example lots of people from disadvantaged backgrounds would not consider hillwalking simply because they don’t know enough about it. I would also add that when you go to a shop – and I include myself in this – an outdoor shop because you need proper footwear, you need the clothes, you often don’t know where to begin.

[ZM]
That’s so true and that in itself can be a barrier. But even when you say from disadvantaged backgrounds, a lot of these places you’ll see, there might not be public transport links, may not drive, may not have access to a car. There’s so many different reasons it could be and so that’s why it’s really important to just show those trails closer to home as well, that you can still reap the benefits. You don’t need to be up – and I’m a big advocate of this – you don’t need to be up a big Munro, a big mountain, to get those same physical, mental, spiritual, any kind of benefits that you do get. You don’t need to be up a big mountain; you can literally just be in your local country park getting those benefits as well.

[JB]
Yes. Now you’ve become a bit of a role model. How does that sit with you?

[ZM]
I mean, I didn’t set out to become one so it can be quite difficult at times because people do sometimes think you’re an expert on whatever it is that you’re maybe sharing at that point. Recently – you mentioned obviously that I’m a mum – so I have been taking my son out on hikes and hill walks and walks, and then people just assume that you’re an expert on (for example) baby-carrying equipment and all the rest of it!

[JB]
I’ve seen your Instagram feed and I’ve seen you out on the hills with all the equipment. As I look back at my days as a young mum, going out to the shops was a major exercise, never mind taking a child up a mountain, but what are the benefits of that?

[ZM]
It’s great. I feel like it’s given him a lot of confidence as well.

[JB]
How old is he?

[ZM]
He is going to be 2 in October now. It’s getting to that stage where he doesn’t want to be tied up in a carrier but he’s also not got the stamina to be walking for long periods of time, so you’re having to balance it – put him in, take him out, put him in … so a 2-hour walk turns into a 4-hour walk for that reason, which can be quite difficult! But the benefits are not just for me. I feel like I’m a better mum for it because I feel more at peace, better in myself as well, but also for him – because the outdoors is just a massive playground. He’s just getting the best sensory experience there is to get. Forget about all these toys that you can give them. I mean, they’re obviously good as well, but outside he’s just running about, splashing in puddles, touching leaves and hugging trees. It’s just really good. I feel like there’s a lot of benefits to be had from taking your children out, but I do totally recognise it’s very difficult. I found the first time I took him out, never mind outside, very daunting. You’re packing the whole house and the kitchen sink just in case you need it, so it’s been a steep learning curve for me.

[JB]
What would you say to anyone listening to this who’s thinking, ‘hmm, quite like the sound of that’. How do they start?

[ZM]
I think just start local. There’s so many benefits to be had just starting local, to build up your confidence. Build up your confidence in what you should wear, what your fitness levels are like, what you should take out with you – just even in the confidence of navigating local paths where you’re not really going to likely stray off too much. Build up your confidence and then start looking further afield, if that’s what you want to do. But my biggest message always is you don’t need to be going further afield, up high; you just need to be moving, getting outdoors – just soaking up the nature and you can do that in whatever way takes your fancy, basically.

[JB]
Even if it’s bucketing it down with rain … and we’ve had to hide under a tree. Well, you are a great advocate for getting out and putting one foot in front of the other. Zahrah, lovely to meet you and thank you very much for joining us.

[ZM]
Thanks for having me, Jackie.

[JB]
And we’re going to take a little break now. When we come back, I’ll be joined by a man who knows this area – well, I’d say – better than practically anyone.

[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 that historical sites and fragile wildlife survive for future generations. Just search National Trust for Scotland and click Donate.

[JB]
Welcome back. Ah, the best laid plans … We were going to head up the mountain, but the weather forecast isn’t playing ball so instead we are relaxing at Ardess Lodge, the ranger base. And I’m joined by a man who knows Ben Lomond and the surrounding area better than most. Welcome to the podcast, Alasdair Eckersall.

[AE]
Thank you, Jackie.

[JB]
Now, Alasdair, you have been a ranger here for how long?

[AE]
For 31 years this year.

[JB]
Wow, you’re also the property manager. How do you manage a property like Ben Lomond?

[AE]
There’s many different tasks to try and cover. I would say that it’s taken a lot of years to try to get the hang of them all. Some of them, I’m still trying!

[JB]
You’ve just scooted down the mountain for us. You were about a mile up, you were saying. What were you doing – path laying, path repairing?

[AE]
Yes, this weekend we’ve got a group of volunteers from the Lake District, from Fix the Fells, up working with us. We get a lot of volunteer help to carry out the path repair and maintenance that we have to do all the time. This weekend we’re a mile and a half up the Ptarmigan path, just trying to do some of the landscaping work to stop the erosion that people cause when they trample off to the side of the path.

[JB]
And how do you do that?

[AE]
We have to provide a reasonable surface on the path for folks to follow, but the main thing is we have to try and make the sides – the ground to either side – less attractive for folks to walk on. And so, we’ll strip the turf off areas of ground and reshape them into lumps and bumps and hollows, and put the turf back on carefully so it all blends back into the landscape and nobody knows we’ve done any work. But what’s left behind are features that just constantly nudge people back into the path line that we want them to take.

[JB]
How sneaky! You’re actually creating potholes?

[AE]
That’s right.

[JB]
How many miles of pathway are there?

[AE]
At Ben Lomond there’s a total of about 10 miles of path, 1 mile of which is Forestry and Land Scotland ground, up from the Rowardennan car park. All the rest is on National Trust for Scotland ground.

[JB]
I suppose you’re having to keep doing this work because of the popularity. How many people make their way up, or attempt to make their way up, Ben Lomond each year?

[AE]
We know there’s about 45,000 to 50,000 people each year that go up and down Ben Lomond.

[JB]
And what is the attraction? Of course, it’s beautiful and it’s world-famous – is it because it’s pretty far south?

[AE]
Yes, there’s no doubt that Ben Lomond’s accessibility to the Central Belt is one of the big draws. It’s also the most southerly Munro in Scotland, so the Munros and Munro hillwalking are quite well known about. Anyone that wants to try their first Munro and hasn’t done it before …

[JB]
It’s a mountain over 3,000ft?

[AE]
That’s right. Ben Lomond’s well in there at 3,194ft. It’s quite often the first Munro that people will come and try.

[JB]
But because it is so southerly and because it’s so accessible, does that bring its problems with people who are perhaps not as equipped as they should be?

[AE]
Aye, it’s fair to say that there’s a good number of folks that go up Ben Lomond that could be a lot better equipped – or aren’t equipped at all. Most people get up and down perfectly safely, which is great, but …

[JB]
How long does it take you to get up and down if you’re fairly fit?

[AE]
We reckon we say to most folk that you’re going to get up and down in something like 5–6 hours, so maybe fitter folks will be getting up there in about 2 and a half hours and maybe a couple of hours back down. But don’t worry if it takes you a lot longer than that – it’s a big mighty mountain and one thing about Ben Lomond is that you’re walking up almost from sea level. Loch Lomond is only about … well, where your starting point is, only 20 metres above sea level – as opposed to a lot of mountains in the Highlands, you’re doing almost the full whack.

[JB]
What are the mistakes that most people make?

[AE]
There’s things like the temperature, your clothing, is a big one. It might be nice and balmy down in the car park – 15 or 18 degrees. It’s going to be 10 degrees colder by the time you get up onto the summit. A lot of people don’t pack that extra layer. Or quite often, if it’s nice and dry when they set off, they’ll not even bother with a waterproof and we all know what the Scottish weather can bring us on the turn of a penny in terms of changes in weather.

Another big thing that has an impact for us on the footpaths is the type of footwear people use. We see a lot of folks going up the hill in trainers. It’s difficult if you’re doing your first hill walk; it’s quite expensive to go and kit yourself out in a shop to get the boots and the waterproofs, and all that sort of thing. And so, it’s quite understandable for folks setting out to try things for the first time in whatever footwear they’ve got to hand, but we see a lot of very expensive trainers going up the hill. You could kit yourself out with a decent pair of boots for half the price of some of the trainers we see folk in. The thinner the footwear you’ve got, the more it’s going to hit your feet as you walk up and down the path. What we find is that a lot of the people who are moving off the hard surface of the path onto the softer ground, and causing a lot of the trampling erosion we get, are people wearing thinner-soled trainers.

[JB]
I see. So, wear the right kit. Is there anything else you have to take with you?

[AE]
Definitely. Basically, you’re going to be out on the hill for a day. You’re going to be 4 miles from the nearest roadside and shop, and all the sort of thing. So, you want to make sure you’ve got plenty of water. Even if it’s not that hot a day, you’ll still find with the exercise you’re carrying out, you’ll need to top up on your liquids quite heavily. So, lots of water; not just one of those little 500ml bottles – you want at least a litre. And if it’s a hot day, try and double that if you can. And plenty of food – make sure you’re not going to be wasting away when you’re up at the summit! Trying to take in the view, going ‘oh, I really like this view but I’m so hungry I can’t stay any longer!’

[JB]
Let’s assume that you’re heading up there and that you’re all kitted out. You’ve got your provisions. What do you see up there? How do you sell it to me?

[AE]
Yes, it’s not a cloudy day; you’ve got the full vista of views all around you. As you get up to about the halfway point – you’re about a mile and a half to 2 miles up the hill – looking backwards, you get that really rewarding view down over Loch Lomond, all the islands dotted through it. If it’s the first chance you’ve had to see that overall view of Loch Lomond, it’s incredible; it’s just a stunning sight. You’ll also start to get the views out to the east over the plain towards Stirling.
And then, as you head further up onto the ridge heading northwards towards the summit, looking out to the west you’ll see all the billowing mountains starting to appear. At the top, that sea of mountains is just all in front of you – from your left, right around to your right. And out to the west, you can see as far as … you’ll see three little hillocks away in the distance: those are the Paps of Jura. You can see Goat Fell really clearly, and away in the distance the southern headlands of Mull as well. So, you get an incredible view from the top of Ben Lomond.

[JB]
Scotland really opens out in front of you. What about wildlife and vegetation?

[AE]
The vegetation changes a fair bit as you go up the hill. On the main path, you’re passing through the woodland zone at first, which is largely managed by Forestry and Land Scotland. It all used to be spruce plantation, but the Forestry have been harvesting that in recent decades, and as they’ve taken it out, replanted with trees that are native to Scotland – birch and Scots pine.
Coming out onto the National Trust for Scotland part of the hill, off into Corrie Cora down to your left you’ll see areas of native woodlands, mostly birch and rowan and willow, that are starting to get a hold. But we do still have sheep farming taking place on Ben Lomond, so that’s obviously affecting the vegetation that you’re going to find – it’s still very much a farmed landscape.
Higher up the hill, you get into more blanket bog and then heath zones, with heather, blaeberry, all these sorts of plants coming to the fore. And then right at the top, you’ll get into a very different sort of habitat. It’s what was left behind when the glaciers scraped everything off the land, but places like Ben Lomond’s summit stuck out and remained free of ice, so the tundra-like vegetation stayed in place. Nowadays, we call that more of a montane sort of vegetation. We have what we call alpine plants that are hanging on in little crevices in clumps, surviving all of that trampling.

[JB]
Despite what we do, nature will find a way. What about the wildlife and the birdlife. I take it it gets more sparse the higher you get.

[AE]
It does, but the higher you get, there’s some interesting wildlife up there. There’s a bird – the ptarmigan, the mountain grouse – that has adapted to turn white in winter. Ben Lomond and Goatfell on Arran are the two most southern locations in Scotland that you’ll find ptarmigan. Generally, all the time I’ve been here, there’s usually about two pairs of ptarmigan that manage to breed on Ben Lomond. They’re quite secretive but they’re very well camouflaged. I’ve seen a family of ptarmigan casually cross the path in front of a group of hillwalkers who were completely oblivious to their presence. They’ve got all this grey. There’s mum with 5 little youngsters, all just waddling their way across the path a few metres ahead of walkers. So, things might be right in front of you, and you have to keep your eyes peeled to have a chance of spotting them.
There’s also birdlife like wheatear. One of the birds that you’re bound to hear, if not see, when you’re going up Ben Lomond any time from March to June is the skylark. Skylark numbers are dwindling in Britain, but on Ben Lomond they’re still very strong. You’ll hear the song just going on forever and ever it seems, somewhere from a tiny dot in the sky above you.

[JB]
Amazing vistas and a great soundtrack. You mentioned the sheep farming there. The thing that always strikes me when I’m in places like this, when you stumble across old ruins, is the history of the place. Ben Lomond has a rich history. Tell me, what do we know about the earliest settlements that were on the mountain?

[AE]
Most of the archaeology that we’ve found on Ben Lomond only goes back as far as the late medieval period, 1500s and 1600s. But we know that people were here a lot earlier than that. About 3 miles to the south of Ben Lomond, just off the southernmost part of the National Trust for Scotland grounds, there’s a wee bay with a house called Mill of Ross. At Mill of Ross there’s a crannog site off in the bay. The hinterland behind that crannog site remains in agricultural use today; it’s all the in-bye fields for Blairvockie Farm. The likelihood is that the use of those fields goes right back to those days of the crannog, taking us right back into Iron Age times.
We know that people were here even earlier than that, because one day, about 20-odd years ago, one of the youth hostel wardens at the time was sitting on the beach at the youth hostel, about 300 metres from us here, just watching folk in the water, picking up gravel in his hands and letting it drift through his fingers. He looked down and sitting in his palm was a flint arrowhead – a pure chance find that takes us back 4,000 years. But most of the history that we can be sure of comes from the 1500s onwards.

[JB]
Presumably, you’re still finding out about the mountain?

[AE]
Aye, we had a really interesting archaeological dig about 3 weeks ago here, which was with the Trust archaeologist Derek Alexander …

[JB]
Who has been a guest on the podcast numerous times!

[AE]
Yes! Derek has a slight obsession with illicit whisky stills! We knew we had two – well, one definite illicit whisky site here and probably another. Derek came back to dig the possible other and discovered it was a fantastic site with the first finds that he’s ever made investigating any illicit whisky stills. In that site, up in Corrie Corrach, we actually found the metal bars that would have supported whatever was sitting over a fire. I don’t know enough about the process to say what it was. We also found some barrel staves, which was really interesting. That’s a space to watch. Derek will be coming back to us with further details.

[JB]
We’ll have to get him back on the podcast to talk about that. The mountain is still giving up its secrets. [Very much so!] It’s also globally famous because it’s linked to a certain Rob Roy MacGregor.

[AE]
Aye, that’s right. So, Rob Roy – this would have been part of his stomping ground. Him and his kinfolk. He actually owned the Ardess farm, or had title to the Ardess farm, from 1711 to …

[JB]
So, near where we are now because this is Ardess Lodge? [That’s right, yes.] For those who are perhaps not quite so familiar with Rob Roy MacGregor, he was described as Scotland’s Robin Hood and other people described him as just a hood.

[AE]
That’s right!

[JB]
Underhand behaviour, perhaps.

[AE]
This was very much MacGregor stomping ground. The first names we are able to find on the landscape – not those who owned the land or held title to the land but those who were actually on the land, living and working on it – there’s a lot of MacGregors, McAlpines and also McFarlanes, because the McFarlanes over the other side of Loch Lomond were very thick with the MacGregors. So yeah, this was very much part of their ground, from here all up the east side of Loch Lomond was their fastness, if you like.

[JB]
A whole lot of history here, as well as magnificent views, as well as putting that notch on your belt – your first Munro. If you’re heading here, what are your top tips for people who’ve never been perhaps?

[AE]
Time of year is one, because we do get vast numbers of the dreaded midge here. We’ve been quite well treated today because there’s a bit of a breeze to keep them off us, but April/May is a fantastic time of year to come here, especially things like the spring flowers. We get a fantastic showing of bluebells throughout the oak woods on Loch Lomond side, as well as all the spring birds arriving back. But it can be great at any time of year. Get that clothing right, just pack that extra little bit in your rucksack to make sure you’re comfy.
It can be very busy at weekends if you’re travelling by car. If you can travel to Rowardennan by water bus – timings are a bit tricky – but it’s worth having a look at if you just want to leave the car behind and have a real adventure at getting here on public transport.
Watch that weather forecast obviously, and try and pick a day when you’re going to get the good views.

[JB]
Well, you’ve certainly made it sound like a day to remember when you do get here, so we’ll let you get back up the mountain and get back to that path laying. I think you’ve had enough time off but thank you very much for spending so much time with us! Thank you, Alasdair.

[AE]
No problem, thank you, cheers.

[JB]
I reckon, if you can, I think it’s the best way to experience the Scottish outdoors and that’s on foot. The National Trust for Scotland has got some cracking walking routes right across the country. You can choose from all kinds of walks in spectacular landscapes to suit your ability, and as the seasons change you can come back to your favourite places and see them anew, from challenging hikes on the Mar Lodge Estate to family walks near Brodie, Culzean and Crathes castles. All the details are on the website, but that’s all from me for now. If you love Scotland, its history and its great outdoors, I hope you’ll join as a member, and don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast and never miss an episode. From me, for now, 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

Three voices: male voiceover [MV]; Jackie Bird [JB]; Ciaran Hatsell [CH]

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

[JB]
Hello. It’s summer and we’re at the seaside, to be precise at St Abb’s Head National Nature Reserve in the beautiful Berwickshire Borders. This area is stunning. It is a beautiful day – blue sky and blue sea. It’s famed for its dramatic cliffs and of course its seabird colonies. Indeed, Scotland, as you may well know, is one of the best places in Europe to get up close to these marvellous creatures. More than a million breed on Trust properties in various locations, including St Abb’s, on islands like St Kilda, Canna, Staffa, Mingulay – to name a few.

However, we’re here to record an unscheduled episode of the podcast. It’s late July, and a few weeks ago another outbreak of avian flu hit the headlines. Now, St Abb’s was very badly hit last year, so we wanted to get back on the ground and let you know what was happening this time. I’m joined again by a familiar voice to many of you: the head ranger here, Ciaran Hatsell. Hello, Ciaran.

[CH]
Hello, Jackie.

[JB]
We are nestling behind a very small building. We’ve got a beautiful view in front of us. The wind noise is pretty bad, but I think we’ve managed to find some shelter.

[CH
Yeah, we’ve found one of the rare quiet spots and very sheltered spots on the reserve, because there’s been a bit of a northerly wind and the sea is full of white horses – and looking dramatic and beautiful as usual.

[JB]
July in Scotland. I’m afraid the beauty of the scenery belies a much darker story. Lovely to see you again. We spoke earlier in the year about the horrendous year you’d had last year with avian flu. We thought we’d escaped; it didn’t happen. Tell me the story.

[CH]
It didn’t. So, obviously last year was a really tough year for seabirds, not just here at St Abb’s but around Scotland and around the world as well. This year, just when we thought we’d got away with it, we started finding it in kittiwakes in late June. It was right towards the end of June when it started hitting mainly kittiwakes and some guillemots as well – and the last couple of weeks have been pretty shocking, to be honest.

[JB]
Firstly, how did it differ from last year? Give us a quick recap of the species affected, and the extent of the devastation.

[CH]
Last year … here at St Abb’s Head we’ve got over 30,000 guillemots and they’re our most numerous seabird. A guillemot colony – if any of you have been to a guillemot colony, you’ll know – it’s a mosh pit; it’s an absolute mosh pit. The spread of a virus within the guillemots is always going to happen; the conditions are absolutely perfect for diseases to spread. Guillemots were the species affected most last year. What we saw were a lot of the chicks that we were losing. The chicks seemed to have low immunity to it. Around the colonies here, we were seeing piles of dead chicks in the water. As we spoke about before, you get hardened to this. Death is part of life on a seabird colony or a seal colony; wherever you work with wildlife, death is a part of that. But to see it on that scale and to see it affecting chicks that are completely helpless was pretty horrendous to be honest. We lost hundreds of guillemots here, thousands of birds in total. Across the coast here, just up the road from here, is Bass Rock, the world’s biggest gannetry, and they lost thousands and thousands of adult breeding gannets.

The seabirds that it’s affecting this year – it seems slightly different in the way it’s hit – is mainly affecting adult kittiwakes.

[JB]
When did you get an inkling that something was afoot?

[CH]
We had very small numbers throughout the start of June – really small numbers, nothing out of the norm, and so we’re were very hopeful that, like I said, we’d got away with it. We thought the chicks were getting big and the seabirds were really cracking on with the season. We thought they were relatively avian flu-free. But towards the end of June and then the first couple of weeks of July, the numbers really ramped up and we started seeing patches of them. So, a common theme is – we’ve had a quick walk around this morning and there’s a patch under the lighthouse where the birds seem to be seeking out fresh water. I don’t know if that’s because they’re already affected and they’re ill, they’re already infected with the virus, but they’re seeking out fresh water. The birds are then going there to die and under the lighthouse is a pile of about 40 or 50 birds. We’ve got on-shore winds at the moment just after this weekend, and lots and lots of birds have started washing ashore on the beaches as well. We’re seeing – just before we had a juvenile kittiwake that had just fledged the nest.

[JB]
Oh, that’s … To explain to listeners, it’s bad enough seeing 50 dead birds washed up on the rocks, but what I’ve found even more harrowing was we went on a walk on a coastal path and there was a kittiwake that was just a few weeks old?

[CH
Yeah, a juvenile kittiwake just fledged the nest.

[JB]
A beautiful, beautiful creature wandering up the path. It didn’t have the strength hardly to make a few steps. We could have got within touching distance of it because it didn’t know what was happening. Of course, we didn’t because you have to give them a wide berth, but it was one of the saddest sights I think I’ve seen. Because bird flu – remind us – it’s a neurological disease?

[CH]
It is, yeah, it affects … When you see the birds dying, what you can see is they show cognitive confusion, they’ll throw their heads back, they’ll shake their heads and they’ll often walk in circles. They can’t take off. If they’re in the water, you’ll see one wing flapping and they’re swimming in circles. It’s a horrific way to die.

As I said, you get used to it. Predation is one of my favourite parts of nature actually, when you see a peregrine take a bird out the sky and smash it and eat it – I love that! [Oh, Ciaran.] It’s fantastic! Death is part of that – it’s great. When you see a bonxie taking food off a puffin, or taking a puffin out the sky – it’s phenomenal! One of the best things you can see.

[JB]
Red in tooth and claw!

[CH]
Exactly! That’s one of my favourite bits about nature. But when you see them helpless and dying …
We have patches of these birds that we monitor. We have productivity plots where we’ll have the same patch that’s been monitored for over 35 years. We get to know them really well. And it’s when you see the chicks, they’re big and they’re almost ready to go – and then the next day, they’re dead in the nest. It’s just horrendous. The scale of it is horrendous as well. What we’re seeing across Scotland and across the world, this virus is spreading and there’s nothing really that we can do about it. There’s nothing we can do to halt the spread.

