Love Scotland podcast – Season 7

Transcript

Five voices: male voiceover [MV]; Jackie Bird [JB]; Mairi Campbell [MC]; Gerry Carruthers [GC]; second male voiceover [MV2]

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

[JB]
Hello. Today, we’re going to talk about a piece of music that’s often described as the song everybody sings but nobody really knows. Beloved in the country of its roots and tucked into the knapsacks of nostalgia of Scots who went off to make their mark on the world, it’s now a global anthem.

Its words of friendship and yearning are simple, and yet they have surpassed and outlasted far more complex depictions of these themes in other songs. It’s been performed by everyone from Beethoven to Jimi Hendrix, and its powerful poignancy has been deployed to jerk those tears in movies stretching from Charlie Chaplin to Sex and the City. I could go on giving you the song’s impressive pedigree, but instead, let’s allow the music to do the talking.

[MC]
Should auld acquaintance be forgot?
And never brought to mind?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot?
And auld lang syne.

[JB]
Wonderful. And that’s the first time one of my guests has sung their hellos! Welcome to singer and musician Mairi Campbell. That was lovely. Hello there.

[MC]
Thank you, thank you.

[JB]
Welcome to the Love Scotland podcast. Mairi has performed the song in – well, I can’t tell you how many venues and around the world, but there’s one hugely eventful performance that we’re going to talk about later. And also the fact that, Mairi, you built an entire show around the song. So, welcome to the podcast. Now, Mairi is chatting to us from Edinburgh. In the studio with me is Professor Gerry Carruthers from the University of Glasgow. Gerry, take it away!

[GC]
Hello, I’m not going to sing that, but I’m looking forward to a chat about Auld Lang Syne.

[JB]
Gerry is the editor of the Oxford University Press multi-edition of Robert Burns. Did I get that right?

[GC]
More or less.

[JB]
OK, that’s good. That’s good enough for me. Now, today we’re going to be discussing the roots and the evolution of this remarkable song. In case you didn’t know, you can see a couple of copies of the earliest versions in Robert Burns’s own hand at the National Trust for Scotland Burns Birthplace Museum in Ayrshire. Now this song, it has a complicated history. Before we pressed record on this podcast, we’re all having a bit of a ding dong about origins of various tunes and words. But before we delve into it, I would like to ask you both what I hinted at in the introduction. There are songs with similar themes. Can you both articulate what is so special, not about the song generally and why it’s become so popular globally, but what is so special to each of you? I’ll start with Mairi. If you could just sum it up?

[MC]
What’s special about this song is it seemed to attach itself to me since the 1990s, when I was surprised to even be learning it with Dave Francis, who had suggested that we learned it together in our wee band called The Cast at the time. And just how the song has grown on me and walked alongside me in my life. I’m just very grateful for the song and the mystery of what’s occurred around it and for me, in relation to my life and this song.

[JB]
Ok, Gerry?

[GC]
Well, I should say that I grew up hating this song and everything around Hogmanay, especially as a teenager, when of course Hogmanay was particularly uncool. My ears began to be opened to Auld Lang Syne by two punk rock versions. That didn’t really make me think, but it does make me think later on that what fascinates me about Auld Lang Syne is that in some ways it is a work of genius, and I guess we might discuss that. But even though it’s a work of genius, a lot of the ways in which it becomes a world song, a world anthem, has to do with a whole series of historical accidents. And ultimately, that’s what fascinates me.

[JB]
OK, well, I called it a Burns song and the world knows of it as a song by Robert Burns. That is not entirely true. Gerry, can you give us the background to it?

[GC]
Let’s work back, Jackie, from Burns. It’s certainly true that Burns makes a universal anthem when he’s working on it 1787/88. He makes it a song appropriate to an age of emigration, people parting probably never to meet again.

[JB]
But where does he find the lyrics?

[GC]
That is quite a convoluted story. We can go back all the way to the Bannatyne manuscript in 1568, which is a collection of poems and songs put together by a man who’s hiding from the plague in Edinburgh. And in there, there’s a lyric called ‘Old Kindness for yet’, and that’s the deep roots. Then when we get into the 18th century, there are a number of songs like ‘Auld lang syne my Jo’. And when Allan Ramsay, one of Burns’s great Scots language predecessors, puts together his Tea-Table Miscellany, he has a song that begins: ‘Should auld acquaintance be forgot, though they return with scars?’
And the point about that is that this is a song that comes out of the English Civil War – or the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, we should call it. It’s about comrades parting, having been in battle, perhaps coming back together and sharing a glass together. And Burns’s genius is to take that lyric, to alter it, to adapt it and make it something that in the late 18th century really rings a bell with people, because that’s the beginning of the agricultural revolution, all kinds of dislocation, people emigrating, etc etc.

But there are many, many songs, both in terms of the tune and the lyric, that are a bit like that, including a whole body of Jacobite songs, because Burns is into Jacobitism and the notion of the Jacobites having to go their separate ways and hopefully come back one day and pick up the cause again. All these resonances are in there. So lyrically, it’s very complicated and part of Burns’s genius is he likes that. So that when he puts it together for the Scots Musical Museum in the first instance, for one of his song editors James Johnson, he says, ‘I took this down from an old man singing it’ and he signs it Z. Z in the Scots Musical Museum is where Burns is indicating that he’s collected it. Some of the material is pre-existing, but he is the man who makes it into a new lyric, so it is a Burns song.

[JB]
Mairi, what about the music? The melody that you delightfully sang for us there, that’s not the original, is it?

[MC]
No, it’s not the original. From what I understand, he learned this tune from the old man or, as you say, maybe it’ll have been an existing traditional tune no doubt, because that’s what he generally used for his lyrics. And then he took the song to his publishers. Publisher suggested they changed the tune to the one we know today. But what I am unsure about is exactly where that original melody came from. Gerry, I believe that maybe you do know it. It’s got a name – ‘A Miller’s Tale’, you said? That’s the first I’ve heard of it. That’s really interesting. I did wonder if there was a connection to Beethoven, because when I listened to that tune, I think it’s quite Beethoven-y. [De-dum-de-dum-di dah-dee] There’s a grandeur about it. I have wondered.

[JB]
You’re nodding …

[GC]
Beethoven does a setting for Thompson, so you’re spot on with that, Mairi. And the other thing, which I don’t need to tell a singer like your good self, is that these tunes in some ways can’t be pinned down definitively. Burns offers two tunes to Thompson, and one of the ones that he offers to Thompson, he thinks isn’t up to much – and that’s the one that’s come back into vogue via the folk or trad revival.

[JB]
Well, let me stop you there, because we have Mairi singing again. This is a recording of it, and this is the original tune that Burns … and the word that I researched was he said it was mediocre. Hmm. See what you think.

[MC]
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And never brought to mind?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And auld lang syne?

For auld lang syne, my jo
For auld lang syne
We’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet
For auld lang syne.

Now, I don’t think there’s anything mediocre about that. I think that fits the words perfectly. I think there’s a melancholy about that.

[GC]
Yes, and Mairi sings it gorgeously. Notoriously, Robert Burns’s tutor John Murdoch said he had a tin ear, and maybe occasionally he did, to think that that tune could be discarded. It’s a wee bit of a mystery why Burns didn’t think all that highly of it, but at that time, Burns is working through several dozen folk tunes, several dozen lyrics. He’s obsessed with the whole thing, and he hasn’t quite worked it all through.

[JB]
You say that he was sending his work to his publisher. What were those manuscripts used for? What was that fledgling music industry in those days?

[GC]
Well, he gets together with James Johnson for a collection called the Scots Musical Museum, which begins 1787 and goes on until after Burns’s death. Burns sets himself a kind of mission. He wants to collect and even restore what he fears might be the soon-forgotten musical heritage of Scotland. So, he’s a man on a mission, and he’s very quickly writing lyrics, adapting them to tunes. He doesn’t write tunes, really, yet he will suggest new tunes, he’ll take tunes that he knows, fiddle tunes, dance tunes, etc etc, strathspeys. And he’s rapidly sending this to James Johnson.

A few years later, by the early 1790s, he’s working with a second editor, George Thomson, who often gets a bum rap from Burnsians because they say, oh, he’s the man that makes it all classical, working with Beethoven and all these guys. The truth is that actually those drawing room settings in some ways historically are more authentic. And it’s later on we become more folksy, especially after jazz, especially after rock music, the 60s. Modern trad music tends to prefer some of the pared-down arrangements, the simple arrangements that we have with the James Johnson settings. But actually, I’ll let you into a wee secret: both the trad stuff and the classical stuff are brilliant. I’m glad we’ve got both … and the punk rock versions.

[JB]
Well, Mairi, you are a classical musician; you’re also a traditional musician. What do the various melodies evoke for you, and how do they do it?

[MC]
Good question. I have played the Beethoven and the Haydn arrangements of Auld Lang Syne and it’s nice to hear you say, Gerry, that you appreciate both of them and that’s right. It’s fascinating how both tunes have accommodated their times that they met.

The classical music is interesting one – lots of de de dee da da da da, little counterpoints – drawing room music, I would say. As a dance band player as well, having played 30 years of playing at New Year’s Eve with the ceilidh band at Hogmanay, everyone’s full, they form a circle: ladies and gentlemen, take your hands please for Auld Lang Syne. If I went into the original version of Auld Lang Syne at that point, there would be an uproar in the room as I meander through 5 verses! And so, in fact, at one point, we did that once upon a time. And somebody had said, well, I want your version because it’s your version. And I said, are you sure? And they said, Oh yes, oh aye. So we did it, sang it. But somebody came and complained. They were awfully put out because they couldn’t get the chance to run in and out and up and down and make a big hoo hah. So, I just think they both have their place.