[JB]
So, this year, is it the same strain? You were down with the full Hazmat gear on this morning. You are testing birds and you are sending it away. What are they saying?

[CH]
The two birds that we’ve tested – two kittiwakes – have tested positive for bird flu. It came back as highly pathogenic avian influenza, H5N1. That is the strain that is the most prevalent in the North Atlantic and in this region at the moment. That’s spreading through seabirds here. And seabirds don’t know boundaries. Unfortunately, the way it spread last year amongst the young gannets – they would go from colony to colony and spread it. But here it’s spreading in little tiny isolated patches, so yeah …

[JB]
It seems to be along the east coast of Britain – England’s very badly hit, the north of England, North East England.

[CH]
Yes, North East England and the east coast of Scotland seem to be the worst affected areas. There are thousands of birds that have died this year on this stretch of coast. It was actually quite uplifting. Unfortunately, as part of this pandemic, if you can call it that – a bird pandemic, avian pandemic. [It is] – it’s brought us all closer together, all the seabird sites in the NTS. We’re all getting together regularly and chatting about what we’re seeing at our sites, sharing knowledge, sharing information, and also just having a chat and lifting each other up a bit. It can get a bit depressing when day after day after day, you’re seeing death all the time. It’s actually quite good to get a sounding board. It was really great – the last meeting we had, most of our colonies (touch wood) were avian flu-free on the west coast. The islands on the west coast and Shetland this year seem to be pretty free of it. I’m kind of nervous saying that because I really don’t want it to spread now, but we’re coming to the end of the seabird season. There are signs of positivity; there is hope out there.

We were talking about gannets earlier on. Something that’s absolutely fascinating that we’ve seen in gannets is the eye colour change. On the Bass Rock, which is the world’s biggest gannetry, just up the road from here, in studies done by the RSPB and the Seabird Centre, they’ve taken samples from birds that have dark eyes. Basically, the whole iris just goes jet black and it shows that these birds have had exposure to the virus and have recovered. Here at St Abb’s Head, we actually have several pairs of gannets that have affected eyes – some with both dark eyes, some with one eye dark and one eye pale. They have chicks and they are breeding successfully. This was discovered early this year and it really gave us the first sign of hope in the colony; it was really uplifting. The only real way out of this is they develop immunity. When we’ve seen that in the gannets, the hope is that it spreads to other species and that they develop immunity.

[JB]
That’s incredible. Nature has given you a visual clue almost?

[CH]
It is phenomenal. It’s really interesting. With binoculars and telescopes out here on the cliffs, you can see them really close up. To see a species that you’re really familiar with – they have really pale irises, a really pale colour – to go from that to jet black! Can you imagine if that was in COVID, and people were walking round with jet black eyes, and you’d be like ‘oh, they’ve had the virus’. It’s so interesting.

[JB]
Yes. It’s something out of scientific fiction.

[CH]
It really is. It gives us the ability to study it as well. We’re monitoring birds that have affected eyes and those that don’t, to see if there is any difference in the breeding success between the birds that have immunity. I know on the Bass Rock, the research never stops, and it’s the same at the NTS sites. We want to learn as much as we can about this virus, because it will help us understand it and then potentially help us look at ways to mitigate against it in the future.

[JB]
There was a taskforce set up last year. What’s it doing?

[CH]
The avian flu taskforce has been set up by NatureScot and various other organisations. One thing I will say is I think we have got a hell of a lot better at monitoring it, tracking it and understanding it. Last year, I think everyone was slightly chasing their tails because we didn’t have a proper set-up for monitoring it and reporting it. What we do here are very regular – daily, if we can – patrols of the reserve, all parts of the reserve – every nook and cranny is covered. What we’ll do is we’ll record every dead bird on an app called EpiCollect and then we’ll also put our records into DEFRA. Once they’re submitted to DEFRA, those are national records that get shared. That’s an international database as well, that can then be used to look at the wider scale of avian flu and the virus spread.

I think we’ve got much better at understanding it. I think the staff on the ground have got much better advice and understanding. We’re fully prepared with all our PPE when we do need to go and remove birds or when we do need to sample birds as well. I think we’re just better set up for it really. I think we’re more on top of it, as you would expect and hope with the second big wave of it hitting this year. I mean, nothing prepares you for it. It’s still a shock to see birds that you’re passionate about, that you love and you see every day – it’s still really hard-hitting when you see them dying on a big scale, but I think we’re definitely set up better to deal with it.

[JB]
We know about the problems whenever it spreads to poultry and the fears for the food chain, etc. As a matter of interest, why doesn’t it, as yet, why hasn’t it spread to other wild birds, inland birds?

[CH]
I think it has. We know that geese were affected a few years ago; barnacle geese were affected on a massive scale. So, the wildfowl, again the most gregarious and social birds …

[JB]
But I’m talking about crows, I’m talking about the scavengers. Why …

[CH]
It has been found in crows but not in massive numbers. They must just have battery acid in their stomachs, because they are eating the dead birds here and they seem completely unaffected. The gannets developed immunity to it and are able to deal with the virus load. It’s possibly to do with their diets. If you think about them eating carrion, they’re exposed to some hellish things really in a normal environment. I was reading recently that it’s actually been discovered in species like reed warbler. I find this really interesting because I think about the mechanism for it spreading and how it spreads. A reed warbler is a relatively solitary bird that spends its life in a reed bed. It’ll have its chicks in a tiny nest, isolated from everything. It’s not a gregarious seabird – like the guillemots – that’s in a big mosh pit of disease.

The one thing that connects a lot of these cases is fresh water. Studies last year showed that the virus can survive in fresh water for over 200 days. One thing we’re trying to do here on the scale is collect the birds from fresh water and very public areas. This is two-fold: to stop it spreading, basically to reduce the risk of it spreading to people and to animals – to dogs, to foxes and to other mammals; but also to reduce it spreading within other species as well if it’s in fresh water. We’ve got a freshwater loch here on the reserve, and lots of species use that – it’s a bit of a highway; it’s a stop-off; it’s a place to go and have a drink and have a wash and socialise. Birds come from all over the planet to come and breed in this tiny little loch.

The reed warblers migrate to Africa in the winter. They come up here and spend a couple of months here – they’ll breed, and they’ll go back to sub-Saharan Africa. This bird that’s tested positive – this reed warbler – presumably (although I can’t confirm this) it’s had exposure to the virus load via fresh water. Obviously, it needs to drink fresh water and it spends its time breeding around fresh water. I suppose it’s not one of the best things, but one of the most interesting things about this is that we’re always learning. Like with the gannets with the eyes and the immunity, there’s so many new things that are going to be thrown up by this and we need to keep studying it; we need to keep learning more.

[JB]
There’s an evolution taking place.

[CH]
Absolutely. We’ve seen it in our lifetimes. We’ve seen this huge event. This is a point in time that we’ll always remember. I think it’s really vital that we try and capture as much information about it as we can.

[JB]
And something to stress again: if you should stumble upon a bird like the one we saw half an hour ago, disorientated – it is such a pathetic sight – you want to help. You think ‘oh, that’s an ill bird. What can I do? Can I take it somewhere to help it?’ The advice is …

[CH]
The advice is not to. Give it space, back off, put your dogs on a lead and give it as much space as you can. You can report it. You can report dead and injured/sick birds to DEFRA via the website – it’s really easy to find. If you’re looking for a location, then a What3Words on your phone or just a map grid reference is handy. It can help narrow it down. But just leave them alone; give them space.

Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately actually, it is a quick death. It usually doesn’t take very long for them to die at all. It’s not a nice death. As I said, they throw their heads back and they show confusion, and they do struggle, but they don’t last very long. And so, if you give it space and let it back off, it just wants somewhere quiet to die unfortunately. That’s what it’s looking for.

[JB]
And the great big global picture? This is an unfair question for you, Ciaran, but I’m going to ask it anyway because you feel so passionately about this and about what you’re seeing. What can be done? What can we do? I think it’s a settled science now that this originated from intensive poultry farming, didn’t it?

[CH]
It did, yeah. This is one of the most frustrating things about this strain of the virus – it’s come from an anthropogenic cause. It was something humans have caused through our desire for the need to produce cheap food. I think we need a change in attitude. I think we need a change in attitude to our diet, we need a change in attitude to our needs – we need to try and live more closely with nature, and try and work with it.

[JB]
And respect.

[CH]
Respect, yes. Absolutely, Jackie. We need to find a way to live alongside it and let it thrive. Something else that we can do, I suppose, is try and reduce other stresses on wild birds as well. Although at the moment there’s not a huge amount we can do about this strain of avian flu that’s sweeping the planet, something we want to try and do on a local and on a wider scale as well is reduce stresses. Offshore here is an amazing marine environment – it’s an absolutely stunning location and what we want to see really is the birds foraging really close inshore, finding food and provisioning for their chicks regularly.

Now, we need to protect our oceans. We need to protect them in every way. There’s obviously the industrialisation of the ocean that’s ongoing around the country. Over-fishing is a massive problem. Kittiwakes, which is the species that it’s hitting here at St Abb’s at the moment: if you go back to 1991 we had nearly 20,000 kittiwakes here. And now we have under 5,000. That’s in a 30-year period, we’ve lost 70+% of them. And that’s without this virus. This virus is like another nail in the coffin for the kittiwake. They have declined so massively. The reason for that is kittiwakes are surface feeders. They’re quite restricted in their foraging strategy. If you think about a guillemot, guillemots are diving machines. They can dive for over 200m and they can exploit a really wide range of food in the water table, whereas kittiwakes will pick food off the surface. They mainly eat sandeels – that’s the best and most nutritious food for their chicks. Those sandeels are being hoovered up off our coast, and those sandeels are being used for fertiliser and for animal feed. We need to help them out; we need to give them a helping hand because with everything else they’re facing, this is the last thing that they needed. Unfortunately, kittiwakes are being hit harder than ever.

[JB]
Well, the image of that poor, pathetic kittiwake in its final hours will stay with me for a very long time. Thank you very much, Ciaran, for your time; I’m sorry it’s such a sad story again. We are coming back later in the year; we’re coming to see the seals and the seal pups. So that’s life and birth – and that’s a far better story.

[CH]
Hopefully, yeah! I mean, the seals had a tough time of it a couple of years ago in Storm Arwen.

[JB]
Oh, fingers crossed!

[CH]
We lost a lot of pups, but we’ve got everything crossed. They really do live life on the edge. Seals pup in the middle of winter; they take that risk with their breeding strategy but it’s a phenomenal sight – the seal colonies are brilliant. One of the best things about this place is it changes so intensely seasonally. You can come here, and it can feel like a completely different place. I can’t promise you we can sit in the sunshine on the clifftop looking out over the sea next time! But what we should get is a lot of atmosphere, probably a bit more wind … and lots of seals.

[JB]
It's a beautiful place to come. There’s been quite a few walkers wandering past wondering what we’re doing huddled against a wall with a couple of microphones. There are plenty of people enjoying what is a glorious day here.

[CH]
They certainly are, and that’s something to remember. Coming to St Abb’s is not just dead birds. The positive thing is we’ve had a lot of chicks fledge; kittiwakes and lots of birds have fledged from the nests. There’s still plenty to see. There’s lots of gannet chicks which are doing fantastically well on the stacks; they’re doing absolutely brilliantly. Outwith all the wildlife, even if you just came for a stunning walk, honestly it’s one of the best places in Scotland you can come. I’m a bit biased but it’s a beautiful part of the world. Please don’t be put off visiting. Please come and see us and support our work, because we’re doing our best to both understand the virus but also to welcome everyone with open arms as well.

[JB]
What we’ll do – we’ll tweet a picture of exactly where we’re sitting and the glorious view that’s in front of us. Ciaran, a joy to talk to you – thank you very much.

[CH]
You too, Jackie – thank you.

[JB]
So, a Scotland without kittiwakes or great skuas? It seems unthinkable, doesn’t it? But it’s not impossible. The National Trust for Scotland cares for our heritage, and that heritage includes seabirds and other wildlife that shelter, breed and feed at our places. Year in, year out, dedicated rangers like Ciaran (he’s blushing now!) and their other experts are caring for our wild birds. And we couldn’t do it without you. If you’re interested in learning more, you could join our Save our Seabirds campaign. Details are on the website nts.org.uk and search for save our seabirds.

I’m sure we will be back at St Abb’s in the not-too-distant future, when Ciaran has promised to bring me here for the seal pup season. A much happier story when we’ll be enjoying new life.

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

Three voices: male voiceover [MV]; Jackie Bird [JB]; David Purdie [DP]

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

[A piano plays ‘Auld Lang Syne’]

[JB]
Hello and welcome. One of the Trust’s most popular locations is Robert Burns Birthplace Museum in Ayrshire. Visitors from around the globe come to see the humble origins of Scotland’s national poet, and a man whose words have inspired paupers and presidents. Burns left an impressive archive of work, but his life ended much too soon. He died in 1796 at the age of 37. At the time, his death was attributed to alcoholism, an unsubstantiated diagnosis that stuck. But in recent years, and with advances in medical knowledge, that assumption on a man who undoubtedly liked a drink has been challenged.
My guest today is among those who have applied not just their great admiration of the poet but their clinical expertise to analyse Burns’s physical symptoms. Professor David Purdie is a doctor of medicine, an author, public speaker and a Burns expert – to the extent that he’s a co-author of the Burns Encyclopedia. David, welcome to the podcast.

[DP]
Thank you; good to be here.

[JB]
Well, we are recording this just off Princes Street. We’ve got some bagpipe musical accompaniment. I don’t know if that will help or hinder. I’d love to find out firstly – Burns certainly enjoyed the grain and the grape. He wrote vividly about it. Now, many artists have their demons. You lecture on Burns all over the world. How prevalent is the notion that he was an alcoholic who died of alcoholism?

[DP]
It was a regrettable fact, I think, that he died twice. He died physically at the age of 37, as you’ve mentioned, in Dumfries. And then he was assassinated post-mortem in an unsigned obituary in what is now the Edinburgh Evening News, the evening newspaper here in the city of Edinburgh, saying that he had died a hopeless alcoholic, ‘useless to himself and to his family, being perpetually stimulated by alcohol’. This, as I say, was unsigned, and many of us have tried very hard to find out who actually wrote these words because they are simply fake news.
In brutal summary, the poet was no teetotaller but, like all sensible men and women, he confined his enjoyment of the grape and the grain to the social and evening hours with his friends and did not let it intrude on his domestic duties to his wife Jean Armour, the family or to his professional business as an officer of the Scottish Excise Service (the forerunner of our beloved HMRC), and for his military duties. Because for the last two years of his life, he was a soldier in the Royal Dumfries Volunteers.

[JB]
Yes, so set the scene for us. Give me a pen portrait of the last few years of his life – what he was doing, what he was writing, where he was going.

[DP]
Well, he lives in Dumfries for the last five years of his life. He has given up farming. It’s a place called Ellisland, 7 miles above Dumfries on the valley of the River Nith. And because of promotion within his duties for the Excise Service (the taxation service at the time), he was now on a foot walk as it was called within Dumfries, looking after the taxation revenues for the city and for the country in that town. Because remember, there was no VAT in those days; that taxation was raised at source. So, he’s working in Dumfries, he’s living there with his wife and the kids, having his children educated at the Dumfries Academy. He has a wide circle of friends from all over the county of Dumfries and the wider Borders, and all over Scotland, and frequent guests from England as well. He’s a highly convivial, sociable, witty man and has a wide circle of acquaintances.
And he’s still writing, of course. He’s still collecting songs and writing poetry because remember he never stopped these two central activities. Not just our greatest poet but also our greatest songwriter – and our greatest song collector, along with Walter Scott and others. He saw to it during this time, and for years before that, that he would collect all the available folk songs of the country. The traditional song heritage of Scotland is very broad and deep, and thanks to him and to others we have that treasury with us today.

[JB]
Your assertion is that in working as a poet full on, and as an Exciseman, he could not have carried out that sort of work if he was an alcoholic.

[DP]
That’s right. It was only after the publication of this unsigned obituary and its repetition in the first biography of Burns by Dr James Currie, himself a reformed alcoholic. That biography was written, I have to say, for the benefit of Mrs Burns and the family, but he could not resist repeating what had been first led off in evidence by that obituary.

[JB]
But why didn’t the family step in and say this is not the truth?

[DP]
They did, they did. But who’s going to listen to a lady in her early 50s by that time, against the power of the press and the power of the voice of well-known authors and writers? It was picked up – as fake news is picked up – repeated, amplified; and still across the world today you’ll find people who believe this. Whereas we know, as you’ve suggested, from the evidence of friends and colleagues, that we would have known – the country would have known – if he had been indeed an alcoholic, because the Excise Service maintained disciplinary records which were found years later, and so did the Royal Dumfries Volunteers. The disciplinary records of the army are still to be found, and in both of them, one of my colleagues consulted carefully to find out: did his name appear on a charge sheet for being incapable or in any way affected by alcohol? And the answer was no – Burns’s name does not appear in the charge sheet of the Excise Service of Dumfries.

[JB]
Indeed, wasn’t he heading for promotion as an Exciseman?

[DP]
Indeed, he was. Good for you. Absolutely, he was and in fact one of my colleagues figured out that had he lived another 18 months, he would have been appointed Supervisor of Excise at Port Glasgow upon the Lower Clyde. In fact, against his name appears congratulatory approval from his superiors as to his work as an Exciseman.

[JB]
It’s very interesting you talk about fake news, and it’s so resonant with what we know of today. I found a piece when I was researching this in the Hampshire Chronicle – so it shows you the spread; it was obviously a syndicated piece. Let me read a bit to you. Again, it was a few months, I think, it was published after Burns had died and after the obituary had initially appeared. It said:
‘He had genius starting beyond the obstacles of poverty, which would have distinguished itself in any situation. His early days were occupied in procuring bread by the labour of his own hands in the honourable task of cultivating the earth. But his nights were devoted to books and the muse, except when they were wasted in those haunts of village festivity and in the indulgences of the social bowl to which the poet was too immoderately attached in every period of his life.’
That diagnosis is being perpetuated.

[DP]
Yes, yes. It’s got legs, hasn’t it? It suits a lot of readers of that material. They thought he was a poet, they thought he was a songwriter. He was highly convivial but of course he was addicted to alcohol, episodically perhaps but perhaps permanently, as the obituary we mentioned already said.
There’s another error in that. The Hampshire people were being told that he lived in poverty. Gosh. That’s another problem we face from time to time, for those who don’t know much about his biography. Burns and his family were never without domestic and agricultural servants in their houses and on the farms.

[JB]
Isn’t that the joy of history that you can transpose something that happened centuries ago to today and you can see this same thing. What do they say? History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes. The fact that it was a good story and perhaps they weren’t going to let the facts get in the way of the good story of the tragic death of this man. We’re talking about this biography that took the story and ran with it, by James Currie. Had he had any relationship with Burns? Because he became the biographer and he also got help in that from Burns’s brother Gilbert.

[DP]
Yes, Gilbert is culpable to a degree here. Gilbert did not speak up strongly enough about the actuality of the poet’s life and his habits. He was rather perhaps dissuaded from that by the fact that James Currie was writing, as we mentioned earlier, for the family and the children. Burns was not a wealthy man. He left debts; they were not substantial, but they were debts. The book was written with the idea of supporting the family through difficult times, their breadwinner having been taken from them.
But just to come back to what you said earlier about the response to this, one of the great responses came from the Kirk. Burns was no friend of the Calvinist church. Burns regarded Calvinism as the suspicion that somewhere somebody might be happy! He took them on regularly in his writings, in prose and verse. But one of the ministers in Dumfries, James Grey, was also the Rector of Dumfries Academy. In a subsequent biography of Burns, he had a letter inserted into the biography to say, ‘Where’s this coming from’? As the lawyers say, cui bono – to whose advantage is it to peddle this story that the poet was an alcoholic, that he died of drink? ‘For the five years that he lived in this town,’ said the Reverend Grey, ‘and where I was educating his sons with others at the Academy, I saw him almost every day. And never once in that experience did I observe him affected by alcohol.’ Who is doing this? Where is this coming from? Cui bono – to whose advantage? Some of us are not alone, I know, in believing that there might well have been a political sideline to this.

[JB]
Political sideline?

[DP]
Yes, indeed. We now know there was a very active secret service, operational in Scotland and in England, at a time of great national emergency. Remember, we are at war with post-Revolutionary France. War was declared in 1793, three years before Burns died. Burns joins up; he joined the Royal Dumfries Volunteers, a TA regiment formed for the Home Defence while the regular army was abroad. It was in there that we now know that there was no problem with him as regards the problem of alcohol. The records of the Royal Dumfries Volunteers are very fulsome, and many young men in that battalion are censured by the military police for over-indulgence in alcohol. Burns’s name does not appear among those.

[JB]
Before we continue then with the case for the defence – Burns’s defence, if you like – can I read this to you? I only found this recently and it’s a lengthy article about Burns written in 1879, so 80-odd years after he died, by someone called Robert Louis Stevenson. [Oh yes!] And he wrote:
‘It is the fashion to say he died of drink; many a man has drunk more and yet lived with reputation and reached a good age. That drink and debauchery helped to destroy his constitution and were the means of his unconscious suicide is doubtless true, but he had failed in life and lost his power of work.’
Why would Robert Louis Stevenson write that?

[DP]
I don’t know. Maybe your correspondent didn’t mention, or forgot to mention, that that essay was rejected by the Cornhill Magazine as being over-censorious and probably inaccurate. [Really?] But I’m surprised because Robert Louis Stevenson himself – and I’m looking over towards the university who as a student there studied law, engineering and literature – he was no teetotaller himself. Very interesting to hear him letting fly at Burns with whom he shares the podium of Scottish literary history. That is highly inaccurate, but I don’t know what might have motivated him to do so, because we know that he – well, I believed – he was an admirer of the poet and a regular reciter of some of his works.

[JB]
Well, let’s talk in detail about the fight back on the ground by people who knew him, or who felt that they had the evidence to question that obituary and the subsequent accusations of alcoholism. Sir James Crichton-Browne, who was he and what was his part in it?

[DP]
Sir James Crichton-Browne was a psychiatrist, one of the first psychiatrists in the country. Sir James Crichton-Browne was one of the first of my colleagues to say, ‘wait a second; wait a second’. For the reasons that we have hinted earlier: the fact that he continued to write at a very high quality right to the end and he didn’t fall off in terms of output and quality and quantity; and the fact that he was not censured by his employers for any problem with alcohol. He said, ‘Wait a second. Let us just examine this.’ He went looking into the poet’s history and spoke to people who had known him and found the median point, I think it was, in the poet’s history of his arrangements with the grape and the grain of the alcohol, if you like. Sure, he’s no teetotaller but he didn’t let it interfere with the duties of his life domestically or professionally.
And so, we’re very grateful to Crichton-Browne for setting the record straight. Unfortunately, he didn't have so much a wide audience as he might have had and that the canard had been set – the hare had been set running and the story was out. And of course, it fitted – as we may have mentioned earlier – that we’ve had a poet. Yeah, sure he was a farmer. He was a highly convivial, witty man surrounded by friends and acolytes; men and women would come to listen to him talk. He was an excoriating critic of certain government institutions of the time, which may be relevant by the way, but he was also a brilliant conversationalist and extrovert and had a wonderful dry, acerbic sense of humour.

[JB]
Let’s talk about the physical symptoms though that would have emerged, I’m sure, if he was an alcoholic or a functioning alcoholic, or had a problem. There was a portrait painted about 11 months before he died. That doesn’t seem to show – obviously, it’s a portrait – but it doesn’t seem to show any of the outward signs, does it?

[DP]
Yes, good for you. You’re right, there was a portrait about 11 months before his death, which was in the summer of 1796. And Jackie, you can’t make a diagnosis from a painting, especially a posed painting – it’s a lateral view of a man of 36 years who looks perfectly fit and well. And that probably is the case. Because what did kill him came upon him very quickly and was merciless.

[JB]
I’m going to stop you there because we’re going to take a break [Ok!] and we’re going to leave our audience on tenterhooks. When we come back, we will talk about what you believe actually killed Robert Burns. We’ll be back in a moment.

[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 with my guest, Professor David Purdie. Now, David, we left part one on a bit of a cliffhanger, but before we begin your diagnosis of what killed Robert Burns, there’s something else I wanted to ask. He must have been tended to during his final days. Was there any evidence from those who looked after him as to what was wrong with him?

[DP]
Evidence would require symptoms and signs and changes at his domestic activities or appearance. It was noted that he had slowed down. It was noted that he was complaining repeatedly of what we call a migratic polyarthralgia; in layman’s terms, that is repeated pains in the joints – hands and feet, possibly elbows and hips as well. He was noted to be losing weight, remarkably fast. And so, it was just assumed that he had one of the many infectious diseases, which slew so many of our people – men, women and especially children – in that era of the 18th century. You’ve only got to look at our graveyards, at the dates going back to that point, to see that survival was not easy. I think it was assumed that he had developed some infectious disease, and that was what was slowly taking him from us. That was still the case until the time that he died in the summer of 1796.

[JB]
Over the years, when people have been looking for clues, they have tried to delve back into his medical history. Note keeping was not as good as it is now but there are some potential clues in his early jobs.

[DP]
Yes, he was a robust child and young man. The first sign of trouble came in 1781 when he was 21 and was in Irvine, not far from the family farm at Mossgiel in Central Ayrshire, to learn flax dressing. They were growing flax on the farm and the Burns family wondered if they might move along from just the harvesting of the flax to this preparation for the production of linen. And he developed what we think was acute rheumatic fever. Rheumatic fever is unusual today, but I can still remember it as a medical student afflicting patients when I was a student at Glasgow back in the 60s and early 70s. Rheumatic fever was dangerous not just initially but because of the long-term consequences, because it can affect the heart and in particularly the valves of the heart in the longer term.
Now, what happened then in Irvine was that he fell ill and he was visited by the local GP or a physician/surgeon as he styled himself at the time. If I meet that man in an afterlife – if there is an afterlife – I will meet him, and I will demand to know why he didn’t write down the diagnosis. But we do know what he thought the diagnosis might have been. We had to work it out retrospectively from the treatments given to Burns. He was given cinchona bark, which was later to be used for treating malaria. He had a fever; we know that because antipyretic drugs were given to him. He had a lot of pain because analgesics were given to him, and he was given a general stimulant. But my dear colleague did not write down the diagnosis.

[JB]
What would Burns’s symptoms have been then?

[DP]
Almost certainly joint pain, fever, probably sore throat, headache, heavy sweating. Clearly an infectious process was going on and that is why the GP was called in and these are the treatments given. We have his notes …

[JB]
Because he saw the doctor about five times when he was in his twenties.

[DP]
Yes, he did. That was not inexpensive in those times. I mean, Burns was not a pauper, as was mentioned by one of your correspondents a little earlier. No, the family was not rich but they could afford the services of a physician. Five or six visits were made and never once did he write down the diagnosis. Maybe he didn’t know what it was. Maybe he thought it was malaria. Malaria was still endemic in these islands in the 18th century. I’ve often wondered about that myself.
There’s no diagnosis, but then again he was released, discharged, went back to the farm and carried on as normal. There was no sign of any sequela from these events, from this presumed rheumatic fever, until much later in his life, when we began to observe, and it began to be observed in him, that something was wrong with his heart.

[JB]
He was also a farmer. There was some suggestion that he could have picked up some sort of infection on the farm?

[DP]
There was a meeting at the college here in Edinburgh – the Royal College of Physicians. We had a meeting of the Historical Society within the college some time ago. We reviewed the symptoms of Burns, the signs observed in him by others, and the ultimate outcome.

[JB]
So, you all got together to discuss this? When was this?

[DP]
Not just Burns either. We lose our poets young. There was a discussion about three poets: Robert Louis Stevenson, Robert Burns and Robert Fergusson.

[JB]
The new Dead Poets Society!

[DP]
Indeed! We lost Burns at 37; Fergusson at 24 [dear me], almost certainly of a head injury; and Stevenson died of a stroke in Samoa at the age of 44. Scotland has not done well with longevity among our great writers. However, what we have from them is wonderful and worth conserving.
In the college that day, we reviewed all the symptoms and the signs and the history of it all, and there was a general consensus – although we will never be utterly sure, because there was no post-mortem – we do not have …

[JB]
Should there have been a post-mortem? Would there have been ordinarily?

[DP]
No, no. In a rural town like Dumfries? No. There would have been certainly an enquiry by those around him in modern times – a PM for a young man dying of an unknown cause like that with rapidity. A tissue diagnosis would have been established. We do not have what the profession calls a tissue diagnosis in the case of Burns, and that’s the problem.

[JB]
There was also a suspicion that it could have been something as mundane as toothache. Now, he famously wrote an address …

[DP]
He did, that’s right. We are coming back to the heart problems, consequent on the acute rheumatic fever years and years earlier. The problem which occurs through toothache is apical root abscess. An apical root abscess is a highly infectious and very dangerous condition in the root of a tooth, where bacteria spill from the tooth into the bloodstream. And if you’ve got a heart which is affected by the long-term effects of rheumatic fever, then there’s going to be a problem. We think that the heart problem was what’s called mitral stenosis.
The mitral valve is one of the great valves within the heart itself, which propels the blood out from the ventricles into the other chambers of the heart and eventually around the body to supply us with oxygenated blood. If that valve is damaged, it is very prone to attack by bacteria if they get into the bloodstream. And that is what we think happened with Burns. This damaged heart, the mitral valve’s damaged and then an apical root abscess or something similar – any other infection – delivering bacteria into the bloodstream, it would settle on that valve and begin the process of what we think was the terminal event.
And the terminal event was acute endocarditis. The very name endocarditis tells you that it was the endocardium, the inner lining of the heart not the outer lining –the pericardium – but the inner lining of the heart, including the valve, which got infected and then led to the terminal events of his life: the rapid loss of weight, the continuing fevers, the polyarthralgia, the pain in the joints and the weight loss.

[JB]
He was, as you know, a prolific letter writer. And he wrote to Mrs Dunlop, saying ‘I have lately drunk deep of the cup of affliction. The autumn robbed me of my only daughter.’ So, he was in emotional distress. ‘And at a distance too, and so rapidly, as to put it out of my power to pay the last duties to her. I had scarcely begun to recover from that shock,’ he writes, ‘when I became myself the victim of a most severe rheumatic fever’. So, he knew he was ailing. And the symptoms, as you discuss, but the treatments – they don’t sound too great. He was sent to the coast to immerse himself in Scottish waters.

[DP]
Not for the first time either.

[JB]
No wonder we can hear an ambulance on its way!

[DP]
Wherever that ambulance is going, it’s not taking patients down to the Water of Leith or to the Firth of Forth for treatment. But in those days, it was. And it was not just the bathing in the Solway, in the freezing waters of the Solway, that was prescribed for him. Prior to that, he had been prescribed bathing in a great tub of cold water on his farm at Ellisland, which was four years before he died. [Dear, dear]
He had begun to experience what’s called PND in the profession. PND is paroxysmal nocturnal dyspnea. In English, that is a tremendous sensation of drowning, of shortage of breath, of suffocation, at night. It is paroxysmal – it comes on without warning. It’s nocturnal – during the night hours. And dyspnea, which means just shortage of breath. He was instructed to douse himself in a barrel of cold water outside his door if this happened. That is a classic symptom of mitral stenosis, or the narrowing of the heart valve, which we think was the root of the final problem with his heart. I think that was probably the origin of the last phase of his illness. The heart began to get trouble, first of all with the valve and then with the infection of the inner lining of the heart, which was the terminal event.

[JB]
You talked about the lack of tissue samples. However distasteful this sounds, if we exhumed Burns’s body today, do we have the wherewithal to help determine how he died?

[DP]
No. We don’t. His bones have been unearthed once or twice. First of all, when he was moved from his initial resting place in St Michael’s Kirkyard in Dumfries to the mausoleum where he lies now. And then in 1834, 40 years after he died, when his faithful and beloved wife Jean Armour Burns died, she was laid beside him in the mausoleum. Because this was the age of phrenology, the poet’s skull was taken out to be examined by a phrenologist. The bumps on the skull being thought at that time to be indicative of the owner of the skull. He was pronounced – surprise, surprise – to be a man of literature by the phrenologist. But there’s nothing of the soft tissue which survived which might help us to diagnose what we have been speculating to have been the case of the cause of his death.

[JB]
So, your diagnosis is rheumatic fever led to a weakened heart and that’s eventually what killed him?

[DP]
Yes, it was endocarditis that slew him in the end.

[JB]
Is it at all possible that because you are a scholar and such a great admirer of Burns that you could be revisioning history?

[DP]
No, no. Good try but no! I’m sufficiently a physician, I hope, to take a balanced view. The poet was no teetotaller, not at all. Sometimes he over-did it, there is no question of that. Sat with his friends in the evening hours in the taverns of Dumfries or Ayr or wherever, but he was no alcoholic. His behaviour and what was observed about him do not support that.
There’s one final twist to the tale. And that is that endocarditis, as we have mentioned, the final event, is an infection of the inner lining of the heart by bacteria which is susceptible to penicillin. And it was almost 80 years after our poet died that another farmer’s son was born in Ayrshire, another Scotsman of genius – in fact our greatest ever medical researcher – called Alexander Fleming, who would make that most momentous of medical discoveries and would receive in 1946 a well-merited Nobel Prize for Medicine.

[JB]
If only he’d been born a few decades earlier. Hundreds of songs, hundreds of poems – such a legacy at such a young, young age to die. What do you think his work, his output, could have been had he lived?

[DP]
You’ve just articulated the absolute reason to show why he was not a hopeless victim to alcoholism or anything else. The output went on right to the very end. The very last song that he wrote, ‘O wert thou in the cauld blast’, one of his finest songs – of which there are 360 by the way – was picked up by Felix Mendelssohn himself. And one of the greatest arrangements of the Burns songs is that very last song, just days before he died in the house in Dumfries. That was the last of them.
You summed it up very well. He left us with just under 400 poems, ranging from 230 lines of Tam o’ Shanter to a two-line obituary, a universal epitaph, but it is one which I have used myself several times in saying farewell with an epitaph and a eulogy to those who have gone from us. And I commend it to anyone listening who might have to give a eulogy. Just two lines:
‘If there’s another world, he lives in bliss;
If there is not, he made the best of this.’
The nation’s debt to him is beyond calculation.

[JB]
Well, that is a perfect note on which to end. Professor David Purdie, thank you very much for joining us and sharing your insights professionally and personally into the life and death of Robert Burns. Thank you.
And whether you’re a die-hard Burnsian or brand new to the Bard, a day immersing yourself at Robert Burns Birthplace Museum in Alloway will open your eyes and ears to an enduring hero of Scotland’s literary heritage. Details are on the website nts.org.uk
And if you have any of Scotland’s stories you’d like to hear more about, then do get in touch. You’ll find the details on the programme page wherever you get this podcast. That’s all from Love Scotland. Why not click on the button to subscribe and you’ll never miss an episode. We’ll be back very soon. Thank you for listening. 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

Four voices: two male voiceovers [MV and MV2]; Jackie Bird [JB]; Jonathan Grant [JG]

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

[audio of waves lapping]

[JB]
Hello and welcome. You’re hearing the haunting ‘Mingulay Boat Song’, which is the backdrop to our story today. It concerns a vital part of the Trust’s work: conserving and caring for our wild places. They range from looking after Mar Lodge Estate – Britain’s biggest nature reserve – to some of our smallest islands and their precious ecologies.
When Elton John decided to retire, it hit the headlines. Likewise, when a well-known politician or a footballer decides to step down, it gets great coverage. But when Jonathan Grant decided to take his leave as a National Trust for Scotland ranger on the islands of Mingulay, Pabbay and Berneray in the Outer Hebrides, he had no idea his decision would make national and even international news. ‘The loneliest job in the world up for grabs’; ‘Jonathan, the Lone Ranger’; ’13 years in a tent’. Those were characteristic of the headlines, as Jonathan found himself inundated with interview requests from the media. I’m pleased to say that things have calmed down just a little, and Jonathan couldn’t say no to a chat with us. And he now joins us from the island of Mingulay. Hello, Jonathan.

[JG]
Nice to be here!

[JB]
It’s been an eventful time. You couldn’t open a newspaper or go onto a news site without seeing your face. You must be wondering what happened. You were viewed as a sort of working Robinson Crusoe.

[JG]
I think that’s what the media and the papers were trying to get across, and it’s not actually like that at all! The other thing was ‘the best job in the world’. I always try and qualify that statement by ‘It’s the best job in the world for me.’ I can get together with the Trust rangers anywhere, and we’d sit and argue about who had the best job in the world. I’m fairly fortunate to be involved in an organisation like the Trust, and have been given the opportunities that I’ve experienced for the last 13 years.

[JB]
Although you weren’t in a tent for 13 years and although you didn’t spend months or years in isolation, there were times and there are times when you find yourself on the islands on your own, and we’ll talk about that in a moment. I suppose the fascination with it – this media storm, as they say these days – I was trying to work out why and all I could come up with is that the number of places around the world offering true isolation is really diminishing and our appreciation of conservation is increasing, so I suppose there’s no surprise that there is a fascination with your job.

[JG]
I can appreciate that. I mean, as I say, I am very fortunate to be in this position. I’m on the island just now on my own because there’s been nobody here. There was some visitors down yesterday, but I do have this beautiful island all to myself. Seabirds; a corncrake in the garden this morning, which was not at all phased about me being about – they’re normally such secretive creatures. I think that’s one of the lovely things about being out in an island like this for any length of time on your own – you almost become part of nature. Rather than being close to nature, you actually become part of it and it’s quite an amazing feeling to get.

[JB]
You wonder why people are envious when you come out with statements like that! The story, as we said, is a fascinating one but your story is an interesting one too, because you were born in Glasgow and your parents were from Barra. Then, when you were about 18 or so, when people you knew and people of that age were heading from Barra to the bright lights of the city, you decided to go the other way. Why was that?

[JG]
I just always loved Barra. I used to go up in school holidays and things and stay with grandparents. My family had a croft on Barra. It was always a place we went to on holidays, and I just never felt that comfortable within a city environment. People talk about loneliness. I was never actually lonely but it’s much much easier to get lonely in a city environment than it is being isolated on your own on a small island like this. There’s a huge difference between being alone and being lonely.

[JB]
When you came back, how did you end up becoming the caretaker for three gorgeous islands?

[JG]
Most of my time on Barra I spent on building work as a joiner to trade. When I was about 40, an organisation – the Summer Isles Amenities Trust – got funding for a part-time ranger post on Barra. I’d always been keen on the outdoors and wildlife and nature, so I thought I’d give that a bash and see how that went. It was only then I realised this is what I want to do! This is what I want to do for a living. Unfortunately, the funding for that expired after two years and there was a eight-year gap. And then the National Trust for Scotland had acquired the islands down here and they advertised for a ranger. I got the post and that was just absolutely amazing.

[JB]
That was about 13 years ago. So, let’s talk about the islands. Just to place the islands for some of our listeners, they’re south of Barra on the edge of the Outer Hebrides. It’s an adventure in itself, as you well know, getting there: weather dependent. It looks idyllic – lots of beautiful cliffs and Caribbean-style white sandy beaches with a few ruins scattered around them. You describe them though as your islands. I like that. Why are they your islands?

[JG]
It’s just that … it’s very hard to describe, you just get that feeling of I’ve got a responsibility towards them. When I first got the job down here, the first season, I thought: God, how lucky am I to be here and to have this job. And then I had a bit of an epiphany, if you like, that along with that is a responsibility towards the wellbeing of these islands, so not only as a caretaker to them, you’re also their advocate. You’ve got to speak up for the islands and to look after them. It’s quite hard to describe actually, how I feel about them.

[JB]
You described them to me as sisters but with different personalities. How did you come up with that?

[JG]
There are similarities between them. They’re fairly similar and it’s always very hard to choose which one you like the best. I need to be really careful how I phrase all this! There are huge similarities but subtle differences between them. Pabbay, it’s probably the gentlest of the islands. It’s got a lovely sandy beach; the cliffs aren’t quite so high. There’s a tranquillity on Pabbay as soon as you land on there. It feels very tranquil.

[JB]
Pabbay’s been uninhabited, isn’t it? It’s been uninhabited since about 1912?

[JG]
Yes, all three islands, the populations left about the same time.

[JB]
And that for you is about the most basic of the islands in terms of where you live. That is where you camp out.

[JG]
Yes, aye.

[JB]
There’s a tragic story. There are lots of tragic stories in the islands because when you’re there and you see the ruins, you really get a feeling for how harsh the life was. Did you take it upon yourself to learn about the stories and the traditions?

[JG]
Yes, Pabbay had a core population of about 24/25. It wasn’t a big population on the island. It was mostly a subsistence existence they had. The menfolk did some fishing. In the late 1800s, four of the local Pabbay men and a relation from Barra went out in a fishing boat, and unfortunately they got caught in a really bad storm and they were all drowned. You can imagine the effect that would have on a small community like that – four able-bodied men were suddenly lost overnight. A pretty devastating effect. Having said that, the people who were survivors actually managed to continue living on the island for another 13 years, I think it was, before they eventually gave up and moved up to Barra.

[JB]
What do you do on Pabbay?

[JG]
It’s mostly monitoring the changes in vegetation because once the National Trust for Scotland took over the islands in 2000, of course it was nothing longer viable for the islands to be farmed as a sheep farm, so the sheep were taken off the islands. The vegetation has changed quite dramatically since then. It’s no longer getting grazed, so we’re monitoring the changes in the vegetation. We also monitor the archaeology on the islands. Last year they carried out a survey looking for European storm petrels. Some volunteers were brought in to help and we discovered that there’s quite a number of them actually nesting on the island, so it’s generally projects like that we’re doing and maintaining the buildings which are left, so they don’t deteriorate anymore.

[JB]
And what about Mingulay, where you are today? I think, at its peak, that had about 150 people living there.

[JG]
Yeah, it’s quite a steady population. Probably the right number of folk that were on the island. They had probably a much better life than people in the late 1800s living in Glasgow for instance. They’re living in tenements, you’ve got TB, you’ve got rickets – you’ve got all these sort of problems in that city environment. Whereas up here, it was a hard life, but they had everything they actually required: relatively good arable ground, seabirds on the cliffs. Like the St Kildans, they were taking the birds off the cliffs and the eggs. And of course, they would fish in the sea, so nature was providing for them. It was a really nice tight-knit community, so everybody looked after one another.

[JB]
Again though, another island not short of a few stories. There was one that really caught my eye, about a man called MacPhee.

[JG]
It was a boy, seemingly. The story is, I think it was the 16th century or whatever, MacNeil of Barra – because this was all part of the MacNeil Barra estate, the islands down here – so nobody had seen anybody from Mingulay up in Barra for a long time, for quite a number of months. They decided to send down a boat to investigate and see what had happened. The boat sailed into the bay and couldn’t see anybody, so they stuck this young lad MacPhee ashore and he went up to the village, and everybody was dead. He came back down to the beach and said they’re all dead. Everybody thought they’d got the plague, so they sailed away and left him.

[JB]
Oh dear!

[JG]
It was the sensible thing to do really, in case he took the disease or whatever back up to Barra with him. They left him on the island for quite a number of months. Every day he used to climb up to one of the hills that looks up towards Barra, to see if a boat was coming down for him. The hill is now called MacPhee’s Hill, and that’s where he used to go and look out to see if his rescuers were coming. Eventually, they did come back for him. MacNeil then granted him and his family a croft land on Mingulay.

[JB]
I understand the Chief felt sorry for him and eventually, after some time, delivered him not only some provisions and some money, but a wife, which was quite nice. I don’t know how the wife felt about it, but there you go. What is it about the one island that’s five star luxury, as far as you’re concerned? You’ve not only got some accommodation, you’ve got a roof over your head – Berneray.

[JG]
Apart from the fact that it hasn’t got a beach – Berneray – it’s got the lighthouse perched up at the very top of the hill. It’s a big wedge-shaped island, with a rocky shore around the bottom. And then as you go up the hill, you go up towards the lighthouse. The lighthouse is situated at the top of a 190-metre cliff. It’s actually the highest situated lighthouse in the UK.
And it’s that dramatic juxtaposition of nature, that natural landscape, and this man-made structure built on top of it. It’s quite an amazing sight. The cliffs there are just absolutely covered in seabirds as well, so it’s a pretty amazing place.

[JB]
Jonathan, let’s take a break from our chat just now. And when we come back, we’ll talk some more about some of the islands. Dare I say, we’re also going to talk about the day that you’re going to have to leave. We’ll be back in a moment.

[MV2]
Scotland’s islands are unique, beautiful, inspiring and often remote. They’ve been part of Scottish culture for thousands of years, but they’re under threat. Places like St Kilda, Staffa, Mingulay and Berneray face challenges like never before. Climate change has made sea levels rise, and extreme weather is putting these fragile places, along with their wild inhabitants, at risk. Can you help?
Your donation to the Love our Islands campaign could support us to protect endangered wildlife. It could help us monitor and do what we can to prevent the spread of avian flu, and it could help safeguard irreplaceable historic buildings from rain and storms. Whatever you can give will go a long way. Just head to nts.org.uk/islands to do your bit. Thank you.

[JB]
Welcome back to the Love Scotland podcast and my guest today, island ranger Jonathan Grant. Jonathan, has your time on the islands – because obviously you’re dealing with contemporary problems and the fabric of the buildings, etc – but obviously you’ve learned about the traditions and the people who lived there. Has it led you to respect their lives and their existence? What have you learned?