[GC]
It’s a funny thing, isn’t it, about the most familiar version. I think we’ve all suffered a wee bit from Auld Lang Syne tune fatigue. We’ve all got a bit fed up with it, and that’s part of the reason that the less popular tune has recently become more popular. But if you go back to the more standard tune, it’s interesting to note of course that’s the one that features in films. And even though it’s more jaunty, very often it will be counterpointed with sad scenes. It’s been used, as Mairi says, for people to go a bit riotous after the bells. But at the same time, Wee Willie Winkie or whatever it’s sung in that most popularly known tune, but counterpointed with a sad scene.

[JB]
That’s Shirley Temple’s rendition in the movie Wee Willie Winkie, I think that’s 1937 or something like that, but not a dry eye in the house. Let’s talk about money. I take it Burns would have been paid for his work, but in terms of royalties for this song, who gets the royalties?

[GC]
No one, because it’s essentially out of copyright. It’s probably the second most sung song in the world after Happy Birthday. But it was a matter of pride for Burns when he was compiling the material for the Scots Musical Museum that he would not accept a penny. This was a man on a mission.

[JB]
Oh, he didn’t get paid? There are good decisions in your career, and there are bad decisions in your career. But not only that, he died before it really became popular.

[GC]
Yeah, it would have been a mystery to Burns perhaps, the extent to which the song went viral, went worldwide. He’s never entirely happy with it. He does two different versions for the Scots Musical Museum. He’s tinkering with it in letters to people like his confidante Mrs Dunlop, and he’s havering on about it to George Thompson before sending him material. Very often with Burns, with songs, with poems even, there are outtakes, there are extended versions; there’s things he might have put on the album! He’s a creative artist who doesn’t necessarily pin things down, and one of the problems of the Burns movement very often is both the man and the work they want certainty. Burns himself quite likes a lack of certainty, and some of that isn’t anything other than his creative development and uncertainty as he goes through the years.

[JB]
Well, you said that he did write about it to Mrs Dunlop, his patron. He wrote in 1788 and he asks her ‘is not the Scotch phrase auld lang syne, exceedingly expressive’, and added that ‘as an avid collector of traditional Scottish music and song that had thrilled through my soul’. He knew there was a bit of magic there. Mairi, when you’re performing it, do you perform all the verses?

[MC]
Yes, yes, I do the five verses. Think of it as two friends speaking to each other in a bar over a drink and when you think of it like that, it’s good.

We twa hae run about the braes, remembering the old days
And pou'd the gowans fine;
But we’ve wander’d mony a weary fit,
Sin’ auld lang syne.

We twa hae paidl’d in the burn,
Frae morning sun till dine;
But seas between us braid hae roar’d
Sin’ auld lang syne.

Yeah, it’s a beautiful song to sing all 5 verses.

[JB]
And in terms of those words, let’s take the easy bit first … or is it! ‘Auld Lang Syne’, what does it mean?

[GC]
It’s almost impossible to translate.

[JB]
So not the easy bit first!

[GC]
Not the easy bit. It’s become a bit in the brain that no one can say precisely what it means, but it means something like ‘since days of old’. But clearly, it’s more emotionally charged than that, and the phrase itself has become almost a standalone trope or metaphor or thing that defines a state.

[JB]
Mairi?

[MC]
Well, it’s funny because it has been explored and it means, as far as I am aware, ‘time since past’. In When Harry Met Sally, there’s a lovely scene in it when he talks about Auld Lang Syne. What does it mean? What does this song mean anyway? Should auld acquaintance be forgot? Does that mean we should forget all the acquaintances? Or does it mean if we happen to forget them, we should remember them? Well, maybe it just means we should remember that we forgot them! Well, anyway, I love that, because actually a lot of people don’t know.

[JB]
It must confuse the living daylights out of a lot of people who are not actually conversant in Burns and 18th century.

[GC]
It does, if they think about it, but both the lyric and both tunes – certainly the most popular tune – they’ve become kind of like memes. They’ve become things that people relate to as a whole. They don’t necessarily need to know what it means in any detail. The lyric itself is all about big human nature and big universal nature – seas and the landscape and so on. And those are the buttons that really pushes. And then some of the particular stuff about ‘willie waulks’ and so on, people just sing that – it gives it a wee bit of novelty, and it doesn’t take too much trouble to work out what those things literally mean. People don’t need to know that if they’re singing it and they’re charging their glasses and toasting one another; it’s all in there. It’s a brilliantly immediate song and lyric in all kinds of ways.

[MC]
I agree. I think the language is confusing and a lot of folk don’t understand it, which we’ve made a bit of a humorous point out of. And it comes back to, Gerry, when you were saying about in the Burns societies and that element of Burns, you have a sense that you ought to know what it’s all about. You should know and people hide the fact that they don’t really know. But when you bring that out like in my show Auld Lang Syne, which is a little music theatre show, I really make a point of that, of really not understanding because I didn’t understand what the words meant. I didn’t. I had to say today, if you know, what does ‘ye’ll be your pint-stowp’ actually mean?

[JB]
What does that mean?

[MC]
Well, it means ‘you buy your pint and I’ll buy mine’.

[JB]
How Scottish!

[MC]
I know. And then I was like, what does ‘a richt gude-willie waught’ mean, and what’s a willie waught? And he said it’s not a richt-gude willie waught. It’s a richt gude-willie waught. And it means goodwill. We’ll take a deep drink or draught of goodwill. And then he was like, I would be singing pooled and Dave says don’t say pooled, you should say poooooooled.

[GC]
And of course, the willie waught is about toasting one another. It’s not meanness per se. It’s like you both invest in getting the drink for each other as a token of friendship, as a token of love. The whole song is, as we keep saying, about love, about friendship. It’s the worldwide anthem of friendship, if not of love itself.

[JB]
Let’s take a break. That’s a good point to take a break when we talk about the worldwide fame of it. But before we do, can I just ask, was it immediately popular? Did it storm to the top of the Georgian Hit Parade?

[GC]
No, it didn’t. It was a fairly obscure text sent by Burns to Johnson, and it sits there somewhat inert until Thompson gets his hands on it. And actually, it begins to take off probably about the 1820s in any real meaningful way, because that’s when Burns becomes more respectable than he’d been. That’s when his music begins to be much more received in the European romantic context. So, it’s a slow burner.

[JB]
And he’s long gone, as I said. Let’s take a break. We have a homegrown song. It’s getting a bit of a following. When we come back, we’ll talk about how that following went global and why.

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

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

[JB]
Welcome back to the podcast. I’m joined by singer and musician Mairi Campbell and, from the University of Glasgow, Burns scholar Professor Gerry Carruthers. Gerry, when did Auld Lang Syne begin to go global and why?

[GC]
Part of the reason is from about the 1810s, the 1820s, people are looking at Burns as a writer who has been set in his songs by the likes of Beethoven and Haydn, as we’ve said, and it’s quite difficult to trace exactly what’s going on. But at some point, this has to do with empire; it has to do with the Anglophone world as well as Europe. We have it taking off somewhat in America, so that we know by the time of the American Civil War, it’s very much seen as a song that is associated with home. And indeed, for a time, the Union side in the Civil War, the bands aren’t allowed to play it, and it’s finally struck up again …

[JB]
Why aren’t they allowed to play it?

[GC]
There’s a kind of fear – it’s strange – but there’s a fear that this will make the troops too homesick and not be concentrating on the cause. When the Confederates finally surrender, that’s one of the first tunes that struck up, Auld Lang Syne. The idea is you can all go home now. We know that by that time in the United States, partly but not exclusively due to the expat Scots community, Auld Lang Syne has got a real coinage. It’s got a real popularity. That, and also from about the 1820s/1830s in Europe, we know that people are appreciating it. Those are two strands.

And also, obviously enough in Scotland, it’s taking on more and more momentum through the 19th century as the Burns cult develops.

[JB]
Mairi, do we know when it was first associated with Hogmanay?

[MC]
Well, I wonder if it was to do with Guy Lombardo at this point, the Canadian–Italian bandleader who had a band called the Royal Canadians and he was doing great and he was working down in New York. They asked him if he had something he could bring to Hogmanay, and he arranged the version of Auld Lang Syne that he was familiar with from his hometown in Ontario, which had been settled by Scots. And he arranged it, and they played it in New York. And it’s one that became recorded on television in 1950s, I think before that, from 1929, I think it was in the radio. But it really became a fixture, a Hogmanay fixture – beautiful arrangement that the band did. For at least 30 years, that was a regular. I think that’s when it really became a fixture. Would you say that?

[JB]
Gerry, can you add to that?

[GC]
Yes. I think Mairi’s spot on. There’s a wee bit of happenstance. It’s partly Guy Lombardo; it’s partly the fact that it’s in circulation in North America anyway. And then the fact that, really more than anyone, Guy Lombardo’s dance band brings that together with Hogmanay celebrations in the age of radio, the age of TV, Times Square.

In many ways, this is a song that has to do with the new media, and that’s what propels it worldwide.

[JB]
Is it the case, though? Again, so many urban myths surrounding it, that one of the main sponsors of the radio show back in 1929, the Hogmanay show, was Robert Burns Panatelas. And that’s what gave him the idea to use Auld Lang Syne.

[GC]
That might or might not be true.