[JG]
Well, I learned actually that I have an ancestral link to the island as well, which when I first started working here for a number of years I thought I must be the only person in Barra and Vatersay who doesn’t actually have that ancestral tie to the islands, because when people left the islands here, most of them moved up to Barra and then on to Vatersay. It’s spread out from then, ripples out from that. A local historian discovered about six or seven years ago that I did have this link – it is my great-great-great-grandmother left Mingulay in 1820 and she got married up in Barra. I know the route thereafter but it was really fascinating to find that personal link. We know where people lived in all these houses, so I’ve actually been able to go up to the building and know this is where some of my ancestors were actually brought up. It’s a very nice part of my job down here. We get visitors coming, maybe from the States, Canada, Australia, and they’ve got this ancestral link to the island. We’ve been able to take them actually down to the house where their ancestors came from. It’s a really emotional experience for most people.

[JB]
That’s shivers down the spine country, that is. I presume when they came there, when they planned their journey, they had no idea that they would eventually manage to sit in the croft, in the building of their ancestors?

[JG]
Yeah, the lovely thing about it … nature … the buildings don’t have any roofs anymore. When the people left, they would have actually taken the building material away with them. They’d have taken the timber away to build new houses up in Barra. Apart from the fact that nature and the sand dunes are making their way into the buildings, grasses are starting to grow off the buildings; they’re all starting to be covered up and be preserved that way. It’s relatively easy for people to picture just what life was like, what the place was like within that sort of environment.

[JB]
Have you seen the ecological landscape change in the time that you’ve been there?

[JG]
We’re seeing a lot of changes for the vegetation and that’s the main thing, because it’s no longer grazed – so the grasses are getting longer, the heathers are getting thicker and we’re seeing changes. We’re also seeing some trees starting to grow, some aspen quite near the shore. There was always on a bit of a cliff face but the sheep would always be cropping the aspens that was trying to grow because aspen grows in group systems and these sister plants come up, so these trees are now starting to take off. We’re seeing a lot of willow scrub starting to come up as well, so the landscape is changing. Whether it’s for the better or worse, time will tell but it’s only something we can actually just sit and watch and monitor, and we’ll come back to that one in 100 years’ time and say what exactly has happened.

[JB]
And what’s the biggest threat to the landscape?

[JG]
I suppose like anywhere it’s going to be climate change. Heavier rainfalls, wind, erosion. But to be honest, there’s not a huge amount of threat to the environment down here just now. It’s more to the wildlife, the birds’ populations and things like that we have to look towards and try and help.

[JB]
I suppose you have to look out for things like rats?

[JG]
We do a big biosecurity programme, which has been really run out and developed, country wide actually. Biosecurity used to be a bit ad hoc, but it’s now much much more established now. We’ve got bait boxes out over the island, any lightweight coffin areas for rats coming in. if we did discover rats on the island, we’d really have to eradicate them as quickly as we possibly could because they could devastate the bird population.

[JB]
It’s interesting, the room where you’re sitting, it’s very bright. There’s clearly a big window out of shot. One second, it’s light; the next second, it’s dark – so the clouds are clearly scudding across the sky. All of the videos I’ve seen of the islands online, they’re beautiful: azure seas and the white beaches. Go on, the weather’s not always like that, is it?! How horrendous does the weather get?

[JG]
It can be pretty tough. I mean, we can’t access the islands in wintertime. The boat operators stop running generally at the end of September and that’s largely because it’s just too rough to get down to the islands. To land, we don’t have a landing stage, we don’t have any pier or anything, so we do come down. If you come down in a charter boat that carries maybe 12 passengers, you’ve got to get ashore on a small tender, from that onto the rocks, and if there’s any swell it becomes really difficult to land, if not impossible.
I have been down on the island here for about a week longer than anticipated just because the weather’s closed in and you can’t go on or off. That’s the nearest it gets to being Robinson Crusoe!

[JB]
The stars must be astonishing because there’s no light pollution at all.

[JG]
Come August, yes. This time of year and the next month, it’s almost daylight for most of the day; you get a bit of twilight. It’s not really a good time for looking at stars. But come August, when it starts getting a bit darker in the evenings, the stars are stunning here. No light pollution, nothing at all to disturb it.

[JB]
Tell me about the visitors. You mentioned the visitors there trying to trace their ancestors; why else do they come?

[JG]
It’s just such a great place. It’s a great boat trip coming down from Barra. You get round the west side of Mingulay and the cliffs there are stunning. We’ve got the third-highest sea cliff in Britain – Builacraig. We’ve also got a nice natural stone archway, and the boat can sail through that. Just the scenery; again, I’ll use that word ‘amazing’! And the seabirds. People come down to see the seabirds, the scenery, experience that boat trip – it’s very similar to St Kilda in many a way. Mingulay and Hirta are almost identical in size; I think there’s about 10 acres difference. The history of them is pretty similar as well. They were crofting, they were after seabirds – there’s a huge amount of similarities between the two islands. It’s that draw that people want to get out to these outlying places. It’s a really nice day out!
We do get a lot of climbers as well coming down here, to Pabbay and Mingulay, to climb on the big sea cliffs. That’s very popular.

[JB]
Uninhabited islands, they have allure for us all. They make countless documentaries and reality TV programmes where they dump people on uninhabited islands … and you got it as your day job. Now, come on, you’re only 65. You’re a man in your prime. Why are you giving it up?

[JG]
I always intended to retire when I reached retirement age and that was largely because I’d feel guilty that I was keeping a job like this away from a younger person to experience, and also a responsibility towards the islands where I don’t feel that I can physically do the work that’s needed.
It’s a sense of responsibility towards the islands but also the fact that I don’t want to keep this job away from somebody else. It’s going to be hard. I was up in the puffin colony the other day there and the puffins are only now just coming into land. The day I was up there, about two days ago, there weren’t many puffins about. But while I was up there, all these puffins came in and just circled round about overhead and it was … quite emotional. I think it’s going to be a struggle to say that’s it, but I’ll be back as volunteer or whatever.

[JB]
Were you emotional because you thought this is perhaps the last time I will ever experience this on my own on my islands?

[JG]
Yes, I think that was it, actually. I’ll experience it again, I’m sure, but it will be with a slightly different perspective.

[JB]
Let’s look to the future now because, as you say, you want to make sure that perhaps the job goes to a younger person, and I feel that there will be no shortage of applicants. Anyone listening to this that quite fancies the job, what are the skills they need?

[JG]
Any ranger job has got a certain amount of autonomy to it, and you’ve also got to basically play to your own strengths. I think my strengths over the years has been a building background. I think, over the 13 years I’ve been here, I’ve helped to create an infrastructure. We’ve got the school house up and running; we’ve got power supply; we’ve got habitable accommodation on two islands now. We’ve also set up monitoring programmes along with other colleagues from the Trust – the archaeologists from the Trust and stuff I’ve done myself.
So, in 13 years I think I’ve created that infrastructure and groundwork for somebody else to take over. Now, hopefully they’ll bring in other skills, and that would be good for the islands and it’ll be good for the Trust.

[JB]
What about the mindset? What sort of mindset will your successor need?

[JG]
You need to be happy on your own. I think anybody coming for a job like this is going to have the right attitude, the appreciation of what they’re experiencing on a day-to-day basis down here.

[JB]
And what are the main memories that you’ll take with you?

[JG]
Lots of them. I mean, the beach on Mingulay – I’ve actually seen between 5–6,000 seals hauled up on there in April when they’re moulting.
I’ve actually managed a trip back down in October when they’re pupping, to see the pups on the beach as well. It’s just stunning.
The seabird colonies, yes. Eagles … I mean, it’s just so many things. Basking sharks out to sea – an appreciation of what life was like for them. You’re not going to get enough in a day trip or a short visit; you’ve got to actually be on the place, look at the landscape and try and understand how it was actually used and how these people worked and lived here.

[JB]
How lovely. Well, you’ve certainly sold the islands and the lifestyle to us. I wish you all the very best in your retirement and whatever you do. Thank you very much for spending some time with us and sharing your fame, Jonathan. All the very best.

[JG]
Thank you.

[piano music plays]

[JB]
And you can find out more about the islands of Mingulay, Pabbay and Berneray on the National Trust for Scotland website. I would certainly love to go, and hopefully I can talk Jonathan into being my guide.
And some island news just in. You may have heard that the Treshnish Isles in the Inner Hebrides have recently joined the National Trust for Scotland’s portfolio of special places. There are eight islands in all, home to many seabird species, including puffins, skuas and guillemots, and lots of wildflowers. The sea around the islands is part of a protected zone for basking sharks and minke whales. To find out more about the islands and to support the National Trust for Scotland’s fundraising appeal that will support conservation work on the 400+ islands and islets in the Trust’s care, visit nts.org.uk/islands
I’ll be back with another podcast very soon. Until then, 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

Four voices: male voiceover [MV]; Jackie Bird [JB]; Simon Welfare [SW]; female voiceover [FV]

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

[JB]
Hello and welcome. Today, we step back into the gilded age of late 19th-century Britain, and we have an appropriate setting. You join me in the grand library of Haddo House, a magnificent stately home in North East Scotland. The grandeur of its rooms and gardens are enjoyed by thousands of visitors each year. But sometimes the scale and opulence of such fabulous buildings can overwhelm the human stories of the fascinating people who inhabited them.
At the heart of our story today is such a person: a formidable woman who rather unnervingly is looking down on me from a huge oil painting above the fireplace. In this full-length portrait, Ishbel, the Marchioness of Aberdeen is in her early 20s, elegant in a silk evening dress with a demure lace neckline and the tiniest of waists. Ishbel was born into fabulous wealth, married into the aristocracy, and could have spent her life simply enjoying the trappings of her immense privilege. Instead, she became a life-long social reformer, a healthcare crusader and a champion of the poor and the underdog. She and her husband Johnny Gordon, who inherited the Aberdeen title in 1870 and its vast estate, set out to change the world and help those less fortunate than themselves. And yet, by the time this golden couple died in the 1930s, they were practically broke. Their story is told in a riveting book Fortune’s Many Houses, and its author Simon Welfare is sitting patiently alongside me. Simon, welcome to the podcast.

[SW]
Very glad to be here.

[JB]
Now Simon, I struggled with that introduction because I wanted to tell a bit of Ishbel’s story but not too much – just to interest the listener. But there is so much of her life to tell! Is that something that you struggled with when you were writing the book?

[SW]
Yes, I was quite daunted at first because, having thought as any author does, that they know everything about someone’s life before they set out to write a biography, I knew very little. We happened to have a very good archive here at Haddo, and I was astonished to find how much books of press cuttings, diaries and all kinds of things were waiting on the shelves for me to read.

[FV]
“Tonight, I went to my first dance at Lady Adelaide Cadogan’s. It was considered a very good one – no crowd, plenty of men, etc. I got on well enough, but I did not find where the wonderful enjoyment lay, hopping round a room, talking about the floor and weather, and such like.”

[SW]
Ishbel spent some time in Canada, which we might get to at some point, and her Canadian diaries run to a thousand pages of hand-written narrative. I started reading them and thought, well, perhaps I can just dip into these. But actually, I read every page, they were so riveting. She was a brilliant writer. And so, I was given very good material to work on.

[JB]
Well, that’s a lot of source material and something to add to her list of talents, because I think there’s something else. I think your book is really two stories. It is about Ishbel and Johnny primarily; but it’s also about that gilded age of staggering wealth that I talked about. It’s a snapshot of the life of the elite at the nucleus of the British empire; it’s the class system at its zenith. Great if you were part of it; not so great if you weren’t?

[SW]
I think they transcended the class system in many, many ways. It’s true Johnny Aberdeen inherited what was said to be the largest parcel of fertile agricultural land in Europe that didn’t belong to emperors or kings. And it’s true too that Ishbel was the daughter of Dudley Coutts Marjoribanks, from the Coutts banking family, and an incredibly rich brewer and MP and art collector. He had one of the finest art collections of the second half of the 19th century. It’s true that Haddo House was pretty smart and large, even in those days, though Ishbel set about changing it. And it’s true that Ishbel’s father Dudley Coutts Marjoribanks had a very grand house on the corner of Park Lane in London, called Brook House, which he stuffed with art treasures. Also, he built a London-style house in the middle of wild Glen Affric, which he also filled with art treasures. Ishbel and Johnny grew up in considerable luxury without having to think too much about money. But they decided, really as soon as they got married, on their honeymoon, that they were going to be philanthropists and spend their money on other people. So, no one could ever have accused them of just lounging around their castles or whatever.

[JB]
Certainly not! And they absolutely could have. Let’s put some dates on this. Ishbel was born in 1857. You were saying that she was born into enormous wealth, and there is a lovely little line in your book that I think captures this – that there was an incident in which her dolly’s tea set was broken but not any old dolly’s tea set.

[SW]
No, that’s right. The children in the house she grew up in, in London – they spent half the year in London, half the year in Glen Affric – the children weren’t allowed into the grand rooms of the house. Like all Victorian kids, they were confined to the nursery, which was grand enough I imagine. But they were allowed to play in her mother’s boudoir, and one day they got a bit rambunctious, and they swept the dolly’s tea set off the shelf and it smashed to the floor. In any other family this would have been a massive disaster, but it wasn’t too bad in the context of the Marjoribanks’ great riches … because this was a dolly’s tea set made of Sèvres porcelain and must have cost the Earth.

[JB]
Extraordinary. They married in 1877. Ishbel was 20. As you said, they both decided on a life of philanthropy. Obviously, doing good works was the mark of a lady and a gentleman in those days but even by those standards, they took it to extremes. Tell me about this honeymoon. Specifically, they set off on their honeymoon with Bibles and medicine. Now, that’s not normal.

[FV]
“We laugh now at the remembrance of the picture we must have made, when with all due care and solemnity, we dealt out pills and quinine, soothing lotions and ointments, and applied bandages and plasters to the crowd of poor wretches suffering from various troubles who heard of our practices.”

[SW]
Johnny Aberdeen’s father had a sudden religious conversion while dressing for dinner one night. Basically, he lived in London and he decided that he would give up most of his property and give it to the poor. He was well known for driving around London with his coach stuffed with furniture to give to the poor. He also spent a lot of time and quite a lot of money on providing people in the Aberdeenshire countryside, in particular, with classes, so they could improve their education. So, they had this background of missionary work and good works in general.
When they went to their honeymoon in Egypt, they got slightly bored of sitting on the boat on the Nile. They decided … luckily, they’d taken a whole lot of Bibles and things with them, … so every time they stopped at a village on the banks of the Nile, they would hand out Bibles and things to people. They were also made aware that there were some children who were likely to be sold into slavery, so they summoned the slave sellers to the boat, gave them a good flea in their ear and sent them off.

[FV]
“Aberdeen called together the crew and explained that these boys, having come to a boat flying the Union Jack, were not slaves and could not be slaves. But Aberdeen added, as the men who brought them had some trouble, some compensation would be given them, after which they had better get away as quickly as they could.”

[SW]
And they looked after the children for the rest of their lives. They, as it were, adopted them, though they didn’t take them home with them. They were very much ahead of their time, and they thought big. They were very imaginative. They did things even on their honeymoon that most people wouldn’t have done, whether they were rich or not. So, that was the beginning, and they took it from there really.

[JB]
They certainly did, but even from those early pages I got the sense as a reader that they were well-meaning in the extreme, but such was their largesse I wanted them to have a wise head. I wish they’d had a guiding hand. I wanted to say ‘stop now’ or just calm down a little bit, because they were naïve. Is that unfair? Johnny, I know, was described as a bit unworldly.

[SW]
Yes, I think they were naive undoubtedly, and their children certainly thought they were naive when they found there was no money left and the estate had to …

[JB]
You’ve spoiled the ending now! Go on!

[SW]
… be sold, but I think that also they didn’t really think about money in the way that people think of how they’ve got money, they must keep it. They thought that they were there to help out, and Ishbel particularly had lots of really good ideas about how to help people.

[FV]
“Our efforts chiefly concentrated on starting a district nurse and cottage hospital at Tarves, a hall and recreation room at Methlick, hot penny dinners for school children at several schools on the estate, a number of working parties where the wives and daughters of farmers and others met to make garments for the poor of each district.”

[SW]
Their philanthropy was so imaginative; that’s what made them stand out. She always saw the gaps in social care.

[JB]
Let’s talk about one of those ideas then. We’re in Haddo House – the Haddo House Association.

[SW]
This again was something that Ishbel built from the foundations laid by the 5th Earl, when he started classes for what were then called ‘farm servants’ and housemaids. She realised that these young people were very isolated in their farmsteads and below stairs in big houses, and she was also very worried when they got, I think, one day’s holiday a year, that they all rushed off to Aberdeen and ‘got led astray’. She thought, well, I’m going to see if they would like to join a social club where they could get a bit of education as well. And so, she got the farmers’ wives and the landowners’ wives together and talked about this. They ran classes for the young women in the farmhouses, because of course they couldn’t go out safely at night. They got the young men together; they had classes, they had fun, they had competitions – and then eventually it had started as the Haddo House Association, and it then became a much wider movement called the Onward and Upward Association. Ishbel, again with great imagination, decided to keep them all together, as it were, by publishing a magazine. She published Onward and Upward magazine.

[FV]
“Mother’s Corner. Advice to Housekeepers. To kill rats, pounded glass mixed with flour into a paste should be placed near the rat holes.
Guidance about etiquette in the sick room – if the invalid asks you to read the newspaper aloud to him, omit the death list and in memoriam.”

[SW]
And then she moved on and decided that the children ought to have a magazine, so that was added to Onward and Upward magazine. It was called Wee Willie Winkie and it was allegedly edited by Ishbel’s daughter Marjorie. It’s thought to have been the first magazine for children ever.

[JB]
Hmm. The Onward and Upward group grew extraordinarily because there were eventually about 151 branches throughout Scotland. She had imaginative ideas, but she thought big.

[SW]
She was also a very good communicator, and one of the secrets of Ishbel’s success as a philanthropist … well, there were two secrets. One was that she was able to get Johnny to write a cheque every time she thought of a good idea. [Always handy] And that’s partly where the money went. But her other modus operandi was to dream up an idea and find the right people to put them into practice. That was really crucial. She didn’t then just stand back and say ‘right, you get on with it’. She kept a good eye. She turned up and did things and talked to people about it and continued, via Johnny, to finance things. It was a very clever way of doing philanthropy and it was not done with any thought of glory in mind. I think she was genuinely self-effacing, kind and generous.

[JB]
She had remarkable energy as well. She was looking after, I don’t know how many houses at the same time, and all that that entailed. She had five children; one sadly died in infancy. The good works were obviously, for the people to whom they were aimed, they were welcomed. But they weren’t welcomed quite so much by Ishbel and Johnny’s peers.

[SW]
That’s right. There was a great rumour that went round that, scandalously, Johnny and Ishbel ate dinner with their servants. Queen Victoria even asked Lord Rosebery if this was true. It actually wasn’t true, but they did regularly meet with the members of the staff, and they were categorically not snobbish. They would talk to anyone; they would listen to anyone.

[JB]
One of the major events in their life was in 1886, when Johnny was made Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. He actually held the post twice, as you well know. Such a prestigious position but it was set amongst the politically sensitive debate at the time of Home Rule. But again, Ishbel was not content to play the wife. Of course, she did all the entertaining and things, but she threw herself into charity work – everything from famine relief to helping the Irish craft industries. There was nothing she wouldn’t get involved in.

[SW]
Well, she was very forward-thinking, and she had a really good idea when she started going around the Irish countryside. She noticed – you couldn’t fail to notice – that there was tremendous poverty, particularly in the countryside, though Dublin had the worst slums in Europe as well. She noticed that particularly the women were often busy doing crafts – lace-making or knitting or whatever – and so she formed a charity called the Irish Industries Association. Her idea was that she would suggest that all these people, who were not doing farming or otherwise scratching a living, would go in for Irish crafts.

[FV]
“Are these industries needed? Why are they needed? There are hundreds who can answer that question better than I can, who could speak of the little cottages nestling on the bare hillsides of the little piece of land, to which the families look for their support. And how bare and dreary is the outlook when a bad season comes, when any difficulty arises and how there seems no alternative but starvation or for some of the family to go over the sea.”

[SW]
She started shops in London and I think one in Chicago, and later on, in 1892, at the Columbian Exposition, she built a replica of Blarney Castle – not full size, but I think one-third or two-thirds – enormous anyway. And an Irish cottage in which she sat and spun things on a wheel. This was all to do with increasing the wealth of rural Ireland.

[JB]
She was certainly ahead of her time. And in that time, women were often expected just to sit there and be quiet. She certainly wasn’t of that ilk. She rubbed people up the wrong way as well, didn’t she?

[SW]
Yes, she did, but not all that often actually. Not for the obvious reasons. I think people were aghast that she ignored the class system and spoke to anybody who she thought would be interested in helping to do things.

[JB]
She wasn’t intimidated by anyone either though, was she? Because she had grown up with prime ministers as family friends. Men of influence did not deter her in any way, and it was very much a man’s world then.

[SW]
Yes, she was quite formidable or feisty from childhood. But people who knew her loved her actually. And yes, she was formidable. She was a big figure, literally. She knew what she wanted. She didn’t perhaps always give advice as gently as possible … [as diplomatically as one might!] – but she wanted to get things done and life was short and there was a lot to do.

[JB]
There’s certainly a lot to go through. Just before we break … we’re romping through this very full life. Johnny became Governor General of Canada – can we just touch on before the break what she did in terms of setting up a nursing unit?

[SW]
Towards the end of their time in Canada, she was very struck by various things. One of them was that people living on the prairies – which she hated actually; she didn’t like the prairies of Canada at all – were very isolated, particularly Scots settlers. So, she got parcels of books and things sent to them. She was also very struck by the lack of healthcare, so she founded an organisation called the Victorian Order of Nurses. She got together, I think, half a dozen nurses and sent them up to the Klondike Gold Field, where there was a very serious outbreak of typhoid amongst the gold miners. And Johnny, of course, wrote a cheque so that a little log cabin hospital could be built. This completely transformed the way of life of people in the depths of what was then still a very wild country, actually. The Victorian Order of Nurses still continues, as one of Canada’s great social care organisations.

[JB]
Wonderful. Well, she was still writing cheques and she was getting involved in the women’s movement as well, but we’re going to take a break from this rollercoaster of a life story. And when we come back, we will find out, Simon, how a changing world and a world war treat Ishbel and Johnny. We’ll be back in a moment.

[MV]
Scotland’s history – think battlefields, think castles, think great glens and historic homes, but think tenements too, and town houses, and doocots, mills and humble cottages. The National Trust for Scotland works hard all year round to safeguard the stories of all sorts of Scots for future generations to enjoy. They do it for the love of Scotland, and you can play your part too. Just head to nts.org.uk/donate

[JB]
Welcome back to the Love Scotland podcast where we’re living the late-Victorian high life with a remarkable couple who had no idea, Simon Welfare, that their charitable works were leading them to ruin. They really thought they could continue to spend. As you mentioned earlier, Simon, they didn’t even consider the fact that the money could run out?