[JB]
This is Gerry’s nice way of saying you’re havering, which is another good Scots word that’s probably included in Burns history.

[GC]
I think it’s just the genesis and the ongoing fame and the increasing fame of Auld Lang Syne. It’s covered in all kinds of unknowable bits, and we know that culture often works like this. You know how do football fans all suddenly learn the same chant? How do they know to do that together? Auld Lang Syne is something the same. There’s about 200 different routes that underlie its popularity and its transmission. That’s one of the things that makes it quite wonderful. That’s one of the things that makes it a phenomenon.

[JB]
It was also used as a bit of background music in a Charlie Chaplin film, in The Gold Rush, and that’s back in 1925. Guy Lombardo took it and ran with it in terms of Hogmanay ,but it had been associated because that was a New Year scene then. And it’s the sentimentality, Mairi, isn’t it? It’s the old and the new. It just fits New Year.

[MC]
It fits New Year and it fits the marking of the end of something, the marking of the end of a gathering, the marking of the end of the year, the closing of something. It’s played in Japan in shopping stores at the end of every single day of the year to let the customer know that the establishment will soon be closing. I think having a song which marks a closing, you don’t need that many. Maybe there’s something about that one where people go, well, that’ll do, and they’ve somehow, just like Gerry’s saying, it’s gathered its own momentum.

[JB]
But I can understand it catching on in the English-speaking world. But it’s big in Japan. It’s been translated into Arabic and Czech, Esperanto, Maori, Russian, Swahili, Urdu, Vietnamese, and it goes on and on and on. What is the power of the song that has enabled that to happen?

[GC]
One of the things simply has to do with the medium, and that is the fact that all of those places you’ve just mentioned Jackie are hearing the song on the radio. So, even without understanding the lyric or having the lyric somewhat explained to them, we’ve got the tune pushing those buttons. Not because they absolutely push those buttons, but because it has gone viral through the age of radio.

It’s also the case that in places like Soviet Russia, Burns becomes more and more a poet of the people. And it’s also the case that vary widely across the world – in Asia, in North America and Europe – Burns has that association as a poet of the people and therefore his oeuvre is consumed. It’s published, it’s re-published and all these things have come together in a way that’s very difficult to pin down. So that becomes, as we keep saying, the world anthem that it becomes.

[JB]
Now, Mairi, as I said, you’ve performed it countless times, including one very special event. I’ll let you tell the story … and don’t skimp on the name dropping.

[MC]
Well, yes. So, the recording that I mentioned that Dave and I first made in 1993 was made on a tape and off it went into the world in 1993. About six years later in 1999, we got a call from the producers on the Presidential Lifetime Achievements Award in America who were asking us if we would come to sing Auld Lang Syne for Sean Connery’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

It came out the blue, but apparently one of the producers had our tape in her car and the production team were trying to figure out, shall we honour Sean Connery’s James Bond story, or shall we go with the Scottish one? And so it was between myself and Shirley Bassey, apparently.

[JB]
You’re indistinguishable, you two!

[MC]
Yes, there’s another name-drop: Shirley Bassey. Anyway, in the end they chose us and so we were invited to this grand event. It was quite an extraordinary weekend. I was slightly in No Man’s Land or No Woman’s Land, maybe. My mother had only died just six weeks before that, and my baby was 8 months old. And so we were in this maelstrom of living life, at this particular juncture. And then on top of that came this event: fly out to Washington, sing this song. It was really thrilling. And Sean Connery was there. And George Clooney and Stevie Wonder and Bill Clinton, among many, many others. It was an A List celebrity moment.

[JB]
And am I allowed to remind you? Yes, you’re nodding. You forgot the words.

[MC]
Correct, correct. It all was a bit, went a bit over. It was too much; it was a wee bit too much and my professional holding evaporated in the moment. Just one of those real things that that you get, which I wasn’t expecting because I’m not someone that tends to have nerves really. But once I was on that stage, the producers had said just sing the first verse and the last verse and that was fine.

But what I did was I went into verse three, ‘We twa hae run about the braes, And pou’d the gowans fine’. And as I spoke those words, this great black tunnel came towards me and I knew I was going to lose the words. I knew it. I could feel it. I just lost it.

But I kept singing. Of course I had to make it up. I had to make all the words up, and I was in the middle of the chorus. Who doesn’t know the Auld Lang Syne chorus? Auld lang syne, my Jo; for auld lang syne. And I’m off on these little meanderings – making it all up!

[JB]
The joy of old Scots. The fact that you were in America and few people knew, but yeah, like a trooper!

[MC]
I had two things happen to me that helped me through that moment and probably only lasted for 30 seconds. But 30 seconds is a long time when you’re in that space. First thing was keep singing. They don’t understand the words anyway, right? And then the second thing that happened was there was this voice that came from somewhere. And it was like the voice of my mother, and I do think it actually was. And she was saying fling out your arms and feel your feet; feel your feet, fling out your arms. It was so much for me, so I did that. I opened my body up and I threw my arms out. And I felt my feet and I just saved myself and came back. The words came back. Dave meanwhile, bless him, was still playing the old chords. He just kept going and I finally hooked back into what was required.

[JB]
But isn’t that lovely of your mum and how she helped you through, and no one did notice. You went down a storm. Let me move on a few years because there was someone in the audience who was going to take your performance of that song and run with it. Tell me about that.

[MC]
Matthew Broderick was one of the presenters that night and his wife is Sarah Jessica Parker. So, another 10 years. You see, every 10 years we get a good gig. We get one of those fancy gigs, actually a little bit over 10 years since the last one …

[JB]
Anyone listening to this – you can contact Mary on …

[MC]
We’re ready! Back in 2008, Sarah Jessica Parker’s production team for the show for Sex and the City: The Movie contacted us and said we’ve got your song in a queue. It might be used, we’re not sure. But just to let you know, it might be happening.

And that was in about September. And then the following spring we saw the film was being launched in London and everybody was there. It was a red carpet affair, but we hadn’t heard anything at that point so we weren’t sure. I phoned up the record company and I said, oh, by the way, any idea what’s going on? And they said your song’s in the movie, so that was amazing. That was amazing. So after that there was a whole, it all worked out beautifully. It was all great, but it was a surprise. It was a surprise but a very nice surprise.

[JB]
Well, I’ve spoken to artists in my time who have also been told that their song’s been chosen to be in a movie, and they’ve paid their money, they’ve got their popcorn and they sat down – and it’s either not made the final cut or there’s a line of it in the background. You got, what, 3½ minutes? Was it almost 3½ minutes? It’s a pivotal point in the movie and it’s your version. And I suppose not only the brilliance of your version, Mary, but the fact that it was fitting for the most emotional pivot point of that movie.

Gerry, you’ve studied not only the Burnsian scholar bit of this, but also which of its uses in a movie, in a song or whatever, has most enhanced its fame?

[GC]
I think it’s quite portable in a lot of ways, Jackie. It becomes a kind of filmic trope, and you see this in the Chaplin Gold Rush film. You see it in It’s a Wonderful Life where it’s played where the individual at that point is outside the circle and it’s calling them back in. And it works every time. And without lambasting directors and producers and writers of film, I would say it’s quite a cheap right to do that. And it works because it’s part of this universal worldwide vocabulary of culture.

So, it’s a very easy thing to do in a sense, but also because it helps anchor New Year. You see Charlie Chaplin in The Gold Rush, where, as I say, he’s outside the circle. And the idea is let’s bring you back into the love, let’s bring you back into the light. And that’s almost always the way in which it’s used. So, this is a repeated trope that does genuinely tug on the heartstrings, but at the same time it’s a bit of a cliche in terms of filmic language I would suggest.

[JB]
The Internet means, of course, that the music industry has changed and much more fragmented. There are and will be fewer – there will still be global music superstars – pieces of universally known music because we can all make our choices now. Will Auld Lang Syne sustain? I’ll ask you both. Gerry, you go first.

[GC]
Yes, I think it absolutely will because the essential structures of festivity of both the Burns Supper, which is something we get a lot, Hogmanay – while these things endure, Auld Lang Syne will remain one of the great world hits. I don’t think there’s any possibility unless society and culture change radically worldwide that will lose its place, he said confidently.

[JB]
We could be doing with a bit of the sentiment of the song, that’s for sure. Mairi, what do you think?

[MC]
Yeah, I agree. I don’t think it’s going to go anywhere unless it’s banned …

[JB]
… or cancelled! Why would they cancel Auld Lang Syne?

[MC]
No, I think it’s like Gerry says, the societal things are in place. It has its place in our events that we like to hold. Yeah, I think it’s here to stay as well.

[JB]
Well, let’s hope so. Something that the world can share. And the theme of friendship is a good note on which to end. Mairi Campbell, thank you for your words and your music. And thanks to Professor Gerry Carruthers.

And just to mention that this is the last edition of the podcast in the series. We’ll be back again very soon. In the meantime, why not visit the Burns Birthplace Museum, which has more than 5,000 artefacts, including those Auld Lang Syne manuscripts. You can get details of opening times on our website at nts.org.uk and that’s also where you’ll find details of the Your Scotland campaign.

Now, the National Trust for Scotland is a charity and if you’d like to make a donation, we’d be very grateful. It’ll help ensure your Scotland, whether it’s your heritage or your wild places, from manuscripts to mountains, continue to be cared for, for generations to come. That’s all from me. Until next time, goodbye.

[MC]
We’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet,

For auld lang syne
And here’s a hand, my trusty fere!

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.

For auld lang syne, my jo,
For auld lang syne
We’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet,
For auld lang syne.

Transcript

Seven voices: male voiceover [MV]; Jackie Bird [JB]; Ciaran Hatsell [CH]; Alex Deakin [AD] courtesy of the Met Office; second male voiceover [MV2]; female visitor [V1]; male visitor [V2]

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

[JB]
If you’re a fan of wildlife documentaries, then I suggest you switch off your TV and make your way immediately to St Abb’s Head National Nature Reserve, where you can experience the real thing. St Abbs on the Berwickshire coast is nature’s Netflix, offering a rolling array of wildlife dramas amid this stunning landscape.

Earlier this year, you might remember we visited during the frenzied seabird nesting season, and now we’re back to enjoy another burst of new life. For a few weeks during November and December, thousands of grey seals take over the beaches here to give birth to their pups. The steep cliffs at St Abb’s Head means that the seals can give birth safely away from human interference, while at the same time allowing us to get amazing views.

As ever at St Abb’s, I’m in the capable hands of Head Ranger Ciaran Hatsell.

[CH]
Hi, Jackie. How are you getting on?

[JB]
Now I have to confess, Ciaran, we have moved away from the coast because it’s blowing a gale and the hailstones were horizontal.

[CH]
Yeah, I think it was a good choice. It’s great to have you back, Jackie. Welcome back to St Abb’s Head … and I love ‘nature’s Netflix’. I’m definitely going to steal that!

[JB]
You can have it with my blessing! We were down at the coast a few minutes ago and we had a bird’s eye view of the seals. I suppose I meant what I said in the introduction: it is like watching a nature programme, but they’re right in front of you.

[CH]
It’s absolutely incredible. What we see here is everything. We see life, we see death, we see drama, and it unfolds right in front of you. The longer you watch a grey seal colony, the more it’s like EastEnders. At this time of year, we’ve got lovely tiny white pups that have just been born and they’re suckling from their mothers.

[JB]
They look all furry. Is it fur? What have they got on their skin?

[CH]
The white fur is called lanugo – that’s the technical name for it – and it’s extremely good at insulating. It’s like having 10 woolly jumpers on. They’re really, really amazing fibres. When a seal pup’s born, it weighs about 14 or 15kg. So, it’s already pretty big, already pretty chunky. In just three weeks that pup will treble in weight, so it’ll go from about 14/15 to 45kg. They are experts at piling on the pounds. They make me quite jealous actually, this time of year, because you feel a bit like that in the winter, don’t you?! Eat more biscuits and cake and stuff because it’s just colder. That’s just survival! And that’s exactly what the grey seals are doing. Being as fat as you can for a grey seal pup is the most important order of the day.

[JB]
The small beach that I can see, because we’re actually nestled in a car just now, but the windows are open. We can see the beach that we’ve just visited, a small bay. We’re getting about 25 feet I suppose from the nearest. So, we’re not disturbing them, but we’re getting that great view. How many mums and pups were there? Paint that picture for me.

[CH]
On the beach in front of us, we’ve got around 20 females that have pups with them. In amongst that, we have a few bulls as well. The bulls are bigger, darker; they’ve got bigger, much lazier. If you visit a seal colony, you’ll see a lot of sleeping. That sleeping is actually really vital – the energy conservation can save their life. So, an extra nap can really have a big impact.

Like you said before, you know you can get really amazing views. Just here at the Head we have the coastal footpath that runs right alongside these rookeries. That’s what we call a pupping area – it’s a rookery. Now, it’s our role as rangers here – I’ve got a small team of rangers – and it’s our job to do what we can to protect nature and provide a safe space for it, but also to share that with people as well. And that can be a really difficult balance to get right.

A really key message when you come at this time of year is just give them space. When you look at a colony, you want to see them behaving naturally. You want to see pups feeding, you want to see them relaxing, you want to see everything that a grey seal colony brings, that’s all you want to see. You don’t want to see them raising their heads. If you see them raising their heads and looking at you, it means they’ve noticed you and it’s time to take a step back. That’s really, really important. You can get incredible views if you bring binoculars, but at some of these beaches, you don’t even need them.

A really key part of our role is daily patrols. Just this morning we had a seal that had flopped up onto the path, right into the middle of the footpath. And so we do these early morning daily patrols and just shimmy them back onto the beach. People see these fluffy white helpless things laid on the beach and think we need to help this. It’s human instinct to want to help and protect, especially when they cry. Because when they cry for milk, they sound oddly like a human baby. It’s quite eerie.

These are really fiercely independent animals. At 3 weeks old, they are left by the females. The females have lost half their body weight. They head out to sea and the pup moults that white coat, first waterproof coat, and it’s a baptism of fire. It’s straight into the North Sea. That’s why being as fat as you can for a seal is so important, because there’s a time lag between leaving the beach as a blimp, a big barrel of a seal, and learning to become an efficient predator.

[JB]
Tell me about the mothers. Let’s break it down. But before we do, can I get my producer who’s sitting in the back of the 4x4 – I think the machine’s getting wet, so let’s put the engine on. And what we’ll do is we’ll close the windows. I feel we’re cheating! We’re doing something about the great outdoors when we’re sitting in a car, but the back of my head is now wet!

[CH]
We’re getting a bad reputation!

[JB]
Yeah, it’s not exactly a great adventure! Tell me about the mothers then; tell me about the females.

[CH]
The female comes ashore. She can weigh up to 200kg, so she’ll come ashore just before she pups, and they nearly always give birth at night. I’ve worked with seals for about 12 years now, and I’ve only seen a handful of births, so it’s quite rare to actually see them being born; it nearly always happens at night and it happens incredibly quickly.

[JB]
That’s incredible, isn’t it.

[CH]
It’s pretty remarkable. I’ve been watching them and I’ve always … There’s a few times where I’ve picked out females that look uncomfortable and they’re shuffling around on the beach and you think this is definitely going to blow, this is going to pop. And I’ll watch it for hours and hours and hours and nothing. And then next morning there’s a brand new pup lying there. If you are lucky enough to see them being born, the process is incredible. I mean, it comes out really quickly. The pup will fight its way out the sack and straight away the female is nuzzling the pup, and the pup turns around and nuzzles the female. That scent bonding is really, really important. It’s a really vital part of the bonding process for mother and pup.

Generally, she’ll just have one. One is more than enough. The life will be sucked out of her – she can lose up to half her body weight. She starts at up to 200kg; she could be under 100 by the time that three weeks has ended.

[JB]
And how long is the gestation period? How long has it been?

[CH]
Well, this is a really cool thing about seals. Grey seals are able to do what very few animals on the planet are able to do; there are around 130 mammals in the world that do this – and it’s called delayed implantation. Basically, grey seals have got a nine-month gestation period but they fit it into a year’s gap. So, the egg’s fertilised, the females stop it developing – they keep it inside them but it does not implant. It’s the blastocyst stage, that’s what it’s called. They keep it inside them, and in the new year they’ll take cues from the water temperature, from the environment, from food source – things that are beyond our perception because they’re much more intelligent in the natural sense than us. And they’ll choose basically when to get pregnant.

Now, this sounds like a crazy tactic, but what that does in this colonial style of breeding, where the females want to mate with the biggest, baddest bulls that have the best genes, it enables them to do it all while they’re all in one place for a very short time.

So, the female’s got a hell of a few weeks. She’ll give birth to a pup, she’ll have the life sucked out of her, and then she’ll get basically accosted by a huge bull. Watching the mating process is really interesting. Sometimes it’s incredibly delicate – there are gentle nibbles, gentle scratches – and sometimes it’s really, really rough. The bull can look almost double her size. The bull seals can weigh up to 300kg; they’re absolutely monsters.

[JB]
And they’re already lying in wait, because another of the bays we stopped at, there were lots of females and lots of pups, and just a great big bull, as you said earlier, flopped down at the bar, biding his time for these poor, poor females. As soon as the pups have gone and they’re depleted, he will pounce.

They’re living cheek by jowl. We saw a couple of the females having a bit of a slap of each other. Is that fairly common?

[CH]
When the females are fighting, all they’re trying to do is defend that really small territory for the pups. Space is at a premium on the beaches. This really small beach is really at its capacity. Normally, we’d only have about a handful of pups on there – and there are 20 pups on there. So, space becomes really important. And the pups, to their own detriment, are often very curious. They’ll flop around, especially when they’re weaned, and explore and get into bother and try and suckle off other females and just cause absolute carnage.

But the females will often defend their pup with their life. Sometimes they’ll grab other pups that have strayed into their small territory. And that means that the females will sometimes have squabbles and fights. It’s posturing. They’ll open their mouths, they’ll snarl at each other, they’ll flap the flippers.

They’re incredibly agile and graceful creatures in the sea; that’s where they’re most at home. You’ll see people in some spots diving with them. They’re really curious, they feel at home. Whereas on land, same as penguins, they’re just so clumsy, they flop around – everything looks like an effort. When they move up the beaches, it’s just ridiculous. They’ll use their flippers and their mouths to gesture and posture at each other. And that’s how they communicate because they’re very limited in their arsenal; whereas in the water, they’re just like ballerinas of the sea. They’re really, really graceful.

[JB]
They’re certainly ungainly on land. I wish people could see the joy in your eyes when you talk about the seals, because it’s clearly a number of thriving colonies here. But we’re recording this late November 2023 and almost to the day, two years ago, at this very spot, it was all so very different.