[SW]
No, that’s right. I think you have to remember that Johnny Aberdeen was actually a younger brother. His eldest brother died in a shooting accident, and his then immediately older brother, who was the 6th Earl of Aberdeen, didn’t like being the 6th Earl so he ran away to sea and disappeared. They eventually found out he’d been washed overboard a ship that he was the mate of. So, Johnny was never prepared really for inheriting a big estate and never, I think, got to grips with the finances. They just spent money, which rolled in actually from the estate for years and years, and left the worrying to their much-put-upon accountant – the lawyer Mr Jamieson, who was endlessly writing to Johnny saying ‘I think you’re spending too much money; please look at the latest set of accounts. We can’t do this; you can’t do that’.
In the end, as the century turned from the 19th to the 20th, the income from their great estate had begun to dry up because of the agricultural depression. That was caused not least by very very bad weather in Aberdeenshire. And so, they weren’t getting the income they wanted. He didn’t have a clue about money and so was inveigled to sell one of their London houses for more than £60,000. The money burnt a hole in his pocket, and when he went across to Canada and things, he was inveigled into buying ranches in British Columbia. There was also the problem of what to do with Ishbel’s ne’er-do-well brothers, Coutts and Archie. They were duly set up with ranches in Texas and Dakota Territory. Both sadly proved to be really hopeless cowboys and were cheated by their employees.
Then they decided, even as the money ran out, that they would build a house 40 or 50 miles away from here, in Tarland on Royal Deeside. That came in at a much greater cost than they thought. They started running out of money in dramatic style.

[FV]
“It is a comfort that Aberdeen can take things lightly; it would be the last straw if he began to worry. But sometimes I fairly sink under the load, trying to help him a bit over public business, to be a companion to the children with knocks raining on my unoffending door all day, work for the National Council of Women and the Victorian Order all night, and this gnawing at one’s heart over money. One feels paralysed by the difficulties – so horribly small and incompetent.”

[JB]
It’s such a sad story because obviously they made some wrong decisions, as you said. But even in the final days in Canada – and they had to come home from Canada because they had indeed run out of money – Ishbel was President of the International Council of Women. She was running around the country, trying to raise money for countless good causes. It’s also very sad because you would have no sympathy for them if they’d been spending their money on fripperies, but they were also trying to help, as you say, ne’er-do-well family members who had fallen on hard times. They came back and there’s another very sad, very poignant piece in your book when we discovered that Ishbel had been secretly selling diamonds from her tiara, one by one – but no one had known – and having them replaced one by one with paste.

[SW]
Yes, she got up to all kinds of things like that, and the family only discovered what she’d done with the tiara probably 50/60 years later when someone wanted an insurance valuation. She sold pictures from this house. There’s a very famous and very valuable Titian called An Allegory of Prudence, which is now in the National Gallery in London and probably worth zillions of pounds, which she sold. She was very careful not to leave a record of her sales, and I wasn’t able to discover how much she’d sold it for, but I think probably the Titian was for about £600 and that was about £20,000 in those days, I suppose. So, a steal for the person who bought it, and eventually a steal for the National Gallery.

[JB]
We seem to be dwelling a lot, obviously, on their slide into financial ruin, and the pounds and pence of it. What about the human cost of it? Because knowing that possible bankruptcy was looming for this golden couple, it must have taken an immense amount of inner strength for Ishbel particularly – who I think was the dominant force in the partnership – to face this head-on?

[SW]
I think it was very difficult. I think they were naïve in that they never thought that the money would run out. And it ran out gradually actually, but they didn’t twig for a long time, I think. They certainly lost sleep. It made Johnny ill; I think it hastened his end. She was very anxious about it and tried to avoid any conversations with the accountants and lawyers! She had been used to, when Johnny was Governor General of Canada and Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, they’d had to pay their own expenses. They’d had to pay their own expenses the many times he was Lord High Commissioner of the Church of Scotland. They knew, in one way, that they were spending lots of money, but they didn’t like to think about it. Even though they lost sleep, they carried on contributing to things. General Booth of the Salvation Army started a fund for the poor. And Johnny straightaway said ‘Yes, here’s £1,000’, when he absolutely couldn’t afford it.

[JB]
She was also under pressure, Ishbel, in her personal life. In a short space of time, she lost her mother, her brothers and her 25-year-old son in a car crash. And obviously then came World War One and, not surprisingly, they threw themselves into the war effort. Their post-war lives were nothing like their previous existence, but time was changing. It was the end of an era and there’s another fascinating fact in your book that, between 1918 and 1921, a fifth of Scotland changed hands. So, they made Haddo over to their son and they sold off the family silver – probably literally – and moved into a smaller house. Johnny wrote a joke book. I did not see that one coming.

[SW]
Well, the people of Aberdeen did see that one coming because he and the Lord Provost of Aberdeen used to hire the Music Hall and have joke-telling competitions in the Music Hall in aid of charity. These went on for hours and hours; I think four hours was one session. And everybody turned up and laughed at the jokes. I have to say that I was once asked to speak at a Burns Supper and I was desperate to find some jokes, so I thought, well, it’s at Haddo, I’ll turn to Johnny’s joke book. I got it out, and when I told the jokes, they fell absolutely flat – to complete silence! But it sold a lot of copies; the joke book sold a lot of copies in its day.

[JB]
Johnny died in 1934, aged 86.

[FV]
“I arrived just in time to take him into my arms, like a tired child going to sleep, before he woke to find himself free of all human frailties, in the enjoyment of that new life about which we so often had spoken. I thank God for taking him thus and for the daily close companionship of recent years, and that he was not the one to be left alone. He could not have borne the silence.”

[JB]
£204 to his name.

[SW]
Yes, and all the money had gone. It’s very difficult to calculate …

[JB]
I think you said in the book, that’s just under £10,000 but compared to the wealth they once had and that Ishbel, she was turfed out of their house pretty quickly because she’d come to an arrangement with someone that she could stay in the house that they were renting, but as soon as Johnny died, the owners rescinded on the deal. But she carried on. Remarkably, she was working for good causes; she was fighting for the ordination of women in the Church of Scotland, raising money for a TB sanitorium in Ireland. Was she appreciated in later life, while she was still alive, for what she’d achieved?

[SW]
I think she was, actually. I think by all types of people. When they had their golden wedding in 1927, they were given a car as a present, and people did appreciate it. She travelled endlessly and they had an extraordinary amount of visitors to their house in Tarland, and they lived there, actually for them, very modestly, and we can’t be too sorry for them. They had a very good life. They did what they wanted to do. They saved 14,000 acres and Haddo for their son. So, it’s sad in one way that they were naive, but it was a great and good life, well-lived I think.

[JB]
When she died in 1939, what were her circumstances?

[SW]
She had moved to Aberdeen and lived in a house that her son had bought for her. She had a not-very-quiet life still, entertaining people like the Prime Minister of Canada when he came to Aberdeen to get an honorary doctorate or something. She travelled around for the International Council of women. She kept bees and she had dogs, and when she wanted to and when she had time, she sat in the garden and talked to her grandchildren quite a lot, and things like that. The kind of thing that one would have hoped she would have done.

[FV]
“Dr Fraser forbad my going to church today, owing to a recurrence of those annoying lack-of-breath spells. Due, he says, to a toxin of that slight inflammation affecting the heart a bit. So, there’s nothing for it but to keep quiet for a few days.”

[JB]
What I haven’t told our listeners is that your involvement with Ishbel’s story is a personal one.

[SW]
My wife is their great-granddaughter. I have known about Ishbel since I was a teenager when I first came up here to Haddo. People had always talked about her, often slightly muttering that she spent all the money and that the roof needed repair and that was going to be difficult to do. So yes, there is a family connection. That’s why I wanted to find out about her.

[JB]
Why, though, has a woman who clearly did more than spend all the money – she spent it on great causes – why do you think a woman who did so much for women’s causes and for charities in general, why hasn’t she been much more widely recognised for that?

[SW]
I think it’s because in some ways she wasn’t in the mainstream of the women’s movement really.

[JB]
Was she too privileged perhaps?

[SW]
I think there was a bit of that but, for example, she wasn’t very keen on the suffragettes doing their demonstrations and running in front of racehorses and things like that. She thought things should be done more quietly, more by negotiation. The other thing was that she operated on an international level, so perhaps she was better known in Canada and Ireland than she was in Scotland. She undoubtedly did many things throughout her life that literally changed people’s lives. Not many people can say that.

[JB]
Well, thank you very much indeed, Simon, for telling us her story.

[SW]
Thank you, Jackie; it’s been my pleasure.

[JB]
And if you’d like to walk in the footsteps of Ishbel and Johnny at Haddo House, all the details of opening times are on our website – nts.org.uk
That’s all from this edition of Love Scotland. Join us next time. Wherever you get your podcast, click on the Subscribe button and you’ll never miss an episode. 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

Three voices: male voiceover [MV]; Jackie Bird [JB]; Steven Reid [SR]

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

[JB]
Hello and welcome to Love Scotland. Today I’m at a holiday home, although it’s a bit grander than you’d imagine, because this is Falkland Palace – the country retreat of generations of Stuart kings and queens. Today, it’s a mix of ruined and restored buildings, and so very impressive with a sprawling formal garden and even a 500-year-old tennis court. Built in the early 16th century, it was a pleasure palace for the royal dynasty, allowing them to replace the cut and thrust of court politics with the cut and thrust of blood sports. And here today, amidst the rich Renaissance architecture, painted ceilings and tapestries, you can walk in the footsteps of the Stuarts and imagine their tempestuous lives. I’m here to talk about one of those lives, that of King James VI of Scotland, who of course became the first king of the whole of the British Isles.
Much has been written about James in maturity, but a new book – The Early Life of James VI: A long apprenticeship – specifically deals with his formative years in Scotland … and what formative years. Separated from his mother Mary, Queen of Scots as an infant, the mother who may or may not have been complicit with her next husband in the murder of his father – I hope you’re following this. Crowned king at 13 months old, an early life spent pinballing among regents and rival factions, experiencing the death and estrangement of loved ones, being kidnapped, held hostage and all the while learning to be a king whilst only a child. The book’s author Steven Reid joins me. Welcome to the podcast, Steven. Did I leave anything out?

[SR]
No, I think you got that, Jackie. It was pretty comprehensive, I thought!

[JB]
What a story, and just for a couple of decades, not even, of his life. Falkland Palace is cared for by the National Trust for Scotland and we’ve been allowed to set up our interview here in the drawing room. It’s smaller than you would imagine, very ornate, wood panelling with a gallery of Stuart kings and queens looking down on us. When you were researching the book, you spent a lot of time here – does it help? What does it bring you to actually sit within the four walls of your subject?

[SR]
I think it’s a fascinating space, and it’s interesting not just for looking at James but really for the whole Stuart dynasty in Scotland. It’s a place that I associate in my mind with them a great deal. It’s a place where the Stuarts come to relax, a place that they hunt, above all. They also, as you say, play tennis on the indoor tennis court here. James was very fond of playing tennis, so you get that sense of him. It’s a place where there are some political conflicts as well that James is involved in his life. Looking just beyond your shoulder, I can see a couple of portraits of James just hanging on the wall, both as a child – that portrait had a German origin, I think – and one that has him as an adult, as James VI and I, above him. You can see both the phases of his life on the wall. It’s very atmospheric and it’s also very beautiful to walk around and look at from a Renaissance architecture point of view as well.

[JB]
It certainly is. Now, childhood shapes us. One of the early quotes from your book makes me feel quite sorry for him initially. He described himself as a ‘cradle king, who grew up lacking parents, brethren, bairns or any near of kin’. Tell us about his birth and the tumultuous period into which he was born.

[SR]
Ok. He’s born in June 1566, just 3 months after the murder of David Rizzio at Mary’s court in Holyrood. There is a story linked to that, that Andrew Kerr of Fawdonside held a pistol to Mary’s belly during the murder of Rizzio, and that Darnley had attempted or intended to try and force Mary to miscarry so he could in effect take the throne for himself.

[JB]
Her husband?

[SR]
This is her husband, her second husband: Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, and James’s father. So, James is born into the political fallout of that, which is really the end of Mary’s personal reign in Scotland. She’d come back to Scotland in 1561 from her life in France. By 1566 the marriage to Darnley had started to fall apart, and then in February 1567, he of course is murdered at Kirk o’Field in Edinburgh. James is less than a year old when all this happens, and then his mother is probably forced to marry the Earl of Bothwell, seized by him. And then she’s taken away and removed from the throne, and James never sees her again. They’re barely together in the first year of his life before he is released under from her and never gets to see her again. Obviously, she’s executed in 1587 in England.

[JR]
You embarked upon this book. You say though it’s a new look at James. Much has been written, so much, about his mother and a lot about James in later life, so what is new particularly in your book?

[SR]
I think he’s well known as James I, and there’s a really robust and well-developed scholarship on him among English scholars of England itself – really interested in him from that perspective. I think when I started looking at the book, I realised that we really didn’t understand how he came to power. It’s such a tumultuous period. He grows up at Stirling Castle, the first 11 years of his life, but then from 1578–85 there are six palace coups as he’s growing up to the age of 17. Five of which are successful; one of which sees him held under duress in house arrest for 10 months. I wanted to understand what actually happened there, what was that experience like for him.
It was also a chance to delve into a huge range of under-used sources in Scottish history. These include the records of the Scottish court itself, which incredibly for the period of James’s adolescence are still in manuscript. They’ve never been printed or edited or published. There’s a huge range of letters and correspondence and charters scattered around private houses in Scotland that you can access through the National Records, so I spent a lot of time going to different places. Particularly to a letter book I found in Glamis Castle, which I spent many a day in the bell tower there looking at. Looking at all these information networks that James built. There’s all these incredible narratives about his life and times that were written by Edinburgh burgesses in notables in the late 16th and early 17th century that tell us all these details about his story that we didn’t know before.

[JB]
Is it possible – is this an unfair question – to sum it up, to tease us? What did you find out? What did you say: I didn’t know that, and it’s not generally known about this man?

[SR]
Well, I think I tried to understand when he came to power, which is why this book’s subtitle was A long apprenticeship. What I hope I’ve shown in the book is that James was far more precocious and far more politically involved in the life of government in Scotland far earlier than we had previously assumed. From about the age of 11 ¾, he’s being approached to take on the notion of adult ruling, to remove his last regent, the Regent Morton, from power. Obviously he’s not taking power for himself, but he is being approached by a faction to become involved. And from there he embarks on this incredible journey through seven years where there are various setbacks and various alliance building that he’s involved in, that sees him learn the rules of political life. It’s a really brutal upbringing that sees the removal of one of his favourites and sees a number of different people come and go in his life.

[JB]
Alright. Well, before we get into the meat of that, can I ask you as someone who has spent years researching this: what is your view on the enduring mystery – was Mary complicit or not in the murder of his father?

[SR]
Oh, that’s a good question. I teach this a lot in my work and I find that I’m always drawn right down the middle of it. I think, on one hand, if she didn’t know then that would suggest that she’s an exceptionally weak ruler because everybody in Scotland hated Darnley. He was politically toxic, and certainly by the end of 1566 everybody wanted him to go. She certainly brought him over to Kirk o’Field. She invited him to come back and made sure he came back from Glasgow where he was convalescing an illness – that always seemed a bit suspicious to me. She does leave his side to go to a wedding masque the night that he’s murdered. But at the same time, there’s a conference at Craigmillar a couple of months before his death to discuss all this – she is resolutely kept out of it. So, the evidence splits right down the middle and I’m afraid I’ve never quite made my mind up about it to be honest.

[JB]
You’re on the fence on this one!

[SR]
I’m absolutely on the fence. You think I would have an answer, but I don’t. I’ve always been on the middle about it. That’s why I think it’s so heavily debated because the evidence can be discussed in either direction so easily.

[JB]
Ok. Can I clarify something else – and I’ve asked you to do this briefly, which may well be unfair as well! For much of his life obviously he was a pawn between Scotland and England. Remind us why he was regarded as a successor to Elizabeth I?

[SR]
James is the strongest lineal descendant after Elizabeth, and after Mary and Darnley, to come to the throne. Mary and Darnley both have a claim to the English throne through their family lines and marrying them makes that exceptionally strong. James IV had married Margaret Tudor and that was Henry VIII’s sister, so that gave them direct Tudor bloodlines. Both Mary and her husband Darnley are descended from that line; they both have Tudor blood so that makes them very, very strong as claimants. The only other claimant as strong was James’s cousin Arbella Stuart who resides in England. But really, looking at the range of options, James is by far the strongest in terms of continuing that Tudor blood line to some extent.

[JB]
Now, you’ve mentioned that for the first 11 or so years of his life he was held prisoner – it wasn’t in a jail; it was a gilded cage at Stirling Castle – while effectively a civil war raged around him. Followers of his mother, ostensibly Catholic, who wanted her back on the throne, and the Protestant nobles. This must have affected him hugely.

[SR]
I think it did. The civil war after Mary’s abdication … it ended 1573 but there are still factions who would like to see Mary restored, and that shadow hangs right over him until her death in 1587. He is raised at Stirling Castle. In some ways, it’s quite a pleasant upbringing because the castle itself is quite large; it has the garden space outside. He has a retinue and a family around him in terms of his guardians, the Erskines, looking after him. But in other ways, there are some shocking moments. For example, when his grandfather Matthew Stuart, the Earl of Lennox is assassinated. He is killed just outside Stirling Castle and the body is brought in, just as he’s dying, for James to see – he’s not much older than 5 at this point. Seeing that must have been really quite shocking for him. And again, with the various coups that take place in James’s early life, he is exposed to violence at a very young age that you wouldn’t normally see. But there is, of course, this fear of Mary being restored; there definitely was a sense of threat, if you like, hanging over him as a result of Mary still being alive in England right through this whole period.

[JB]
So, he had a series of four regents. [He did, yes] Body count: two shot, one beheaded and one died in office?

[SR]
One did die in office, yes, although again there were allegations, as there often are in these cases, of poisoning as well. It’s not a job you want, being a regent in Scotland. You never last very long. They often talk about fortune’s wheel, and I think Regent Morten, the last one, he manages six years and that’s doing quite well. He’d been through politics right from Mary’s reign. But yes, it’s a short and brutal job because there are so many factions to try and balance.

[JB]
And he had a particularly influential tutor, George Buchanan, who wasn’t kind to him.

[SR]
No, not at all. Buchanan’s well known for apparently beating James and for actually smacking him on the bottom, for bullying him and telling him that he comes from the same bloody nest as his mother, who was a tyrant and a whore. Interestingly, Buchanan had started off in Mary’s court. He had come over from working in France and had spent time at her court. He turned against her when Darnley was murdered and became the leading propagandist against her and put out a range of literature saying that Scots monarchs had always been elected and that they could be deposed, tried and killed with impunity if they were tyrannising the realm. He did try to get these ideas across to James to beat some humility into him, but James, like many a young student, rebelled against that and went on to write some of the most robust defences of kingship and the rights of kings and queens that any monarch ever would.

[JB]
Let’s talk about the psychodrama at the centre of all of this that fascinates us all – the relationship between James and his mother. Another historian described it, quite chillingly I think, as ‘relations but not a relationship’. Was there any sort of maternal bond there?

[SR]
I think there absolutely was. Mary did feel very close to him in that first year especially. She spent a great deal of money decorating his chamber and getting the best bedding and best items of clothing and things as she could for him. She ensured his safety and preservation in that real tumultuous first year of his life, and she also put him into safekeeping at Stirling in the early part of 1567. She put an order out ensuring the Erskines would guard and protect James at Stirling. She didn’t realise however that that would be turned against her, when her reign started to fall apart. She went to Stirling in April, just days before she was seized by Bothwell, and tried to take James with her. And the Erskines said: ‘I’m sorry, my lady, you’ve agreed this rule whereby only a couple of nobles can get access to James at a time; and to release him into your custody, I would need an act of parliament. You cannot take him away from here.’ And then of course she is seized by Bothwell and the drama unfolds. She is removed from power. She herself is a victim of that.
They are together briefly at points in that first year, but they’re often apart as well. They do spend Christmas together at Holyrood and they are at the baptism together in Stirling. After that, the relationship becomes one where there is some affection. Certainly in the letters that are passed to each other as James gets older, there is a pretence of affection. How real that is, it’s hard to tell. But there is a sense that they are rivals. Mary certainly feels that increasingly as James comes of age. She’s aware that people in Scotland are looking to him rather than to her, and that her restoration is increasingly unlikely. For James, he sees his mother as the biggest stumbling block to his smooth accession to the English throne. He doesn’t really remember her or know her. It’s a difficult relationship where there is a sense of family bond, but it’s one that is ruled by pragmatism, by the desires of both monarchs to get what they want, and by a rivalry ultimately because they’re both in line for the English throne.

[JB]
Because as the years go on, she may well have maternal feelings but she uses him as a bargaining tool.

[SR]
She does, absolutely. At least, I think there is clear evidence that in the initial period of her captivity, around 1570/1571, Elizabeth’s actually very keen to see her restored to Scotland. She doesn’t want a rival queen within her borders who can act as a Catholic figurehead. She also doesn’t want to be involved in the continued removal of another female monarch from power. She’s open to Mary returning, but one of the conditions that the English government put down is we would like James as a hostage to come to England and be held in our safekeeping. Looking at the correspondence, there’s a sense that the one person who does remain convinced this is an option to take, when all the nobles in Scotland and even the English government are saying ‘this isn’t really going to happen’, is Mary. Mary is the one saying, on the advice of her own advisors, if we hand James over, we can get you home and then look to get him back – or at least use this as a bargaining tactic. She’s willing to do that, but then obviously as he gets older, he becomes the focus of her attempt to gain her freedom. She tries to get back to Scotland by hopefully entering into an association with him, by creating a joint rulership where she would return to Scotland and co-rule with him.

[JB]
But he’s having none of this.

[SR]
No, none at all. Well … he does and he doesn’t. It emerges in the early 1580s, just as he starts to come of age, and he does write letters to her, business conducted through his favourite Esmé Stuart, then through Captain James Stuart, the Earl of Arran. He writes to her and says: ‘I love you, I honour you and I obey you.’ He even puts a wee heart mark on one of the letters he sends to her – we can see a copy of this in the English archives. But ultimately, it’s not something that he really wants, and there is a sense that he’s stringing her along far more than she deserves. Indeed, in January 1585, when he gets the nod from Elizabeth that they’re going to enter into a formal Anglo-Scottish League, he drops Mary like a stone. So quickly that she thinks this is bad counsel, this is someone around James who is advising him. This can’t be coming from her son because it’s just so cold-hearted. But it is. It’s absolutely James saying ‘I think this is something we are no longer going to pursue.’