[AD]
Storm Arwen is hitting the UK on Friday night and it’s prompted a rare Met Office Red warning for the strength of the winds across the coastal strip of eastern Scotland and northeast England. The storm is heading steadily … [fades out]

[CH]
So, Storm Arwen hit on 27 November 2021. I remember it very well. We were able to be in a unique position here to get a count in just before the storm hit.

[AD]
It’s an unusual wind direction as well, bringing in some very large and dangerous waves, likely to be some coastal damage, along with structural damage from these kind of winds and the likelihood of power issues … [fades out]

[CH]
We had a Red weather warning that was forecast just into the afternoon. We were just returning from doing a count. We woke up in the morning and saw carnage like I’ve never seen before. When you work in conservation, you get completely hardened to death. It’s part of life; on a seabird or a seal colony, it’s completely normal, but seeing it on that scale was massively hard hitting.

We lost in that one storm – we did a count before and after – we lost 42% of all the pups, so it was 849 pups in that one storm. There were piles of bodies in the water all the way up the jetty on the beaches. There were strand lines of dead seal pups. Seal pups that had weaned, 3–4 weeks old and they were ready to go into the sea, and the turbulence and the strength of the storm just unfortunately saw them drowned and bashed against the rocks and perished.

It was really hard to see and to witness. But actually it was a really important point in time. These turbulent winter storms are going to become more common. It’s going to affect seals. It’s going to affect seabirds. Some of the seabirds are displaced by turbulent winter storms and they are becoming more regular. So, it’s going to have an impact and it’s something that we have to become resilient to and the animals are going to have to get used to.

However, on the flip side of that, it’s really nice to have a success story in conservation. We’re often scrabbling around for something positive. We do end up talking about death, whether it’s bird flu or massive storms and losing all these seals, and what we saw the year after …

[JB]
Because let’s remember that the females have one pup, so you didn’t know what was going to happen in subsequent years.

[CH]
No. We talked about the breeding process. As soon as the females have weaned the pup, they’re ready to mate, they’re ready to go. We had lots of questions about whether there would be a reduction in the pupping rate because we didn’t know whether they’d had that chance to meet up with the bulls and actually carry out the mating process.
The next year, 2022, fast forward another year. We did another count and we had, I think, it was 15 more than the year before previously, so 15 more pups. And we were absolutely chuffed. There were so many questions around it and we just needed answers – and we did the count, and life found a way.

We’ve no idea what the process, what the mechanism was. They must have met up in the water. They must have found a way to meet up, maybe at the moulting sites. And yes, we had more pups. Certainly, this year we’ve just carried out our very first count. We’re in the middle of the count process at the moment, but the numbers look promising. We’ve had over 1,700 pups in our first count which is really, really close to what we had two years ago, pre-storm. So, it looks really good.

As I said, these positive conservation stories are so hard to find, and we’ve got to really grasp to them. Going back to 2007, there was no seal colony here. It’s a basically a pop-up seal colony in the space of around 15 years.

[JB]
I like that! I’m going to nick that – a pop-up seal colony. And what does the health of the seal colony here tell us about the bigger picture of marine life?

[CH]
Grey seals, and seabirds to an extent as well, are what we would call biological indicators. They’re relatively easy to study because they come ashore and pup. So, we’re able to count them and they are indicators of the wider health of the habitat in the wider ecosystem. Grey seals are the apex predator: they are #1, they are top of the food chain here. The fact there are so many is a really positive sign for the wider ecosystem because there is enough food to sustain them.

Not everyone likes seals. Historically, there have been culls in the past, going back to the 1960s and 70s.

[JB]
They’re protected now, aren’t they?

[CH]
They are protected. Seals are protected under the Marine Scotland Act; they’re afforded legal protection. But it’s just in the 60s and 70s, it’s not that long ago this is happening. Those culls were sanctioned on this stretch of coast, and there were thousands and thousands taken. What we’re likely seeing here is a bit of resurgence from the historical dip that the cull brought around.

A good way to explain it is that because a lot of the locals, the fishermen, a lot of people generally, a lot of fishing community around the UK and beyond, they really don’t like seals because they see them as an extremely voracious predator. And they are! They are that. I think an analogy that I sometimes use is that if you were stuck on a hill and snowed in for two weeks, and you knew that you were going to get out after two weeks and you had a finite supply of food, you wouldn’t go in the fridge on the first day and eat the entire contents because you’d have nothing left. That’s not how ecosystems work. Grey seals will take what they need to survive.

[JB]
What do they eat mainly?

[CH]
It’s a really varied diet. They do eat a lot of fish, but it will be whatever is most seasonally abundant. So, when the mackerel are running, they’ll eat a lot of mackerel. When there’s herring around, they’ll eat a lot of herring. Sand eels are the best source of food for seabirds and seals, so sand eels are the number one. That’s what we want to see them eating. Protecting our oceans is something that we can try and do to have a very positive impact for seals and seabirds going forward.

[JB]
That’s a lovely, optimistic note on which to take a quick break. And when we get back, we’ll check up on some of the other winter inhabitants enjoying the glory of St Abbs.

[MV2]
You need to smell the flowers, said my bro. Turns out wild heather works just as well. We were up Ben Lomond like mountain goats. Couldn’t believe it was so close to home. At the top though, life was a million miles away, so we signed up to help look after it. We all need looking after.

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

[JB]
Welcome back to Love Scotland. Now, last time we spoke in the summer, Ciaran, you were experiencing the early stages of a late bird flu outbreak. Tell us what happened.

[CH]
We were thinking we got away with it. Bird flu hit St Abb’s Head and some of our other colonies a lot later than it did the previous year. It was a new strain and they were calling it the herring gull strain. Here at St Abbs, it affected mainly our kittiwakes. Kittiwakes are a species that … I mean, they are the colony – they are the noise, they’re gregarious, they’re lively, they’re the sound, the real soundscape of the seabird colony.

There are species that have already undergone massive declines for so many reasons, and to see them hit by bird flu, which is another nail in the coffin for the kittiwake, was really tough. We lost hundreds of adults, mainly adults. The productivity – that’s how many chicks fledged per nest – looked ok. There was a bit of a silver lining, but yeah, it was back to square one really. Back to a couple of years ago when we were donning PPE, picking up dead birds from the beaches and removing them again.

Me and my ranger Rachel dubbed ourselves the Flus Brothers because I think you’ve got to have a bit of black humour; a little bit of humour amongst all the darkness. Again, it was a tough time for everyone around seabird colonies around the UK, and it did seem that kittiwakes and gulls were hit the hardest and quite a few auks as well, so a lot of the guillemots later in the season were affected.

[JB]
Fairly recently, a lot of the rangers from right around Scotland, the National Trust for Scotland rangers, you got together and you had a seabird conference. a) Why wasn’t I invited? And b) What did you talk about? What did you come up with?

[CH]
This is the very first seabird conference the NTS has ever had. Last year, we employed a senior seabird officer – that’s Ellie Owen, who is spearheading all the seabird work for the NTS. For someone who’s worked with seabirds for 10 or 12+ years, this is really exciting. We got together from all our sites – from the far reaches of St Kilda out to Staffa, rangers from the Treshnish Isles that are going to be there the next year. And we got together and we chatted all things seabird.

That was a massive range of things – from how we use our data, how we monitor our seabirds, trying to get it all standardised, making sure that our data is as robust as it can be. We can then feed this into working really closely with our policy team, and we can actually use our voices as seabird advocates to exact change, to really make change.

[JB]
But what changes can you make and what are the dangers? What are you wary of?

[CH]
In a rapidly changing world, seabirds face so many different risks. We’re looking at massive issues from overfishing in the seas, so losing sandeels, taking the food out of their mouths. We want to campaign to shut sand eel fisheries in Scotland and around the UK.

Offshore wind developments is a massive thing. That’s something that we’ve been really, really great at talking about amongst ourselves, but actually, it’s a huge issue of our time now. The National Trust for Scotland, as an employer and someone who’s passionate about green energy actually, we don’t want to come across as anti-renewables and we’re absolutely not. It’s really quite simple. Our message is that we need the right things in the right places. There’s been a massive windfarm proposed off St Abb’s Head – Berwick Bank windfarm. It’s one of the biggest in Europe and it’s going to be huge. The projected impacts on our seabirds here at the headland – we’ve talked about some of the other issues they’ve already faced and they’re already up against it – the projected impacts are huge. So, we just want the right things in the right places and for the impact to be as low as it can be.

At the seabird conference, we had people from the communications team in the NTS, we had people from the policy team. And we’re basically just trying to work together to make sure that essentially we are the voice for our seabirds; we are the voice for our seals; we are the voice for all the nature that we are guardian of.

And this is a massive point in time to really feel that upwelling of excitement and passion, because there are so many great people that work for the NTS. We need to make sure that we get our voices in the big conversations. And we’re not scared to have those conversations and be really passionate advocates for nature, because they can’t speak up for themselves.

Often with all these issues, they snowball and pile up on top of each other, and it’s really easy to feel helpless. Something that people can do is support Our Seas campaign. We’re looking to fight the battle on all fronts. There are various things that people can do. They can add their name to petitions. They can go on our website and look at all the information that’s available to them. They can look at Citizen Science projects, getting involved in seabirds, getting engaged with them, because I think the more that we shout about them, the more that we get their stories out there, the more people come to love them. And if you love something, then you want to protect it. And that’s what we’re all about.

[JB]
Well, you’re certainly putting the message out there for people listening to this, not just people who are members of the National Trust for Scotland, but just people listening to the podcast generally. If you want to do something, if you love your wildlife, if you love your seabirds, you know what to do.