[JB]
Good grief. And the shadow of Elizabeth always looms large. She’s always on manoeuvres.

[SR]
Always. I think she’s someone James has to have a relationship with, and she is his godmother. They correspond regularly throughout his life, but from the moment that James is really able to become involved with politics, from the very earliest phase of his political apprenticeship, he is keen to pursue the English throne … or to get some acknowledgement from Elizabeth that he is a preferred successor. He’s particularly interested in the lands that used to belong to his Lennox grandparents in England, which were gifted to them by Henry VIII. He continually tries to get hold of those as a way to say, ‘I’m an English citizen who holds lands in England’. That would make his claim to the throne that much easier. This is something he’s always interested in, and he really cultivates this relationship with Elizabeth through his apprenticeship as well.

[JB]
We’ve talked about his callousness, but I want to point our listeners towards one little nugget in the book. It was very revealing. It was when he was about 5, when he was made to speak to parliament and it showed that he was being utterly manipulated, but at heart he was just a wee boy.

[SR]
Yes, this is one of the parliaments that’s organised by Matthew Stuart, the Earl of Lennox. It takes place at Stirling because Lennox has the advantage of holding the king’s purse. The queen’s party – the party acting for Mary – they have the legitimacy of their monarch in exile. They also control large territories of Scotland outside of the Central Belt. They also have much more significant manpower. But the king’s party have the king, and that’s really the game: you have the figurehead. He is taken to parliament; he gives a speech and he does it very well.

[JB]
At 5?

[SR]
At 5, yes. He’s also made to dance a jig before the English ambassador and to recite Bible passages when he’s the same age as well. He’s coached to ensure that the right people see him as a good king-in-waiting. But, when this happens at Stirling, he’s sitting there and he’s looking down and there’s a tablecloth in front of him. He can see that there is a hole in the tablecloth. He says out loud, ‘There is a hole in this parliament’. It’s the kind of thing where you realise he’s gone off script and it’s fine, but it shows you that really there is a small child underneath this very well-polished, princely exterior who’s being controlled.

[JB]
One final point before we head to the break. You mentioned his favourites. There was one very significant favourite: Esmé Stuart. He was a relative of James. He was brought over from France, good-looking, sophisticated. Tell us about that relationship and how important it was.

[SR]
I think the Esmé Stuart relationship is of fundamental importance in shaping James’s character, his later life and how we debate him since. Esmé is invited over to Scotland by a group of nobles, with James’s consent and blessing, as the most suitable successor for the Lennox earldom. The Lennox earldom is a really powerful one in central Scotland. If James doesn’t grant it to him, it would go to Arbella Stuart, his rival kinswoman in England. He really wants to ensure that it’s held within Scottish hands under Scottish control. When Esmé is brought over, James is eagerly awaiting his arrival. What James perhaps doesn’t anticipate in this decision is the deep, intense, emotional connection that that brings in him. It creates a hugely important emotional relationship between the two men. It’s been debated frequently – is it a sexual relationship? Is it a homosocial relationship? Is it a familial relationship? Is it the case that James is dazzled by his older kinsman and by his French manners? Is it that Esmé actually treats him as a true monarch and serves him in a way that other people in his life hadn’t to that point? Or did they simply love one another? It’s a huge debate and one that I started to look at in the book in a bit more depth.

[JB]
But it gave him solace at a time when he was a lost and lonely child, to a certain degree.

[SR]
It did, yes. Lennox certainly filled an emotional void in him that had existed since he was a child. Obviously, he’s raised by the Erskines. He’s raised by Anabella Erskine, the Countess of Mar, but there’s always a formality there. He is the king to her, and she has her own noble son that she’s putting her energy into. He doesn’t get that emotional input from anybody really in his life. Esmé really fills that for the first time, and there’s a love between them that he remembers for the rest of his life. Indeed, when Lennox is removed from him, that in itself sets the trajectory of the final years of James’s apprenticeship, as he gets revenge on the men that remove him from him.

[JB]
At that point, we’ll take a break. We’ll get to James’s mid-teens and a terrifying event, as if there haven’t been terrifying events previously, that had a profound effect on the rest of his life. We’ll discuss that in a moment.

[MV]
Treat someone special to a year of new experiences with a National Trust for Scotland gift membership. Gift them great days out and do your bit to help protect our amazing places. Gift a year of membership at nts.org.uk/gift

[JB]
Welcome back to the podcast. We left James as a teenager, Steven Reid, aged 16 trying to get to grips with power among treacherous noblemen, all jostling for control. But then in 1582 comes an event called the Ruthven Raid.

[SR]
The Ruthven Raid is the defining moment of James’s adolescence; it’s what really sets him onto full political control. It takes place at Ruthven Castle, just outside Perth. It’s at Huntingtower, just at the Broxden roundabout now. Basically, James is seized whilst out hunting. It’s a plot led by William Ruthven, the 1st Earl of Gowrie, who’d been a loyal servant to James up until that point but was heavily indebted to the Crown as treasurer. He was on the hook to royal debts to the tune of about £45,000, and he – along with another group of noblemen including the Earl of Mar and the Earl of Angus – seized James and forced Esmé Stuart away from him. They put James under house arrest and put Lennox to flight, and then proceeded to take control of Scotland. They pushed for a closer realignment of foreign policy; they wanted to go back to working more closely with Elizabeth. Esmé Stuart had moved more towards Catholic France. They also wanted to get royal spending under control as well, and to bring back a more vigorous form of Protestantism … or at least, so they said.
As a result, James himself was kept captive, initially at Ruthven but then at Holyrood throughout this period. Even though embassies are sent from Elizabeth and from the French king, he’s still held until the summer of 1583, when he’s able to make his escape from Falkland where he’s spending his summer holiday.

[JB]
Yes, tell us how this happened and about Falkland’s involvement.

[SR]
By early 1583 James had managed to get leverage from his captors through the French ambassadors who came to visit him. He was able to sow dissent among the different factions at court and to secure emancipation of his captivity. Under these terms, he was able to come to Falkland with a small group of nobles for his summer. He was going to spend his summer hunting here. And then, when he found out that Esmé Stuart had died, that was the final straw really holding him to the Ruthven raiders. He had hoped that, if he could win them over, he would be able to have Lennox restored. And when he found out that Lennox had died in Paris, he said ‘That’s it’. He fled on horseback from Falkland, did a mad dash to St Andrews, where he holed himself up in the castle there and called a convention. He called all the men who had been loyal to his mother and who weren’t loyal to the Ruthven regime to him. They set up their own government and ousted the Ruthven Raiders from power.

[JB]
As you say, this was at a time in his life when he moved from being manipulated to becoming the manipulator, almost.

[SR]
Yes. At that point I think he had really been forced to work with the different factions, and they had been putting ideas for regime change to him and leading policy more on his behalf than he’d actively been involved in. When he escapes from the Raiders, it’s very clear that he pursues a form of revenge against them. He forces them all either to flee or puts them into ward.

[JB]
He hunts them down in a very callous manner. He takes his time. Revenge is a dish best served cold, as they say.

[SR]
I think that’s actually a fair way to put it. Over the space of about six months, he gradually says to them: ‘If you don’t acknowledge what you did to me was wrong and seek my pardon for it, then I’ll have no choice but to bring in massive sanctions against you’. This leaves them open to being accused of treason, which could of course cost them their lives.

[JB]
He upped the ante at that time as well, against Mary, didn’t he? He really saw her as a threat to the main prize, which was the throne of England, showing what you described as ‘duplicity and callousness’. Wow! You’re not sitting on the fence as far as that’s concerned!

[SR]
No! When I set out to do the book, I didn’t set out to really get into the Mary/James relationship because, as you say, it seemed like so much had been said about it before. But as I got into it, I thought no, hang on, this story hasn’t really been told about James really did try to manipulate her through the association. And then of course, one story that I couldn’t really tell in the book, because it’s slightly beyond the scope, is the fact that he does stand by when she’s executed. When she’s tried for treason in October 1586 and sentenced to death, at first he doesn’t take it seriously. Then he realises she could actually be killed but he’s faced with a stark choice. Does he put real pressure on Elizabeth, possibly with some sort of military intervention, and risk his place in the English succession? Or does he allow the process to take its course and secure his claim? That is a real difficulty. Ultimately, we know the way that history goes. He doesn’t do too much to interfere. He puts up a token resistance with the embassy that he puts down, but he could have done a lot more, I think, to rescue her from the situation she found herself in.

[JB]
As he grows into adulthood, although he was still only in his late teens, you see the adult that he has become. He spends a lot of time here, at Falkland, because this is the pleasure palace; this is where he hunts, and he loves hunting above all. He leaves the hard work almost to the middle men. He decides that the middle men are expendable.

[SR]
That’s very true, and that’s a policy that stays with him throughout his life. He puts all his energy and investment into Esmé Stuart, and he lets Esmé dictate policy a bit more than he does the others. And that blows up spectacularly. From that moment, James will use middle men to enact his policies, whether it’s pursuing closer ties with England or protecting James from threats in the ways that he’s been subject to as a young man, or as a child. But ultimately, when people like Captain James Stuart, Earl of Arran, who fills the void after Esmé Stuart’s removed, when he fails to secure an Anglo-Scottish settlement and when the nobles in Scotland rise up against him, because he’s seizing too much power and control, James says ‘I have to let you go’. He does make a tokenist move to keep Arran but when the nobles march against James and Arran at Stirling in November 1585, he lets Arran go, opens the doors to the nobles and says, ‘Let’s talk about it; we’ll have a discussion about it instead’. He lets Arran go, and that’s it.

[JB]
He’s very keen on token resistance, it seems! What’s your takeaway from your extensive research? Another biographer described him as an ‘unpleasant young prince’. What do you think?

[SR]
I think unpleasant is probably too strong a word. He’s certainly cunning, he’s ruthless, he’s pragmatic. I think he is shaped extensively by the various coups and counter-coups that he encounters as a child, also damaged by it in some ways. I think that he has very strange relationships with his family and indeed with all the male favourites in his life. He places deep emotional and possibly physical satisfaction in his relationships with his male favourite and I think that that is something that is shaped by his upbringing. He finds a solace in his male companions that he doesn’t find elsewhere in his life and that’s tied as well to ideas of loyalty. He sees that one thing you always have to have in life is loyalty from the people around you, and he’s always on the lookout for that. That’s the yardstick by which he measures everything in his life.

[JB]
Now, we leave on a cliffhanger. Your book ends in 1585. So much in a comparatively short life, he’s 19. You’re going to remedy that with another book?

[SR]
I think so; I hope so! We’ll see how this one goes, see how it’s received, but yes I think there’s still so much more to do with the records in Scotland. As I say, they’re all still very much in manuscript form for the court and household in this period. There’re still so many letters of James’s that are uncatalogued and untranscribed around private houses in Scotland and England, and there’s all these narratives in Edinburgh that we could look at as well. So, I think there’s still a huge amount that we can learn about him.

[JB]
In terms of your understanding of the man so far, is the James you ended up writing about the same James you thought you were going to write about?

[SR]
I thought that he would be someone who delegated. I thought he would be someone who had a clear grasp of his politics, but he’s far more astute and far more precocious than I ever thought. I had hoped to find more about his relationship with Esmé and the nature of it, because that’s something that is an eternal debate. But the evidence just wasn’t there … or the bits that we did get were tantalising, so that’s something I’d like to see if there’s more about his relationships with other people as we get into the second book.
He’s certainly a survivor, and deserves to be far more known than he is because of just how remarkable a feat he pursues in this period – to survive all these coups. That was something I was really surprised at just how successful and how able he is at doing that.

[JB]
He was one of the longest reigning Scottish kings – 58 years on the throne. Indulge me. Had he not moved south, let’s change history. Would he have stayed on the throne of Scotland? Would he have brought stability?

[SR]
I think he probably would have. I think what causes the disruption in the Stuart monarchy is the fact that it becomes an absentee monarchy. James promises after 1603 that he will come home every 3 years. He only comes home once, in 1617. Towards the end of his life, he begins to bring in policies, particularly in the church, that are more Anglican in focus. There’s more of a lean towards an English type of church settlement. That policy, and the sense that Charles I, his son, is increasingly distant from Scotland is what leads to the British Civil War. Ultimately, longer term, that separation is what leads to the Stuarts falling.
I think if he had stayed in Scotland, he had huge fallings out with his nobles and huge debates and ructions with them, but he understood them. He was in amongst them in debate in parliament and at court, and he felt like one of them. I think if he had stayed in Scotland, that bond would have stayed and he would have had a keener sense of the policies in Scotland. I think him going down south is ultimately what leads to that close divergence between what’s going on with the monarchy in London and what’s happening in Scotland.

[JB]
So, in terms of those tumultuous, bloody formative years: awful to live through but they played a part in making him the precocious, measured, callous diplomat that he became. Is that a fair description or characterisation of him? How would you sum him up ultimately?

[SR]
I think as someone who was definitely cunning, wily, pragmatic and … I suppose he writes a poem, one of his first poems, and it basically says ‘If thought is free, think what you will, but keep it to yourself, always keep it to yourself’. Keep your cards to your chest. And that’s what I tend to think of him as. He’s someone who is both garrulous – he is brilliant at court, loves to hunt, deeply passionate, deeply intellectual – but he knows when to cut and run, and he knows when to let someone go who has been loyal to him. He knows when their political value is up and that’s something he uses throughout his life.

[JB]
It was an apprenticeship, from what you say, that he used well. [It absolutely was.] Oh, thank you. Thank you for sharing your research with us. Stephen Reid’s book James VI: The long apprenticeship is out now and published by Birlinn.
Will you come back and take up the story? How long did this take you? How many years?

[SR]
This one took six years to actually write but it’s probably taken about ten years to research and develop.

[JB]
And what’s your estimate for the second part?

[SR]
I’m hoping a little less than that, but we’ll see how it goes. Maybe about five or six, if I’m spared!

[JB]
At least it’s not such a bloodthirsty court and bloodthirsty times as the Stuarts in which we’re living! I look forward to joining you at Falkland Palace.

[SR]
Thanks Jackie!

[JB]
And if you’d like to walk in the footsteps of James and the other members of the Stuart dynasty, then Falkland Palace is for you. You could spend a very long time here, roaming the rooms and the beautiful garden and imagining all that palace intrigue. It’s been preserved for you by the National Trust for Scotland. For details of opening times and lots more information, head to the website: nts.org.uk
That’s all from me. Please subscribe to the podcast. It’s all free and it means you’ll never miss an episode. 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 voices: male voiceover [MV]; Jackie Bird [JB]; Vicci Coltman [VC]; two female and one male actor voiceovers

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

[JB]
Hello and welcome. I hope you’re wearing your best bib and tucker, because you join me in the dining room of one of Edinburgh’s most fashionable addresses: the Georgian House in Charlotte Square, in a part of the city today called the New Town. Back in the 1700s, where the bulk of our story takes place, it really was. At the time, Edinburgh was at the heart of what’s become known as the Scottish Enlightenment, an era of intellectual and scientific advancement. We’re here to talk about the life of Sir Henry Raeburn, whose work depicted some of the Enlightenment’s key figures and therefore formed a portrait of the era itself.

This year marks the 200th anniversary of Raeburn’s death. You may be familiar with his famous painting of the skating minister on Duddingston Loch, or of his portraits of some of the most influential men of Edinburgh society. But there was a lot more to him than that, as we’ll find out. His anniversary is being marked by an exhibition of his work here at the Georgian House, selected from the National Trust for Scotland’s impressive Raeburn collection. The paintings and engravings have travelled from a range of properties, including Craigievar and Fyvie castles, Alloa Tower and Hill of Tarvit. Each portrait has an Edinburgh connection. By the wonders of technology, visitors will be able to hear a snippet of the life stories of the sitters. But for the story of Henry Raeburn, I’ve got a real-life narrator. With me is Viccy Coltman, Professor of 18th-century History of Art at Edinburgh University, who has edited a book: Henry Raeburn: Context, Reception and Reputation. So, it’s all covered! Viccy, welcome to the podcast.

[VC]
Thank you. It’s great to be here.

[JB]
Now, as an 18th-century historian, you must be pretty familiar with surroundings like this.

[VC]
Yes, I am. It’s great to be here in the Georgian House that belongs to the National Trust for Scotland. Sometimes I think we forget that the National Trust for Scotland has townhouses as well as country houses for which it is so esteemed, so it’s lovely to be back here. I have been on numerous occasions – and here in the dining room with you.

[JB]
For those completely unfamiliar with Raeburn, can you give us an overview of his significance within British art?

[VC]
Well, I will do my best! I will try. Raeburn … let’s start with his dates because it’s useful to anchor artists chronologically I think, as a sort of starting point. He’s born in 1756 and he dies in 1823. What you’ll get from that is Raeburn lives a very long life in a period when not everybody did. The life span of many people was really quite short. Raeburn spans this period of the late 18th and into the early 19th centuries that, as you’ve already said, is called the Enlightenment – a period of aggressive endeavour in various academic and scientific disciplines.

[JB]
He was born not so very far from here?

[VC]
Not far at all – spitting distance – we could walk down. He was born in Stockbridge, which was then just outside the city but obviously now is embraced within the city. He spent most of his life there; he lived there as a married man; he had his studios in the New Town – he had two different studios. He is really Edinburgh born and bred.

[JB]
He was orphaned at a young age.

[VC]
He was. His father was a tradesman, a yarn boiler, and we know that both his parents died and then he was orphaned. He is schooled at Heriots and then he begins an apprenticeship as a jeweller in Edinburgh. And then he graduates to painting miniature portraits, and then he becomes a post-graduate and goes on to painting oil-on-canvas portraits, for which he is so renowned.

[JB]
When did he begin to make his name as a portrait painter? And was there a lot of competition at the time?

[VC]
In Edinburgh there was a really esteemed history of portrait painters. There were predecessors like David Martin, like Allan Ramsay – who also has a London and an Edinburgh studio. He’s not a trailblazer as such, but what he does do is he comes at the period when he really corners the market in Edinburgh and in Scotland. He is, I think it’s fair to say, Scotland’s greatest portrait painter of that period. So really, he doesn’t have a lot of other competition within Edinburgh; he is the master.

[JB]
What made his work so alluring?

[VC]
I don’t think there’s any one thing. I think it’s important the people look at the portraits and take from them what they want. What I don’t want to do is suggest there is just one way of seeing these portraits, because I think there’s lots of ways of seeing them. But what is often said is that he is so technically good that people feel that his portraits are real people. Although obviously they’re two-dimensional, people get a real sense of the three-dimensional historical sitter.

[JB]
So, excuse the pun – no pun intended – there’s no broad-brush description of his work?

[VC]
Is there a broad-brush description? Not really, no. It’s interesting you use the term ‘broad brush’ because Raeburn is a famously intuitive painter. His main competition in this period is Sir Thomas Lawrence in London, who is the King’s Painter. Lawrence is a painter who does masses of preparation on the canvas; there’s loads of under-drawing. Whereas if you go to Raeburn, he pretty much has the virtuoso technique where he starts on the canvas. And so, there is a sense of the immediacy of the encounter with which you meet his sitters.

[JB]
As I said at the start, through this work we get an invaluable snapshot of Edinburgh society at this vitally important time. It’s good that he was prolific.

[VC]
He was incredibly prolific. We think … let’s imagine his working career is about 40 years and we think there was possibly as many as a thousand canvases. Now, to date, nobody has published a complete catalogue of his works, possibly for the very good reason it would be a life’s work! But certainly, what we can say is that he was hugely prolific, although it seems to be that we only really know Raeburn through a few particular canvases. You’ve already mentioned the Skating Minister, which in some academic circles it’s disputed whether it’s even by Raeburn.

[JB]
You say historians are all arguing – nothing new in that! – but what did they decide? Did he paint the Skating Minister?

[VC]
Did he break the Skating Minister? My view is … so, at the moment there’s two camps and I’m not in either.

[JB]
Oh, get off the fence!

[VC]
There’s one camp that says he obviously did, and there’s another camp that said he obviously didn’t. I have to say that I think at this point we simply don’t know, and we have to wait for further evidence to be revealed. I’d like to think it might be by Raeburn because it has such a place in the National Galleries’ collection and in the hearts of many Scots, but I do think we need to find more evidence. There are also his famous paintings of the Highland Chiefs which are really well known. But in a way I think we have a view of Raeburn which is about his portraits of men, of Scottish Enlightenment sitters who are all men or who are mostly men; professional classes – and actually I think his practice is much more diverse than that and much more nuanced.

[JB]
Well, it was undoubtedly then a man’s world, as you say, and he painted the Highland Chieftains, the professors, the medics, the legal fraternity – but it isn’t widely appreciated that he did paint a lot of women. And it’s only through those depictions pretty much that we knew that those women existed and had lives.

[VC]
Yes, absolutely. Obviously, this is a period in which women are really politically disenfranchised and many women have fallen through the cracks of history and particularly those kind of middling women – we use that term for the 18th century to denote a huge portion of society that is not the aristocracy or gentry but is the middling, white collar sorts of trades. We have many, many portraits of those women which deserve a second look.

[JB]
Well, let’s take a second look. Although this is a podcast, I’m sure you can describe it because we’re sitting underneath a glorious painting of a middle-aged, austere but striking woman. I know that she is called Margaret Buchanan, she is middle-aged, she’s a minister’s wife. Before we discuss the painting, I mentioned that visitors will be able to hear a little bit of the life stories of the sitters, so let’s hear a snippet of Margaret’s story.

[Audio of woman’s voice]

I’m quite satisfied with my portrait. It shows me just as I am.
I’m an Edinburgh lass.
I grew up in Warriston’s Close near Mary King’s Close, off the old High Street.
Now my husband has died, I live on Castle Street in this great New Town.
It is such a shock living here, I can tell you.
The streets are so wide and the buildings so … modern.

[JB]
So Viccy, tell me what you see when you look at that painting.

[VC]
First of all, it’s useful to establish the size. This is what we would call a half-length canvas and what that means is it shows the sitter’s head and shoulders. You’ll see she’s got her arms crossed, and actually the crossed arms come to the bottom of the frame and are slightly cropped. What we have here is this lovely depiction of middle age, which I think is something that really we all ought to think about as a stage of life that is not often as well represented as it might be. Notice her gaze. She’s got these lovely dark brown eyes that look straight out of the canvas, so she’s really meeting the viewer head on. And she wears this bonnet and a lovely black shawl where Raeburn has indicated the type of fabric. She’s got white around her neck and she’s also got white cloth on her bonnet, so she looks very modest but very self-contained. It’s a lovely portrait, as I say, of middle age.

[JB]
He was sensitive to women particularly, because there is a glorious book that I looked through during my research for this and there were a lot of women, a lot of middle-aged women, and you got a sense of their personalities as well as just how they looked.