We met some people just as we were parking up here, visitors from Spain who are coming to see the seals.

[CH]
Hi guys. Welcome to St Abb’s Head National Nature Reserve. It’s very good to see you.

[V1]
Good to see you.

[V2]
Nice to meet you.

[CH]
Are you off to see anything particular today?

[V1]
Yeah, we came to see seals.

[CH]
Superb. Well, it’s a brilliant time of year you’ve come. We’re right at the peak of the pupping season now, so there’s lots and lots to see. There’s lots of pups on the beaches. The trails are really easy to find and they’re all marked out with fences and signs. As long as you stay the right side of those and be respectful of the space, you should be absolutely fine.

[V1]
Absolutely. We’ve seen that this is one of the best places in Scotland to see seals.

[CH]
It is! I mean, we’re just an hour from Edinburgh, just down the road, so it’s a really nice place to come and connect with nature. The seal colony is only here for a really short time, so they’ll be gone by about Christmas time. It’s really great that you’ve come at this time of year; it’s the perfect time of year.

[V1]
Where are they going after?

[CH]
A lot of them will just leave out to sea. The adults will undergo a complete moult of the fur, but they don’t do that here. They’re here for the pupping season, which for each pup is about 3 weeks. After the females have fed that pup for 3 weeks, it’ll go, but we get early and late pups because it’s quite a big colony. We’ll have sometimes over 2,000 pups that are born on this stretch of coast.

[V1]
OK, is there something that we need to keep in mind when we see the colony of seals?

[CH]
The most important thing is to give them space. We’ve got all the beaches fenced off and there should be enough space there, but just to be quiet, to be respectful and if you have a dog, keep it on a lead. It doesn’t look like you have one, but it’s a really important message because seals and dogs don’t really get on very well, as you can imagine!

We have had some horror stories of people trying to get too close to seals taking selfies.

[V2]
For example, if you see a seal injured, you have any phone number you can call, to report them, maybe to the vet or to some organisation to call?

[CH]
There are, yes, there are a couple of organisations. There’s British Divers Marine Life Rescue and the SSPCA.

[V1]
Because sometimes you see a seal with a net or something …

[CH]
That’s right. A really key message at this time of year if there was an injured or abandoned pup on a colony is to leave it, because if you go into that colony, you could risk disturbing the rest of the colony and actually doing more damage. If it’s on the beach in the colony, we let nature take its course. It sounds harsh, but it’s the best thing for the seal colonies. Now, if it was a seal on an isolated beach, it was on its own and it was washed ashore, there’s sometimes things you can do to help – and those organisations, the British Divers Marine Life Rescue, which is a bit of a mouthful, they do some brilliant work in rehabilitating injured or abandoned seals. But like I said, on the colony, a really important message is give them space, just be respectful and let nature take its course because that’s what we want to do.

[V1]
Amazing. Thank you very much. Thank you so much for everything.

[CH]
Hope you have a nice day.

[JB]
Is that representative of the people you get here in these months?

[CH]
Honestly, people come from everywhere. We’ve had messages saying I’ve got friends coming up from New York and people coming up from London. I think it’s such an incredible thing to see a seal colony. And one of the most exciting things is sharing it with people, seeing the looks on people’s faces when they see the seal pups, when they see them feeding, when they see them interacting, when they see them scratching, when they see them sleeping. It’s absolutely amazing.

We’ve had a few chats over the years. I’m lucky enough now to have a small team here. There’s a team of four of us now, a group of really, really passionate and enthusiastic rangers. Just last Saturday I had some family visiting and I brought them to see the seals as a civilian. I was walking around incognito. I had a big moustache on and bowler hat … And actually walking around and seeing them interacting with the public and showing people through telescopes, seeing the looks on kids’ faces and seeing the knowledge that they’re sharing with people. Honestly, for me, I just thought I was so proud. We’ve got an Engagement Ranger, we’ve got a Ranger, we’ve got a Visitor Services Assistant and we can do so much more and achieve so much more here at the headland.

Something that’s key here is going back a couple of years, it was just me on site. People could come here and not meet a member of staff. We need people to know that we’re looking after the wildlife here. We need people to know that we care about it.

[JB]
At this time of year, a lot of people batten down the hatches. A lot of Trust properties are closed because this is the time of year to restore and regroup. But the natural world is always open. What would you advise people with all of your experience to do?

[CH]
One thing I will say is that nature never closes its doors. No matter what it is, whether it’s small, as small as a tiny little mushroom that’s sprouting from the ground up to a grey seal that’s 300kg, engaging with nature is so good for your physical and mental health. It gets you outside, it gets the wind in your hair. I know we’ve had a bit too much of it today maybe!

[JB]
Says the couple sitting in a car! It’s the thought that counts!

[CH]
There are grey seal colonies all around the UK and we’re in quite a unique position to be an hour from Edinburgh. We’re very accessible and we do want people to come here and enjoy it. We do need people to enjoy it in a responsible way. But honestly, when I walk out there and I spend time with the seals, which I get less and less time to do, but I do try as much as I can to sit with the seals and just enjoy the season because it’s so short and so finite. We have to take advantage of these intense seasonal changes.

And that’s something that makes this place in particular so special. You go from a crazy seabird city to the noise and the jibber jabbering of the cliffs, and you get to this time of year and the beaches come alive with seals. Come and see it before Christmas time because they’re not here for long and just simple interactions.

Every weekend on Saturdays and Sundays, myself or one of the ranger team will be out there. We’ll be showing people the seals through binoculars and telescopes, sharing the life stories, answer any random questions that you may have, whether they’re about seals or not!

So come and see us. Come and ask us as many questions as you want and, like I said before, just get to love it, get to know it because once you know it, you love it. And when you love it, you want to protect it, and that’s what we want to do.

[JB]
You mentioned something really interesting there, because at this time of year, when we have only a few hours of light, you mentioned mental health. Now we’ve managed to travel down to St Abbs. I live in a city, for example, but within half a mile of me there’s a nice hill and I think that’s important, isn’t it? Because nature is everywhere, and the benefits of nature are everywhere.

[CH]
You’ve put it so lovely, Jackie. One of the best things about nature is you can find it in any nook and cranny. It doesn’t matter if you’re in the middle of the busiest city; a little park, even one tree, if you focus on that, it’s really, really good for you. We appreciate that not everyone can make it out here and it’s not the easiest place to get around. You have to be at a level of physical fitness.

I think wherever you are and whatever you’re doing, just take time to notice nature. There’s something really beneficial for your mental health on focusing on the little things, whether it’s learning the bit of birdsong, whether it’s starting your journey along learning about mushrooms, because this time of year there’s lots of different things around.

It’s just really important that people engage with nature in a society that’s often disconnected with nature. And we find it through actual Netflix rather than nature Netflix. I think it’s really important to put that screen down and get yourself out as much as you can, even if you open a window and just enjoy the sound of the wind and the waves, maybe like we’re doing today in the car.

[JB]
Oh, stop telling people what wusses we are! Brilliant. Ciaran, as ever, thank you very much. That’s all from this chilly but uplifting episode of Love Scotland. I hope you’ll agree St Abb’s Head National Nature Reserve and its many inhabitants are cared for by the National Trust for Scotland and we would welcome a visit anytime.

For more information on the changing seasons here and what you can expect to see, head to the website at nts.org.uk
That’s also where you’ll find plenty of information about other Trust properties across Scotland and their opening times over the winter season.

But from me, for now, bye bye.

[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]; Robyne Calvert [RC]

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

[JB]
Perched on a windy hillside overlooking the Firth of Clyde and just 30 minutes’ drive from Glasgow is an unlikely place of artistic pilgrimage. In 1902 work began on the Hill House, a family home for a wealthy publisher and his family. The architect was Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Although the Hill House, which is cared for by the National Trust for Scotland, is celebrated as Mackintosh’s domestic masterpiece, it was the result of a partnership – a collaboration between Charles and his wife Margaret, an accomplished artist in her own right. Just as Mackintosh’s reputation has grown in recent decades – his signature art nouveau designs can be found everywhere from prestigious museums to tea towels – so too has the recognition of Margaret’s talents, her influence on his designs and on their output as a team.

‘Margaret has genius; I have only talent’ – words attributed to Toshie as he was known, which underline how much he valued the woman who was his partner in life and in work. So, in today’s podcast, we’re putting Margaret in the spotlight. And doing so with the expertise of Dr Robyne Calvert, a cultural historian who’s written academic papers specifically dealing with Margaret’s legacy. Welcome to the podcast, Robyne.

[RC]
Thank you so much for having me.

[JB]
Now, Robyne, as a subject to research, you were first attracted to Margaret and not Charles. Why?

[RC]
Well, they sort of came as a package because you never see Margaret before you see Charles! Quite frankly, they were beautiful. I think sometimes when you study the history of art and design, you’re supposed to be very staid and must look at everything critically, but we forget that we come to these things at first because we find them beautiful. There’s something compelling about them. They look so strange and different. There was this element of fantasy about them that I was interested in; I just really wanted to know more. In particular, when I learned that she worked alongside Mackintosh and yet we don’t know much about her and for a long time her work was marginalised, I thought I wanted to really dig in further and look at how her contribution came in through the wider body of his work and the work of their wider community of friends.

[JB]
Let’s talk about Margaret; let’s begin with her early days. She wasn’t Scottish; she was born near Wolverhampton.

[RC]
Yes, she was born down in ‘the south’ and grew up down there, probably into her early 20s. We don’t actually know much about her early life unfortunately. We do know that she did study art with the headmaster of a school down there, and it’s thought that she probably did go and study abroad. She probably went to the Continent, but we again don’t know for sure. She was fluent in German and French – we know that. She seems to be incredibly well-read. But, there’s very little known about her early days, until she comes to Glasgow – and even then, we would love to know more.

[JB]
She was born in 1864, and we think her family came to Glasgow around 1890. She would have been about 26?

[RC]
I think actually perhaps even 1888, a little bit earlier than that. They came up here. She would already have had her education; of course, she was very close to her younger sister Frances, who was 9 years younger. The two of them began taking classes at the Glasgow School of Art, which in those days was housed in the Maclellan Gallery – not in the building yet. They were taking courses together as day students. And it seems from what we can tell from records they were studying more design courses. Margaret had definitely had artistic training before; Frances probably had some as well. They begin taking these classes together at the school.

[JB]
And then they set up shop together. They set up a business. Was this unusual for women?

[RC]
It was unusual for women but it’s not as unusual perhaps as we think it was. A couple of years ago, there was this great Modern Scottish Women exhibit at the National Galleries of Scotland – Alice Strang there did incredible research – and other projects too that have been looking at how women worked together in studios. A lot of times that information is really hidden because women would, for example, submit to art competitions not saying their full first names. They might have been M Macdonald. She didn’t … but as an example. There’s women submitting who may not have been known to be women. There were a lot of women who were working as artists and set up studios together or would have collaborative studio addresses.

[JB]
What was she selling, so to speak?

[RC]
They worked in multi-media. Again, there’s not a lot of work from the period but definitely they did watercolour work but they also did metalwork like repoussé. They’re these elongated watercolours that have these long metalwork frames. Each of them did two in the series. They would come up collaboratively with themes. They also did illustrated books; they worked on poster designs. It was a wide range of design work, some of which was for commercial commissions.

[JB]
How would you describe the style? This is very difficult to convey in a podcast and I think anyone listening could engage the help of Mr Google when we talk about specific works, but the style as described is Celtic imagery and folklore. It’s these elongated figures, generally, of women – very detailed.

[RC]
Yes, it definitely arises from this idea of Celtic imagery but also there’s a lot of Japanese influence in there. Japanese prints were something that were disseminated in the period; ultimately, the Mackintoshes had them in their own home. All of this rises out of aestheticism really – the wider design movement towards the end of the 19th century that was very interested in non-Western artistic influences. Not just Japanese; Chinese, Indian … really across the globe. Things that are coming into local museum collections. They’re very much like magpies. I think what they look at, in terms of style. But then they bring it into work in a really unique way. The figures do look very elongated. They look strange. At the time they were referred to as the Spook School, or the Ghoul School – the figures look like they were coming out of the graveyard, which is perhaps also what drew me to them originally! I’m a bit of an old goth!

[JB]
They were very different from what was around in the mainstream at the time. What did she look like? I read a description of her as ‘tall, stately, with commanding charm and majestic auburn hair.’ There’s a clipping of that hair in one of the museums – and it is beautiful, auburn hair. Do we know any more of how she looked, and about her character?

[RC]
Yes. There are some of these early descriptions of her as looking … in fact, there’s one description that describes her as looking ‘particularly English in her dress’ at an early party, which is interesting. Ultimately, she becomes part of this circle of friends at the Glasgow School of Art, and they did present themselves in a way that we might call ‘artistic’. They wore artistic dress, which means in the case of Glasgow they were wearing things that either they made themselves – more loosely fit clothing – or things that they embellished, added embroidery to, added these beautiful decorative collars to. They presented themselves in a way that signified ‘I’m an artist, actually; I work in artistic circles!’. Which is perhaps how we think of artists today. She was always described as being elegant and refined. Later on, there’s a great description of her painting in her grey, kid-skin gloves to protect her hands from the mineral spirit.

[JB]
She and Toshie (as he was known), they must have been a striking couple. How did they meet? He was almost 4 years younger.

[RC]
They met at Glasgow School of Art, probably introduced by Francis Newbery, the Director there at the time – as the story’s been told by Jessie Newbery (his wife). She was the Head of Embroidery at the school and also a good close friend of theirs. Basically, he saw kindred spirits within their work and within the kinds of things they were interested in. And of course, the fourth person we are missing so far is Herbert MacNair, who’s a friend of Mackintosh’s. The two men meet the two women, probably as part of some of the activities they were doing at the school: sketching clubs and activities that Newbery arranged. Apparently, he saw in them kindred spirits artistically, and so they met and they started working together.

[JB]
And that became the Glasgow Four.

[RC]
I think that’s a term that was applied a bit later on. They were referred to as The Four according to Jessie Newbery.

[JB]
Charles was at evening classes at the Art School. He was an architect draughtsman. His background was different from Margaret’s; he wasn’t so well educated. But the early stages of that relationship, that was complicated, wasn’t it? There was a lot of talk of a love triangle, because he was in a fairly serious relationship with his boss’s sister.

[RC]
Well, maybe!

[JB]
Oh! Tell more!

[RC]
This is an interesting one. There’s all these little mythologies that are fun to pick apart. It has been said – and again a lot of what we know is by people who have told the stories many, many years later to people. In the 1960s, people were running around interviewing the last people who knew Mackintosh, and they were getting quite old themselves. This story has to do with Mackintosh apparently having been engaged to Jessie Keppie, who was the sister of John Keppie, who was his boss then partner in the architectural firm he worked for: Honeyman, Keppie and Mackintosh ultimately. He was apparently engaged to Jessie and then he jilts her for Margaret once he meets Margaret – that’s the story that gets passed down.

Now, more recent scholarship has wondered about this, about the veracity of that – and also there’s just some details that we do know about their timeline where it doesn’t quite pan out. In particular, the friendship between Mackintosh and Jessie Keppie did seem to carry on. There’s a casket that he made for her that’s in the collection at the V&A that’s after this apparently happened. He does go on to continue to work with John Keppie. I guess it’s possible that you would make someone a partner in your firm and build great buildings with them after they jilted your sister … but it’s a little hard to imagine that that relationship wouldn’t have broken down if he left her heart-broken somehow.

Also, there’s this beautiful set of photographs that show this group of friends, mostly women, who were part of the sketching club at the art school, out in the countryside having a beautiful day out. In these photographs, Margaret and Jessie are arm in arm, and looking at each other in friendship. There’s no real solid documentation that they were ever engaged and that he dumps her. Perhaps they were dating? Maybe he took her for a coffee? Who knows! I think it is a story that has gotten blown out and also it’s frustrating from the perspective of trying to study women in art history because we gravitate to these stories of cat fights and love triangles, and whatever. When actually, why don’t we look at them as artists and their work? We don’t know the details of their personal lives really.

[JB]
By the late 1890s, they were beginning to exhibit together. How successful were they?

[RC]
They showed pieces at the 8th Vienna Secession Exhibition in Europe. That was, I think, really important for them. That exhibition was published widely in design magazines, but in particular at that exhibit they were there with Gustav Klimt, Hoffmann, another Vienna Secessionist who apparently saw them as a huge influence on their work. I think that gets under-played a little bit. They then go on to exhibit in Turin, in international modern art and design exhibitions essentially. There’s a few key design exhibitions that disseminate their work more widely. When they get published, they get a bit more well known. But it doesn’t necessarily result in a lot of work for them unfortunately.

[JB]
Is it fair to say that at that time Margaret was regarded just as highly as her husband?

[RC]
I think she was regarded just as highly in certain artistic circles, yes certainly. Their work was looked at as collaborative and I think importantly Mackintosh was very clear to credit her. That, to me, was really great for the time. When he sends off these lists of what the objects are that are going to be in exhibitions, he’s very clear to write who they all are by – because he’s collecting things from other people at Glasgow School of Art as well. The MacNairs exhibit as well. He’s very clear to delineate. In fact, for the Vienna Exhibition, there’s photographs of some of the works. The May Queen gets sent, and on the back of the photograph in his handwriting (these photographs incidentally are still here at the University of Glasgow) he says: Designed and executed by Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh. I think it’s really important because since those days, some scholarship has perhaps suggested that she didn’t actually design the work, that she just made it. She was a maker, like many of the other artisans that Mackintosh employed. There’s been some question marks that have been put over her contribution as an artist and designer herself. But he wrote it – so I don’t know how we can argue with that.

[JB]
As you say, they married in 1900 and that began a particularly intense and successful artistic period in their lives, which we will talk about in a moment. But first we’ll take a break, and when we come back we’ll discover what life had in store for this hitherto golden couple.

[MV]
Are you a whisky lover or a nature lover? A fan of Burns or a good ghost story? No matter what you love about Scotland, there’s an episode of Love Scotland just for you. Take a look through our archives to hear the in-depth stories behind Scotland’s history, people and places. Don’t forget to review, like and share.

[JB]
Welcome back to the Love Scotland podcast where we’re talking about the life and substantial talents of the artist Margaret Mackintosh. Robyne Calvert, I hadn’t realised how many of the headline Mackintosh works – and that’s Charles and Margaret’s – were completed in a very short window, just at the turn of the century.

[RC]
Yes, absolutely. At the end of the 19th century, The Four were working with each other – particularly the sisters were working in the studio together. When they get married – the MacNairs get married in 1899; the Mackintoshes in 1900 – from that point on, they only work with their spouses.

[JB]
That’s interesting, isn’t it?