[VC]
Absolutely. We know his wife. He marries a rich widow and we know she was 14 years older than him. Although it’s slightly fanciful to read too much biography into the portraits, I think there is a sense in which he’s wonderful at representing women as they age. With the young women, they’re breathtaking and male historians have salivated over them; but actually the middle-aged women, like this one, really respectable. And then he also paints old women with a wonderful attention to detail for that sense of which their life is coming to an end and ebbing out of the canvas. Really such a beautiful painter.

[JB]
There is a fabulous portrait of his wife, where although Raeburn is clearly not in the portrait, you can see the intimacy – he paints the intimacy between them.

[VC]
Yeah, I absolutely agree. Often where Raeburn puts the sitter on the canvas … so when people come to the exhibition, they might want to look at where the sitter is. In that portrait you’re talking about, and also this one of Mrs Buchanan, she’s actually really close to the surface of the canvas, as if she’s really engaging with us as her gaze meets our gaze. He has a lovely painterly touch.

[JB]
Back in the day, how wealthy would you have had to be to commission a Raeburn? And why, in terms of your social status, would you have done it?

[VC]
You had to be pretty wealthy. These are luxury objects. Let’s remind ourselves that these are oil-on-canvas portraits. I often think it’s like buying a luxury car. But I should say that portraits are priced according to their size. Actually, if you don’t have that much disposable income, you could just get a little head and shoulders, and that would be the cheapest! If you have plenty of funds and money is no object, you might well have yourself painted about the size of life, in what we would call a colossal portrait. There are some Raeburn portraits in which the sitters, and actually I’m wrong to call them sitters because they’re standing – the sitter subjects are shown life-size. They are extraordinary and they would have been the most expensive.
Why would you do it? You might do it … well, there’s lots of reasons why you might do it. One of the areas that I’m working on is how portraits figure in a lifecycle. I’m very interested in people who maybe get their portrait painted when they come of age. In the 18th century, you come of age at 21. Sometimes you would mark that by sitting for your portrait. This obviously is if you’re a young man. Young women don’t feature until perhaps they get married, and then we might have a pair of what are called pendant portraits of a husband and wife. Later on in the lifecycle, you might sit again when you had had some children. In this period of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, parents are increasingly becoming rather attached to their children. And so, they have them perhaps painted in a portrait with them, or maybe just the children on their own. There are some lovely child portraits by Raeburn of little boys and even some baby portraits – but they’re not really to my taste – that show processing through the lifecycle.

[JB]
Well, let’s hear from another of his female sitters, and this plays into the lifecycle you were talking about. We think this was painted to mark her wedding. It’s part of the exhibition. She is Isabella Gregory. She’s a young beauty, depicted wearing an exquisite Empire-line, cream, Grecian-style gown.

[Audio of actress]

The dress I wore for this portrait was a favourite of mine, the latest fashion from Paris, and I remember feeling quite daring.
Being married to an eminent physician can be exhausting but I do relish the parties and soirees.
I like nothing better than organising the household for a party, especially when we host Robbie Burns. James and he became quite close. Burns was always receptive to close readings and suggestions to improve.
There was always someone to stay and I was particularly happy when James’s cousin Thomas Reid came to the house – his conversation often made my head spin.

[JB]
I think Isabella was one of the sitters who, as you said earlier Viccy, would have had people salivating because it is rather glorious. Tell me about Raeburn, the man. What was he like? Was he a tortured genius or was he outgoing and fun?

[VC]
Raeburn the man is quite difficult to access because we don’t have a sitters’ book. Sometimes with portrait painters and with artists more generally, you have a surviving archive in which we can understand more about who their sitters were, their prices and how they ran their practice. With Raeburn, because we don’t have that and we don’t have that many primary accounts of people sitting to him, it is quite difficult to access him as a historical portrait painter. We don’t get a sense of him as somebody who is hugely driven because, for instance, he had the opportunity to relocate his practice to London, which would have been much more competitive but also much more lucrative.

[JB]
But money mattered to him because he became affluent, didn’t he? And as you said, he wasn’t born into a great deal of wealth. Let me just read an excerpt of a letter from Raeburn to someone who hadn’t coughed up actually for the portrait. It’s quite long but it gives us a bit of an insight. It says, from Raeburn:
‘Painters and poets and these sort of people you know are always poor. And as I am no exception to this general description and I have considerable sums to pay about this term, I have taken the liberty to remind you of your portrait and to say it would be doing me a particular favour if you would send me an order for the amount, the sum of 50 guineas. I would not have taken this liberty but that I know it is a trifle to you and may have escaped you.’
There we are. A rare look into Raeburn’s personality, and a nice bit of diplomacy from him.

[VC]
Yes, absolutely. That is quite typical of the period: the idea that you have to slightly flatter the patron. And also, what we have in terms of a Raeburn archive tends to be letters like that, of which that is probably the most florid, because usually they’re much more along the lines of ‘Dear sitter. Please pay the bill.’ And sometimes he has to send two or three reminders, but as you say that’s an absolutely lovely letter. ‘Poets and painters’. This was a sitter who’d recently left military service – Duncan Campbell of Barcaldine – and it’s a glorious military portrait actually. He was so busy working on his estates that I think he forgot to pay for the portrait. But that should be said, within the Raeburn archive, which is about half a dozen letters, this is one of the more forthcoming where we do get much more of a sense of him as a man and as a painter. And yes, he comes across as being someone who is concerned about money but it’s also written in this really charming, genial style: ‘it will be a trifle to you; please pay.’

[JB]
Tell me, we’ve talked about how wealthy the sitters had to be; they were not without ego. How important was that, to be painted by Raeburn? ‘Oh, do come into the drawing room. Oh, there’s a portrait of me, painted by Raeburn’!

[VC]
It was important, but also in this period … in the early part of Raeburn’s life, if you’re a real egomaniac you might try and sit to Sir Joshua Reynolds in London. London portrait painters are available. Certainly, a large portion of Edinburgh society, particularly the upper echelons, would be in London perhaps for parliament or court, and so would have had the option to sit to London portrait painters. What I think happens with Raeburn is that he corners the Scottish market, because if you live up in the Highlands, you have to perhaps come to Edinburgh on your way somewhere else, and that happens quite a lot. People sit to Raeburn from the Highlands when they’re in Edinburgh on their way south.

[JB]
We’ll talk about Raeburn’s brush with London in a moment because we’re going to take a short break. We’ll leave Raeburn at the peak of his fame here, the turn of the century? We’re heading into the 1800s, he’s heading for middle age, Viccy. He’s the go-to painter, as we’ve said, for the wealthy and influential; life is good. But then his life takes a really unpleasant turn. We’ll be back in a moment.

[MV]
Treat someone special to a year of new experiences with a National Trust for Scotland gift membership. Gift them great days out and do your bit to help protect our amazing places. Gift a year of membership at nts.org.uk/gift

[JB]
Welcome back to the podcast where we’re casting an eye over the life and work of one of our greatest painters, Sir Henry Raeburn. Viccy Coltman, as a portrait painter you’ve explained how Raeburn was the top dog in Scotland for a long time. But there was that much bigger and more lucrative market in London, and it’s puzzled art historians like yourself down the years. Why didn’t he up sticks and move south?

[VC]
Actually, the story of Scottish art would be really quite different if he had done that, because we wouldn’t be able to claim him as a great national painter of this period. The reason I think he didn’t go to London is because he’s married with children. And then in 1810, an opportunity becomes available to rent the studio of a portrait painter called John Hoppner, who’s recently died. Obviously, portrait painters need studios that are kitted out in very particular ways. They need big windows with access to light. I think that, with his children and his business up here, Raeburn just didn’t make that jump of going to London; he stayed here with his family. He had completely cornered the market up here and he remained doing that for over a decade, until he died.

[JB]
Is there any suggestion that he perhaps liked being a big fish in a small sea here, and that he was apprehensive even about trying his art in London?

[VC]
I think that London was saturated with portrait painters at this time. He could probably see that it was incredibly cut-throat. What he does is he has the artist David Wilkie, who’s from Fife, who is his London correspondent, if you like. Wilkie tells him what’s going on in London and Raeburn regularly communicates with him. He has an ear and an eye to what’s going on in London. I should say he is elected as a Royal Academician in 1815, so he’s not without influence in London. But he never makes that big move. He stays up here and has this fantastic Edinburgh practice.

[JB]
I think in one of those letters, the quote is ‘Please tell them I am still in the land of the living!’. Historians argue as to whether that was a bit chippy or whether it was just tongue-in-cheek, dry humour.

[VC]
I think it was really tongue in cheek. In the same letter, he says: ‘I feel like I’m living in the Cape of Good Hope’. He is absolutely self-parodying his own notion of what it might be to be artistically isolated. Edinburgh of course is a growing metropolis in this period. It’s not like he’s in some rural backwater elsewhere in Scotland.

[JB]
And as you say, he did exhibit in London very successfully.

[VC]
Yes, he did. He also exhibits a lot in Scotland. We know about his work being exhibited in London because the critics do comment on it. The really important paintings like one of the Highland Chiefs is exhibited in London. But you do get the sense that what Raeburn is doing is much more to do with Edinburgh’s emergence as the capital of Scotland.

[JB]
But then, a colossal mistake. Tell me about the bankruptcy.

[VC]
Right. The bankruptcy is still something that we don’t fully understand the implications of, I don’t think. What happens in 1808 is that a company called Henry Raeburn & Company, which is a mercantile endeavour based at Leith and it sends goods to London, it basically goes bankrupt. There is actually an archive around the bankruptcy. I’ve looked at some of the papers but actually what we really need is an economic historian to come and help us make sense of this, because as you would expect from a bankruptcy there is a large and complex paper trail which documents what is going on. Certainly, in this period, Raeburn is obviously a portrait painter by trade but this is a speculative venture. So even after the bankruptcy he continues painting. Some art historians have suggested that the quality of the canvases declines because he’s painting for money; he’s painting to write off his debts. I’m not sure that that’s true; I think that’s too simplistic. But we certainly know there is this bankruptcy in 1808. When there’s a prospect of London in 1810, that may be part of his decision to stay up here.

[JB]
So, he was 52 when it all went wrong. It says a lot about his character, as you say, that he began to paint himself out of penury.

[VC]
Yes, it does. I do think that more needs to be understood about the bankruptcy. It’s also interesting because Sir Walter Scott writes himself out of bankruptcy, and I think it happens a lot more in history than we realise. Perhaps it would have some sort of social stigma, but I think we need to understand it much more within its historical context. Raeburn goes bankrupt; Scott, who sits to Raeburn on multiple occasions, also faces bankruptcy in his publishing venture. So, it is a feature of this period, let me put it like that.

[JB]
Well, let’s hear another clip from one of his subjects. Raeburn amassed a portfolio of military men, as you’ve mentioned, and also of those Clan Chiefs. This is Alexander Ranaldson MacDonell, Chief of Glengarry.

[Audio of male actor]

I stood for Raeburn in his prestigious studio at 32 York Place in my full regalia with the Glengarry cap. I also insisted the ancient targe and swords were included in the background.
He placed me on a pedestal next to the tall windows, which suited me well.
He did paint a little too fast for my liking; Scott agrees with me on this unfinished look, but it remains an impressive picture, suited to the chief who went on to welcome the king into Scotland.

[JB]
And that painting, Viccy, is one of those astonishing paintings, I think it’s a full-length, isn’t it?

[VC]
Yes, it is a full-length, slightly under-life as we art historians would put it, which means it’s just a little bit under life-sized. A magnificent painting in the National Gallery of Scotland and it’s on display. This is one of the iconic Raeburns for very good reason. It is a magnificent image of this Highland Chief but it’s particularly a military image because he was a colonel at this time who raised a regiment. We know this portrait was exhibited in London, so it comes back to what you’re saying, at the Royal Academy in 1812. But actually, I think I’ve managed to find that it was painted in the 1790s when lots of regiments were being raised in Scotland for the French Revolutionary War. So, I actually think it’s an image that is about the manpower that he had at his disposal to raise a regiment to fight for ‘King and Country’.

[JB]
This is another reason why Raeburn is so important because he is painting history. He wasn’t just painting the Enlightenment; he was painting the post-Jacobite era and the importance and resurgence of the Scottish regiments and then into the Highlandism and all linked with Sir Walter Scott, who was mentioned in that clip. I think Scott had a hand in Raeburn eventually becoming knighted.

[VC]
Yes, Raeburn is knighted in 1822, which is the year before he dies. It is one of the sequence of events that takes place during the royal visit of George IV to Edinburgh. Scott, as is very well known, is often described as stage managing the visit. Quite what that means is open to all kinds of interpretation, but we do know that Raeburn is knighted at Hopetoun House and we also know that, had he not died the following year, he was going to paint a portrait of George IV in his full tartan regalia and his Highland outfit that was commissioned specifically for the royal visit. In the end, the commission went to Wilkie, who became King’s Painter for Scotland.

[JB]
So, in the end, although it was a year before his death, London came to him really. The king came to him!

[VC]
Yes, absolutely! I absolutely agree. The king came to him. Part of the royal visit, works by a number of Scottish artists were displayed at Holyrood Palace, of which Raeburn was one. There were some portraits displayed, including Raeburns, although I haven’t been able to ascertain which portraits exactly. There were some landscapes by Scottish artists. So, yes, it was wonderful that the London court and the king himself came up here.

[JB]
You’ve said about 1,000 canvases. Where are they?

[VC]
A lot of them are in America. What happens in the story of Raeburn’s reputation is that it plummets.

[JB]
When does this happen?

[VC]
This happens in the late 19th century/early 20th century, around the turn of the century really. A lot of country house collections are being dispersed and the big buyers at this time are the Americans, particularly the first generation of new money who start to build up these big collections of English art. I’m afraid to say that when Raeburn’s portraits first travel across the Atlantic, he is described as an English artist. There is a real appetite for his work in the US. There are some wonderful collections in Britain, of which the National Galleries of Scotland and the National Trust for Scotland have fantastic examples. But there are also a lot of Raeburns dispersed in the United States in collections. Part of my work has been going to places like North Carolina and seeing incredible Raeburn portraits there.

[JB]
It’s a difficult job but someone’s got to do it!

[VC]
I’m happy to do it!

[JB]
I was wondering what are Raeburns sold for? There was something I could find on the internet, which you never know if it’s true or not, his portrait of Lady Carnegie sold for £100,000 two years ago. Does that ring any bells?

[VC]
That would probably make sense. I think the prices are fairly wildly different. Certainly, if it’s a tartan-wearing sitter, that tends to hoick the price right up. [Really?] There was a wonderful portrait sold of a young boy in a tartan skeleton suit – a skeleton suit does not mean he’s a skeleton! A skeleton suit is what young boys wore before they were breeched, before they reached a certain age. That portrait went for hundreds of thousands. I think to pick up a Raeburn, even a modest Raeburn, you’re going to be looking at tens of thousands.

[JB]
As you say, Raeburn’s reputation as a painter has fluctuated down the years. Where is it now?

[VC]
I’d like to think it’s in a good place as we celebrate 200 years of him. I think there is a difference between his academic reputation and his reputation in the market. The market is not really something that I know a great deal about, but I certainly think in academic terms, the study of portraiture remains really buoyant, of which he is a fantastic exemplar. And also I do think people are really drawn to his portraits for the reasons we’ve discussed: the open gazes, they look so much like people you might know. But again, that’s part of the seduction of portraiture, and we need to think about these portraits quite critically. But certainly, I think they have a lovely quality and they do help us to map out these Scottish families in the period of the late 18th and early 19th century, the different professions, the different classes, the different stages in the lifecycle. They’re very rich as historical documents.

[JB]
They absolutely are. Viccy Coltman, thank you very much for telling us all about the life of Sir Henry Raeburn.

[VC]
Thank you.

[JB]
And the Raeburn exhibition runs from June to November 2023 here at the Georgian House. Details are on the National Trust for Scotland website – nts.org.uk – and there you can also see the paintings we’ve discussed and more. They do look fabulous – they are made for a house like this – as well as hearing those audio clips of Raeburn’s sitters. But that’s all from us for now. I’ll be back with another podcast very soon. If you subscribe to the series, just click the button; it’s free. And you’ll have an episode ready whenever you want to hear it. 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

Three voices: male voiceovers [MV]; Jackie Bird [JB]; Diana Gabaldon [DG]

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

[JB]
Hello and welcome. For a comparatively small country, Scotland punches above its weight in terms of world recognition. Tourists come attracted by glorious scenery and a complex and engaging history; many among them are in search of their own Scottish roots. Recent years have seen a new lure for visitors, which has boosted tourism and increased interest in our tumultuous past still further. It’s called the Outlander effect.
For the uninitiated, the Outlander books – nine bestsellers so far, with a fantastically successful screen adaptation – feature a time-travelling nurse from the 20th century who falls in love with an 18th-century Highland warrior. The early books are set in stunning locations across Scotland, many of which are cared for by the National Trust for Scotland – the village of Culross, Falkland Palace and the Culloden battlefield, to name a few. Places so gloriously frozen in time that they need only a tweak from production teams to place the characters in the books back in their Jacobite past. In all, the Outlander effect has given Scotland an even more alluring role on the global stage, but it all comes from the imagination and talent of just one woman: Diana Gabaldon, a former research professor with specialities in zoology and marine biology, who began writing Outlander as a practice novel to see if she could do it. Boy, could she!
I’m delighted to say Diana joins me now from Arizona, where it’s the wee small hours of the morning. Welcome to the podcast, Diana.

[DG]
Hi, Jackie. Lovely to be here. Thank you for joining me at this hour of the day!

[JB]
I was very worried when this interview was being arranged. It is 2am for you, and I am reliably informed that these are the hours in which you work. This is your schedule.

[DG]
Yes, it is. I am not a morning person, put it that way!

[JB]
You’re a very early morning person! You were writing just before we hooked up.

[DG]
Yes, aha.

[JB]
Dare I ask, is it Outlander 10?

[DG]
Part of it is, yes. The Writers Guild of America, to which I of course belong, since I write scripts for the show, is on strike at present, which means that I am not allowed to be working on scripts or outlines or anything connected with the television show. If that were not the case, I would also be working on things for the next season or the prequel, which is a project that has been recently approved. That deals with the parents of Jamie Fraser and the Jacobite Rising of 1715, which is of course going back a bit further in time but still to an exciting period of Scotland’s history.
So, I’m not doing that because we’re officially on strike, so yes I’m doing Book 10 plus another couple of small things.

[JB]
Oh, to have a peek at that computer, which is no doubt nearby, but we’ll deal with that later. Tell me, how do you write? Do you have a word count target of a morning? Do you have a scene, or do you just write until you reach a tricky bit?

[DG]
Ah. Well, it varies but by and large I need what I call a kernel, which is a vivid image, a line of dialogue, an emotional ambience – anything that I can see or sense concretely. I don’t work with an outline and I don’t write in a straight line, I’m afraid! Which is not how they tell you to do it, but you know … you do what works for you. I talk to a lot of writers and the fact is that not everybody’s brain works in the same way. It’s perfectly alright as to however your own brain does work; it’s whatever lets you get words on the page. If you are strictly linear, or you’re the sort of person who puts up wall charts with your characters’ shoe sizes and preferences in peanut butter – and I do have friends who do that – then go for it! It’s whatever works for you, and mine is this rather messy but predictable way of working. Meanwhile, those kernels that I mentioned can be something that I’ve seen or something I’ve overheard – a line of music, something that I’ve seen from a museum or perhaps something that I’ve seen from my rather large research collection. I’m sitting here looking at an enormous built-in book shelf – it’s got four bays and it holds about 2,000 books. My husband gave it to me for an anniversary present about 20 years ago!

[JB]
Talking of your husband, because what I wanted to ask is: when you are writing full-on, what are you like as a person? Are you a tortured soul? Are you difficult to live with? Perhaps you’re not the person to ask this – perhaps I should be asking your husband! Go and wake him up, bring him in!

[DG]
Not really, he would not … he doesn’t function at this time of day! He is a morning person, which came in very helpful when we had children because he would get them up in the morning, feed them breakfast and push them out the door to go to school … and I would get up in time to drive anyone who needed. But I would be at night for hours, so if anyone had trouble with homework or a bad date and needed to talk in the middle of the night, that was me. To answer your question, we’ve been married for 51 years now, so yes, I think I’m probably not that hard to get along with!

[JB]
I have to explain to people listening to this who perhaps haven’t heard of Outlander, or who don’t know the extent of its success, let me tell you this. A few weeks ago, I was in a town in Portugal. I was about to cross the road and a lady comes up and starts to ask me directions. I can’t speak Portuguese, she realises this, she breaks into English, she recognises the accent and asks where I’m from. I say I’m from Scotland … and she explodes! ‘Outlander! Outlander! Oh my goodness, Outlander!’ At which point, I get my phone out. We have interviewed Sam Heughan who plays Jamie Fraser, your main male character, and I show her a picture of the two of us together, and she … self-combusts. I mean, your fame! It turns out she’s from Brazil. You must be used to this sort of reaction.

[DG]
Well, I’m rapidly getting used to it! It’s been gradually happening over the last … well, I started writing Outlander 35 years ago, so it’s been a while! I guess you do get used to it after a while and it’s quite wonderful.

[JB]
In the initial stages of this, when did it dawn on you that it was eliciting this sort of reaction?

[DG]
Well, it’s been what you might call a slow build. The books are, as my first editor says, these have to be word-of-mouth books, because they’re too weird to describe to anyone. If you just say, well, you have this nurse who goes back in time and meets this hunky Highlander, this sounds like the worst kind of romance novel, which is actually not what it is at all. But there is no simple way of describing the books – they involve almost everything. I have so far seen my book sold as fiction, literary fiction, mysteries, science fiction, fantasy, romance on occasion, military history – in fact, the books are sold by the Military History Book Club. Actually, at one point, I beat both Stephen King and George R R Martin for a Quill Award one year. It was rather a large category but still. I mean, that’s the company I run in.

[JB]
Well done, you’re covering every market. I particularly like the military history because there are many very enjoyable sex scenes and I can imagine Colonel Bufty Tufty who has picked up a copy of one of your books getting rather a surprise!

[DG]
I get a lot of interesting mail from male readers. The only negative email that I have ever gotten from a male reader was from a rather fundamentalist preacher who told me I was the spawn of Satan! I’ve never tried another book but, you know, we just disregard that sort of thing.

[JB]
Which of those descriptions are you most comfortable with?

[DG]
Fiction. Essentially, they are historical fiction and I would like to think that they’re reasonably well founded in history. I was a research professor, as you mention. Even though it was in the biological sciences, when I decided to write a novel for practice, I said what is the easiest possible kind of thing I could write for practice? I didn’t mean to show it to anyone; I just wanted to learn how to write a book. So, I said what’s the easiest thing I could possibly write? And for me, historical fiction. I was a research professor; I had access to a very large university library as well as the International Library Loan system. I said, if I turn out to have no imagination, I can steal things from the historical record, and that turns out to work quite well! So, that’s where I began, with historical fiction. The time travel happened accidentally.

[JB]
I think it’s well known that you got the idea from an old Doctor Who episode involving a Jacobite warrior who had been transported back in time. But to get back to that visceral reaction from your readers, have you tried to distil just why? Because there are thousands of books published each year, but very few spark that sort of reaction.

[DG]
I know. Yes, that’s quite odd in a sense. It’s nice that that happens. As to why … I get a lot of mail, and over the years I’ve gotten immense quantities of letters and things. What people seem to enjoy the most or to respond to is the sense of reality: that these are real people, that they share the same concerns that the reader has. The time travel is essentially just accepted as a fact. If you were a time traveller and this is what happened to you, how would you react? Well, you would react in this particular way, wouldn’t you? Fortunately, the heroine of my novels does not react like the way heroines of time travel romances do – being a very sensible person who was a combat nurse in World War II.
With regard to the Doctor Who thing though, I should say that while it was a character named Jamie McCrimmon in one of the Patrick Troughton’s episodes of Doctor Who who stimulated me when I was thinking of where shall I set this putative historical novel because one time would do as well as another. But I happened to have just seen an episode in which this young man appeared and is killed, and I was thinking, well, that’s really fetching. I found myself still thinking of it the next day and I said, well, write a book. It doesn’t really matter where or what to use, because no one’s ever going to see it. It’s just for practice, I said. Well, why not a gentleman in a kilt? Why not? Scotland, the 18th century. So, that was responsible for the time and place.
The time travel though was a function of the female character, my English combat nurse. It began as just an ordinary historical novel. I did not have any practice writing fiction at this point and I was just imagining things vaguely. I thought, well, let’s loose this person into a cottage full of Scotsmen and see what she does. And so, she walked in and they all turned around and stared at her, and I’m thinking why does she look odd? And she began acting like a woman from 1946 and responding in that way. I was thinking, you sound very modern, that can’t be right, but she just kept making smart-ass modern remarks. And so, I said, well, I’m not going to fight with you all the way through this book. No one’s ever going to see this; it doesn’t matter what I do, so go ahead and be modern. I’ll figure out how you got there later.
The fact that she was a nurse came about later, because I said, well, what does this woman do?
I knew she was modern, but not from when she came and so forth, from the things that she said. She immediately met a wounded man and then started trying to take care of him with absolutely nothing. I thought this is obviously a very determined sort of person, and so eventually it came to me where she must have come from. I said I want someone who is capable. I don’t want her to have a wounded man fall at her feet and be screaming and running off, looking for help. I want her to be able to fall to her knees and start putting him back together. So, who would she be? I poked around and I was thinking she’s something in the medical line but it’s not modern, it’s not from our time because medicine today is terribly, terribly technological. I was thinking I don’t want her to be saying, oh my God, if only I had an MRI machine I could put this gentleman through. I said I want somebody who is blood and guts. She knows what to do, and so she came from sometime prior to our time but after the main pillars of modern medicine were recognised. Those would be anaesthesia, antibiotics and antisepsis. Looking back through history, going to things that I won’t go into here, I actually taught human anatomy and physiology for many years as a side thing, so I did have a very broad but shallow grasp of clinical medicine. I did know that all three of those things, while they were discovered in the late 19th century, actually came into usage in the early 20th century and came into common usage during World War II, where they were used on the battlefield. I said, that’s where she came from. She’s a combat nurse.

[JB]
That’s extraordinary. You clearly … I mean, you’ve just reinforced the fact that you certainly do not write in a linear fashion.

[DG]
I definitely don’t! I’m sure it would be faster if I did, but no, I don’t.

[JB]
And also the fact that you wrote the entire Outlander first novel without visiting Scotland?

[DG]
Yes. As I say, it was for practice. I had two full-time jobs and three children under the age of three. I wasn’t even telling my husband that I was writing a novel on the side because he would have tried to stop me. Not out of any objection to my writing a novel per se, but a fear that I would drop dead. I knew if I told him, he would say, well, wait until the kids are in school, wait until my business is doing better and you can quit one of your jobs, and all that. I knew if I didn’t do it then, I might never do it and so I just didn’t tell him. It kept going along, and when he finally found out it was much too late to stop me!

[JB]
So, you write the novel. It is so evocative and – this is coming from a Scotswoman – it reads authentically. When you eventually get to Scotland, when you stand on Culloden moor, which features hugely in the storyline, how did you feel?

[DG]
Pretty much the way everyone feels on Culloden moor. It’s an extremely moving place. The bottom line is that the men who fought there are still there.

[JB]
You sound emotional.

[DG]
Yeah! Have you ever been on Culloden moor?

[JB]
Yes, I have. Sombre doesn’t begin to describe it but I can see from your visceral reaction, thousands of miles away, why it’s translated so well in the books.

[DG]
Yes. I’m afraid I mush up easily!

[JB]
I do too. I’m emotionally incontinent and it’s a good thing. And for someone like you, as a creator, it’s great. It’s a great thing. Scotland isn’t alone in having beautiful scenery. As I said in the introduction, we punch above our weight. And that sense of history that pervades our wild places, what does something like that – when you started travelling more in Scotland – what did that do to your creative process?

[DG]
Well, aside from just the visceral reaction as you say from actually being in that place, I don’t know anyone who goes to Scotland and does not feel that. It’s right there. But, I did the first book entirely from research. The thing is Scotland is a very beautiful place as well as a very historical place and a very literate place. Scots have been writing about their own history, their own geography and so forth for a long time and that was all available to me, in terms of both fiction and non-fiction. I had evolved quite a mental apprehension of what it was all about, so to speak. I read every book I could get my hands on that was written by a Scottish person, because that’s how I developed an ear for the Scots language. I realised from my research that in the 18th century people were still speaking Gaelic in the Highlands and so forth.
That’s rather funny as a matter of fact, because I began writing Outlander in 1988. In 1988 there were not many Scots available in Phoenix, Arizona. Also, the internet just barely existed and certainly was not available – we didn’t have Google Translate and things like that. So, finding a source for Gaelic was something of a challenge. I ended up finally finding a bookstore in Boston called Schoenhof’s Foreign Books and I called them up – because there was no email or anything like that –and I said I’m looking for a Gaelic/English dictionary. They immediately said Irish Gaelic or Scottish Gaelic? And I said, aha I’ve found the right place! Yes, I want Scottish please. So, they sent me this slim volume and that’s what I used when writing Outlander. Consequently, the Gaelic in it is extremely crude. In the middle of the second book, I finally quit my job at the university. I was on a year-to-year contract and my contract came up for renewal and I said to my husband, because the publisher had given me a three-book contract, well, we won’t starve if I quit. I think it would make it easier to write this book, so I’m gonna quit and I think I really want to go see Scotland.
So, we parked the children with my parents and went to Scotland for two weeks, where I discovered a nice large Gaelic/English dictionary, which eased my efforts quite a bit. And then along came the third book and I got a nice letter from this gentleman named Iain MacKinnon Taylor, who said: Dear Miss Gabaldon. I’ve been reading your novels and I love them. It’s so wonderful to see my homeland and my history so beautifully represented and in such a marvellous way. I absolutely love your books. He said, there’s just this one thing, which I hesitate to mention. I am a native Gaelic speaker; I was born on the Isle of Harris, and I think you must be getting your Gaelic from a dictionary. I said, well spotted, Mr Taylor! Anyway, he said, it’s not that you’re using the wrong words exactly, but you’re not using them grammatically or idiomatically the way that a real native speaker would. He said, I hesitate to do this but can I help you with the translation? I said, Where have you been all my life, Mr Taylor?! And so, he very kindly helped me with the Gaelic for the third through the fifth books, I think.

[JB]
How wonderful that he actually got in touch. You say you’ve been writing the books obviously for more than 30 years. Do the two main characters, specifically, do they live inside your head in a parallel universe? They must be part of you by now.

[DG]
Oh yes. Well, they always have been. People say, where do you get your characters? They talk about Black Jack Randall and he’s so disgusting, he’s so foul – I can’t stand this man. And I’m thinking, you have no idea that you’re talking to Black Jack Randall right now, do you?

[JB]
Oh my goodness, yes! Heroes and villains. And he is a rather nasty villain. When it came to the television series, these characters who were so real, so well-drawn, how important was it for you that they were cast correctly? Did you have any say, for example?

[DG]
No, no, no. Writers are more or less the bottom of the totem pole in terms of television and so forth, in spite of the fact that we are very valuable and perhaps invaluable. But we aren’t the most important things to television; the visual is what it’s all about. It’s what it looks like, which is why there’s so much bad television around us! But anyway, I would not have the faintest idea how to go about locating actors, let alone vetting them for the process and all that, so I just waited wide-eyed to see what might happen next. Fortunately, Sam was the first person that they cast. Maril Davis – one of the producers – she called up in great excitement and she said, ‘well, we thought this was going to take forever to find Jamie but we found him – first track out of the box.’ I was thinking, really? And she said, ‘Oh yes, we’re so excited. I’m sending you his audition tapes and we’ll see what you think.’ And I was thinking, yeah. Anyway, they sent them, and I was looking at them and thinking well … and five seconds later he was gone and it was just Jamie Fraser in the book, right there. I had no idea, but it was just amazing. I talked to him later. I said, how do you do this? And he said, well, I read the book. I just had this gut feel for the guy. I knew who he was. I said, boy, don’t you! And he has not lost that. He still knows who Jamie Fraser is.

[JB]
He does, because he has been a lovely guest on this programme and he has that fusion of being a man’s man and being very, very sensitive. The chemistry between Sam and Caitríona Balfe, your heroine, leaps off the television, the way that the relationship … because I asked you earlier, how did you distil the success, that visceral reaction to your novels? And in my humble opinion, having read a couple of the books, I think it’s the love story. I think it’s because it’s so beautifully drawn, so intense, that anyone who has been in love – and clearly you have, to write this – recognises its authenticity.

[DG]
Well, thank you. I think that’s true. Interestingly enough, Caitríona was the last main actor cast. They had been looking and looking and looking, and they had just had Sam being shipped off to California to do trials with different actresses and all that, and none of them were right. Everyone was thinking there are millions of good English actresses – why can’t we find Claire? Finally, they were coming right down to the wire on production. They had to start setting things up that week and still they had no Claire, who is naturally kind of important. So, they collected all of the audition tapes that they had from a wide variety of actresses and sent all of the production people home with their own set and said, go through these and pick one. They came back three days later with bloodshot eyes, having watched all of this, and all of them said, well I don’t know, there’s just something about this one. And they had all chosen Caitríona’s tape, all of them. It was a 30-second tape but something about her just clicked. And then they did a chemistry test between her and Sam, and that was just absolutely riveting. They both just picked it up instantly and, yeah, we couldn’t have gotten luckier.

[JB]
Certainly. The screen adaptation of a book must be absolutely wonderful, but there must be drawbacks because your books are so full of description and nuance and character and plot that the TV shows would have to be five hours long! As a writer, I’ve heard you being interviewed and when they talk about ‘plot adaptations’ in inverted commas – ie cuts – you’re accepting and you’re philosophical in your response. That must be hard. I know that fans of the books come to you and they’re not happy at all!

[DG]
Yes, that’s true but they assume that I have a great deal more influence than I actually have. I had no experience with television whatsoever, and so it’s extremely fascinating to see how things are made. But I did understand the basic problem, which is that you cannot take a book that’s …

[JB]
930-something pages is the one I’m reading at the moment!

[DG]
It’s quite a bit, yes. They range between 300,000–half a million words each. You’re not going to take a book like that and squeeze it into 8 hours of television, which was the basic season at the time. Obviously, we’re going to have to pick and choose. If you’re just picking out particular scenes, you have to string these together in a plausible way. How are you going to do that? Well, I had no experience whatsoever in television writing and all that, but they did as part of the film deal make me a consultant into the show, which essentially means that they show me everything, which is wonderful. They show me the scripts; they show me all the iterations of the scripts. Each script goes through, I think, seven or eight or even nine (or ten!) rewrites, and often they’re rewriting it while they’re filming it because something is just not working right and all that.
They also show me all of the daily footage that they shoot. They film five, sometimes six, days a week. I routinely get an hour’s worth of dailies, as they call them, which is fascinating to watch because you’re seeing everything. It’s especially good when you have actors who are working on an emotionally intense scene because even though all of the actors, without exception, have been wonderful besides our leads. Even the very small parts are done just beautifully and all that, and that takes … I can’t even tell you what it takes being not an actor myself. But you can watch them doing it and it’s fascinating to see them work their way deeper into this character as they work. When they’re doing it with each other, the process is fascinating, just to see how it evolves.
I’ve been on set several times. I have written a few scripts myself and it’s really, really interesting but terribly complex. It depends on so many things and it comes down to two things: one being the script and two being the actors. The director of course also plays a major part, even though they’re largely invisible. You don’t really see them unless you’re sitting there. I’m thinking of one time I was on the set, and it was raining. We were filming outside and so forth. I was standing behind the director and the head cameraman was looking for just the right place to set his mobile camera. Many of them are huge and run on tracks, and having those moved is quite a production. But he had one that he could pick up and move it around, and that’s what he was doing. He’s moving here and here, very good cameraman, and the director was getting wetter and wetter and more furious and finally he actually leaped into the air – I’ve never seen anyone actually be hopping mad before – but he was! He hopped up and down, shouting: ‘just put the flaming thing down and turn it on!’

[JB]
Ah, the glamour of show business! Let’s take a little break, Diana Gabaldon, and when we come back, we’ll talk more about all things Outlander and specifically about one of the key characters – and that is Scotland.

[DG]
Ah, absolutely.

[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 for National Trust for Scotland and click Donate.

[JB]
Welcome back to the Love Scotland podcast, and to my guest: Outlander author Diana Gabaldon. Do you realise, Diana, that tourist agencies throughout Scotland wake up each day and thank their lucky stars that you were born?!

[DG]
Well, I’m very flattered and I’m very happy that that should be the case. VisitScotland, the tourism agency, four or five years ago now I think, actually gave me a Thistle Award for my services to Scottish tourism, which they were kind enough to say had caused a 72% increase in visits to Scotland from people who had been reading and watching Outlander, which is wonderful.

[JB]
I was trying to get some figures and all I could get were that it’s been responsible for more than 5 million visits, and that’s just over the last few years, allowing for the break from COVID. Now, as you say, you’ve been showered with accolades including the National Trust for Scotland’s USA Foundation’s Great Scot award. It must be rewarding as a history lover to have played such a part in raising the profile of a place and therefore helping the heritage?

[DG]
Yes. This is not the sort of thing that you can set out to do, but to have it happen is a really wonderful thing and I’m very grateful.

[JB]
Because there are the locations. There’s Culloden Moor, there’s Glencoe and there’s a very interesting one – Preston Mill. It’s a sort of Mr Darcy moment for Jamie, who’s in the water and partially clothed. So, I can see the attraction, which is great; but on the other hand, the profile it raised helped to raise money to restore the mill itself, which is great.

[DG]
I was fascinated. Yes, this – as they call it – Outlander effect is quite amazing. Things happen that you would just never think of.

[JB]
As you spend more time in Scotland, you say that you’ve spent time on set. Have you tweaked your characterisations and your personalities to include more of the Scottish psyche?

[DG]
Oh! No, I really haven’t. I’ve got a fairly good grip, I think, on the Scottish psyche because what I did, when I was writing Outlander, I read everything I could get my hands on that was written by a Scottish person. So, I got a feeling for the rhythm and all of that. You can’t understand the language of other people without understanding quite a bit about the people themselves. I was in the habit of whenever I heard anyone with anything like a Scottish accent, going up to them and saying ‘Can I buy you a coffee? You can just talk to me!’

[JB]
I’ll remember that the next time I’m in Arizona! The books – I have to be careful with spoilers here – as they progress, they move away from Scotland. You’re now on Book 10. Is there a chance that it will come back here?

[DG]
There is a chance but, as I say, I don’t plan the books ahead of time, so I can’t tell you at the moment.

[JB]
My question about is Book 10 the last. Because if you go online, people are living in fear that Book 10 is going to be the end. Come on!

[DG]
Yes, well, I’m 71. I don’t know how long I will last. I have it in mind that Book 10 should be the last to give me a good chance of actually finishing off the series in good order, but you never know. I mean, I wrote Outlander for practice; I was never going to show it to anyone. I just needed to learn what it took to write a novel, but things happened. Here we all are! They gave me a three-book contract when my agent sold Outlander. I wrote three books and then I called my agent and I said, well, I don’t know if you’ll consider this good news or not but I’m pretty sure there is a fourth book because I can see things happening. He said, oh, that’s good news.

[JB]
Publisher falls on his knees in office and thanks their lucky stars!

[DG]
A bit like that. So, while I, at the moment, intend Book 10 to finish things off, it might not work that way. I might get further into it and think, well, this isn’t … I mean, I can’t do it. I can see much more stuff; it’s going to have to be 11. And if that happens, we’ll just deal with things when we get there.

[JB]
Is it true – I mean, this rings a bell because I’ve watched so much of you and read so many interviews – that you have the final scene in your head? Did I make that up?

[DG]
Well, I’ve actually written it, yes.

[JB]
You’ve written the final, final Outlander scene?

[DG]
Yes, which is not to say that I may not rewrite it because I fiddle constantly with stuff. The language probably will get picked at, but I know what happens, yeah. That scene doesn’t necessarily affect what comes before that.

[JB]

The newest TV season is airing on the day that this podcast is released [oh lovely!] – have you seen the entire finished product? [I have, yeah] And you’re happy with it? Oh, you’re not going to say you’re not happy with it, but does it bring an extra dimension?

[DG]
Yes, uh-huh. It’s very good. Yes, it’s one of my favourite seasons.

[JB]
What can you tell us about it without spoiling it? What are the elements that fans should look out for?

[DG]
Well, it has a lot of battles. I mean, it was being filmed during the American Revolutionary War, so naturally there are some, but I’m very fond of battle scenes both in the writing and in the filming. The filming is spectacular. This is, of course, very skilled work on the part of the television people as well as the actors, but they have all just risen to the occasion beautifully. One of my favourite episodes of this season seven is the eighth one, which has the First Battle of Saratoga. They did just a fabulous job with it as well as with the assorted characters they have. I’m not sure what you would call it … the telescoping effect is what I normally think of it as, where you need to have an overall view of things where you get the big picture and so forth, but the story is when you zero in on a person or two people or the smaller interstices and so forth, and they did just a fabulous job of both those things, so I’m very happy with that.
The fact remains that you cannot squeeze 500,000 words of fiction into 16 hours of television, and that’s one of the longer seasons. We do have an eighth season, which is under contract. It’s been re-lit, as they say, so that will get filmed and then, as I say, there’s also the prequel dealing with Jamie Fraser’s parents. So, there is more Outlander to come.

[JB]
And I’m sure the prequel regarding Jamie’s parents, that will be set in Scotland?

[DG
Yes, absolutely.

[JB]
Well, as far as you know, because as you say that imagination of yours could take you anywhere. They could go on their holidays to Bulgaria for most of their early years!

[DG]
The thing is that it’s based, at least to start with, on the earlier Jacobite risings – the 1715 and the abortive 1719, both of which did in fact happen in Scotland. So yes, most of it will be around there. On the other hand, Jacobitism as it were was a much bigger phenomenon. There were many European countries who got involved in terms of financing or political intrigue and so forth. So, as we go along, we may actually go somewhat abroad from Scotland and look at some of the things that happened between these battles that took place. There’s a lot of history before you get to a battle and a lot more afterward.

[JB]
I tell you, what you don’t know about Scottish life in the 18th century must not be worth knowing, because as I was reading the book, I was also researching a future podcast on the plague in Scotland, medieval times and beyond. I was speaking to medics, I was speaking to epidemiologists, I was speaking to historians – and I was cross-reffing with the medical information in your book of herbs and treatments, etc. You were absolutely bang on, so no wonder. How long does it take you to write a book and research it?

[DG]
Ah, it depends on how much else there is going on in my life at any given moment! Normally, it would take me three to four years to write one of the big books. I do write shorter ones but that’s a separate series dealing with Lord John Grey. He does have one book where it’s half and half Jamie Fraser and Lord John – that’s the Scottish prisoner. So, there’s a certain amount of overlap, but by and large the big books, about three to four years. Part of that is research; part of it is just it’s a very long story and my walking rate, as I call it, is about a thousand words a day. I try to hit that maybe five days a week, but things happen. I travel now much, much more than I did when I began writing, so there’s that. And there’s tending the flocks, as you might say in these days of social media. You do keep your postings up and things like that, which also takes time.
The research I do as I go along. There’s no way of doing all the research to begin with, and then starting to write the book because there’s always more you could find out and I don’t know what I need to know until I’m in the middle of the book! I sometimes come to a point and I think, well, I know what happens personally but I don’t know what was happening physically at this time in this place. So, I need to find a book about the Battle of Yorktown and read through that very carefully, so I know who was there and how it happened exactly, and what was the political background to this. And then from that, I pick what pieces serve me. There’s quite a bit of to-ing and fro-ing, and picking up stuff. My research is not very focused except in general terms – I want to know about this battle; I want to know about this place; I want to know more about Gaelic.
You’ll be happy to know that the island of Stroma actually makes a small appearance in Book 10. And that’s because we went to Orkney a few years ago as part of an exploration, you might say, with a very nice guide. We were going past Stroma and the guide was telling us about its very interesting history. No one lives there now because it’s such a god-forsaken place! He said there was no landing dock for large boats and so forth. They petitioned the government for years and finally got their dock. He said as soon as they did, the entire population walked down the dock, got into boats and they all sailed away!

[JB]
Oh dear! Well, my job is done. We have an exclusive from Book 10, Diana. I’m very much aware of the time it is in the morning and the fact you’ve already put in a shift, and you do have to get some sleep and then you do have to get up in the middle of tomorrow and write some more. So, can I ask you one last question, possibly an unfair question? What is it from this phenomenal 30-odd-year success story – the books, the TV series, the reaction, the tourists, the effect, the phenomenon – what are you most proud of?

[DG]
Hmmm … just that people like the books!

[JB]
Lovely answer, lovely answer. I shall let you get some sleep now. Diana Gabaldon, an absolute pleasure to talk to you. Fans are waiting with bated breath for whatever you do next, but it’s been a joy. Thank you for joining us on the Love Scotland podcast.

[DG]
It’s my pleasure Jackie, thank you so much.

[JB]
And if you want to walk in the footsteps of Jamie and Claire and visit the locations made famous by Outlander, whilst also learning about the real-life characters of Scotland’s past, head to the National Trust for Scotland website nts.org.uk
You’ll find plenty of facts on the Outlander fiction, and no fiction whatsoever about Scotland’s fascinating past. Don’t forget to subscribe to the Love Scotland podcast. Press the button and you’ll never miss an episode. 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.