[RC]
It is. And that period, particularly for the Mackintoshes, does become incredibly productive. It’s the golden period of Mackintosh’s work too – it’s right when the first phase of the Art School has opened; he’s working on all of these different commissions. And Margaret is involved in a great many of them.

[JB]
Let’s talk about the Hill House. It was commissioned, as I said in the introduction, and began in 1902. What is Margaret’s role in the Hill House?

[RC]
Like so many of the other works, it’s so hard to pick a part! I think that is actually one of the interesting things about looking at this. We often really want to lay attribution on particular works – this person did that, and this person did this … You want to credit it very clearly. But when you have these creative intimate collaborations, it’s hard to pick that apart a little bit. We do know very clearly, for example, she did this beautiful gesso panel that sits in the fireplace in the main White salon.

[JB]
Explain briefly what a gesso piece is.

[RC]
I’m very happy to do that. If you can imagine if you had a flat piece of plaster and then there was a drawing on it – perhaps maybe this is the best way of understanding it. We actually do have information from Agnes Blackie, one of the daughters of the Blackies who owned the house; she was the youngest daughter. She watched Margaret – this is the only place in fact that we have any idea of how Margaret worked – she said she watched Margaret working on that panel and ‘she piped the gesso on the surface like you decorate a cake’. It’s these very fine, beautiful lines. It is the same elongated figures. Earlier, I didn’t mention they were very influenced by the work of Aubrey Beardsley, who’s somebody who is also working in this style. These elongated sweeping lines and figures – and the one that’s at the Hill House is a …

[JB]
Is this the Sleeping Beauty?

[RC]
The Sleeping Beauty figure. This is a horizontal one and she’s lying reclined with her eyes closed. You do have all the roses on the surface, the same motifs that are repeated throughout the work and throughout the house.

[JB]
And the drawing room where you find this is comparatively minimalist, but it is a striking piece. Your eye is drawn to it as soon as you walk in the room.

[RC]
Absolutely. I think it’s a minimalist room in the sense of it being all white. They had an all-white room in their own home; you’ve got the White Dining Room at the Ingram Street tea room. It does appear to be unified in that composition. And then there’s all of these details – these pops of colour we would say today.

One of the other ones in that room that we know for sure was by Maragret are the antimacassars, which are the textiles that are on the back of the settee or sofa, and the chairs. If you don’t know, an antimacassar is because in the late 19th century men liked to do their hair up with macassar oil. If you have an oily head that rests on the back of your furniture, that’s not so nice for your upholstery!

[JB]
Every day’s a school day!

[RC]
You would make an antimacassar to put a textile on there to protect it. Now, I would never want anyone to put their oily head on one of Margaret’s beautiful textiles either! It’s a sit-up; don’t lean on it. But they are really beautiful, particularly the one that’s on the sofa. It’s so modern-looking; it’s pointing towards art deco. It’s almost gridded, with all these different colours, and there’s three sections to it. At the centre of each section, where you might expect to find a rose, it’s actually more like a yin-yang symbol. They’re really different.

[JB]
When visitors go to the Hill House, are they aware of Margaret’s influence specifically?

[RC]
That’s a good question. I would hope so, if only because the guides there are great. They like to let people know. I’m not sure if you were to walk in and you didn’t really know much about them at all, you might assume that everything in there is done by the same hand, because the styles overlap and are so different. I think that’s also why it’s difficult to piece out Margaret’s involvement. Some arguments have been made that we shouldn’t give her credit for places like the Hill House or the Willow Tea Room, or anything else, because she wasn’t an architect. In some ways that’s fair enough. No, she couldn’t have drawn up the plans and designs; she wasn’t a trained architect. But what we can’t quantify is the conversations that they had. He comes home from work, maybe shows some designs, she gives her input – we don’t know how that worked. That idea that her influence is felt somehow in the house, I guess, is the easiest way to describe it. But she did do some very significant pieces within the house, and within other of his work, that are definitely by her.

[JB]
Let’s talk about the tea rooms because they came to the attention of a tea room tycoon of the time: Miss Cranston. In Sauchiehall Street in Glasgow, in the Willow Tea Room, there is the Willow Wood panel. Again, very difficult in a podcast – please at home look this up – try to describe that to me.

[RC]
Gosh. Well, it’s my personal favourite. It’s a long, rectangular composition. It has at the centre a large green oval that’s meant to represent a well. Here I should insert the theme of this panel is a set of sonnets by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the pre-Raphaelite poet, that are about souls revolving around a well in which a person looks into the well and sees the spirit of his lost love, perhaps dead, gone from him, rising up from the well. When you see the Willow Wood panel you see these three figures in it but it’s all very abstract. There is a face in the well that you can see; there’s a figure of a woman standing on the right; and then there’s another figure in the background. There’s a strange Egyptian-looking eye in the centre of it that’s dropping tears. If you were to read the poems, which I quite like to do when I go in there and make people listen to the poems! All of these motifs are in the poem themselves, but the overall effect of it is like this strange beaded curtain that is meant to stylistically represent these willow leaves, willow branches falling around this well. That theme plays out around the room in the stained glass and the repeats, but when you go in there you would never know it’s this romantic, quite tragic poem that is the theme of the room.

[JB]
It’s a dazzling work, and again I encourage anyone to go and see it because you truly get an idea of Margaret’s expertise. So, we had this incredibly intense and successful period in the early 20th century. But then, when we get to 1910-ish, Charles’s style starts to fall out of fashion in terms of his architectural work. Why?

[RC]
I think there’s a lot of complications that start to happen. In his personal life he doesn’t seem to be getting the kinds of commissions that he wants in Glasgow. I think to some extent that it is seen as a highly highly decorative style, and it wasn’t necessarily …

[JB]
It wasn’t to everyone’s taste, because there are pictures in the gallery of their house – this white minimalist room – and then the traditional Edwardian living rooms: cluttered, dark, ornate at the time. You can imagine that you had to be very different and have very different ideas to commission something.

[RC]
Yes, even their own close friend the critic Herman Muthesius made comments about that room, saying ‘it’s an aspirational ideal but embedded in that, it’s unliveable.’

[JB]
His work starts to fall out of favour; money is tight. They move south. Why is that?

[RC]
They go south because the work is drying up. I think they go originally not with any intention of leaving forever but it just transpires that way. They end up settling in Chelsea. Along the way, Mackintosh seems to switch a lot of his focus away from architectural work – I think because he wasn’t getting architectural commissions – towards design work. He starts producing amazing textile designs; so does Margaret, incidentally. These watercolours that he starts to do – he goes to the south of France to do his watercolours. Margaret travels with him initially but then she ends up staying in London because she has a heart condition and travelling becomes more difficult for her.

[JB]
We’ve leapt a bit now. They go to London 1913-ish, and then war obviously.

[RC]
I think that’s the biggest factor.

[JB]
Not a lot of commissions going round; there’s a different attitude. A huge paradigm shift. They move to the south of France. This is in 1923. Why did they go there?

[RC]
Margaret’s health isn’t quite as good any more, so they go to the south of France primarily for the climate. Their money can go a bit further. I think Mackintosh is also interested in developments in modern art. His style is shifting around this period. If we look at some of the commissions he did do, later commissions for example 78 Derngate down in the north of England, you look at that and it looks art deco. This is still several years before art deco becomes a thing. The same for Margaret too. There’s a few paintings from this period – they’re very weird, if I may, as much as I love. The palate becomes darker, in fact black; heavy black starts coming into it. In his watercolours, there’s a lot of outlining happening; the textile designs, the patterns – we’ve gone from that undulating curve to zigzag lines. It looks very jazz.

[JB]
That is a transition. There’s a quote from him, just when you were talking about money there, he says: ‘money, either paper or metal, slips through my hands in a way that would make a financier weep’. He was aware that that wasn’t perhaps part of his skill set. As you say, they were in France and there was a very important time. Margaret goes back to London for about 6 weeks and there’s not a lot of primary source material for us to find out what they were like as a couple, but here there is a collection of letters that he called the Chronicle. We only have the one-sided letters – these are from Charles to Margaret. What do they tell us about their relationship at that time?

[RC]
Those letters, I think, are some of the most beautiful parts talking about how close they must have been. The fact that he writes to her so frequently, and obviously she’s returning the letters. In some ways they’re just mundane accounts about his day – what he’d eaten, what he’d seen. He definitely makes some interesting and fun commentaries about people in it. But for me, one of the most important facts that we have about their relationship come out of these letters – this happens when he is obviously responding to a letter Margaret’s written him in which she’s going to have to go to an interview with an architectural critic and journalist about his work. Of course, not having her letter, we don’t know what she has said to him but perhaps she has expressed some kind of anxiety, like ‘I’m not sure really what to say to this guy’. This is where Charles writes back to Margaret and says: ‘just remember you are half if not three-quarters in all of my architectural work’. So, a bit unlike that ‘Margaret has genius, I have talent’ comment; that’s a second-hand one. This is directly from his hand. He is saying to her and reassuring her; ‘you are half if not three-quarters in all my architectural work’. Not just the other stuff they did. In his mind, she’s a huge part of everything he’s done. Again, how that worked we don’t know, but he seemed to think she was incredibly important.

[JB]
From the letters, they are still very deeply in love. This is 25 years or so into their marriage, and Charles seems almost needy. He’s really, really missing her. He was still painting; she had given up creating art in the early 1920s. Do we know why?

[RC]
No, we don’t. I wonder to what extent she’d really given up. Some of her late works are from 1921/22, but my favourite work by her is a painting called La mort parfumee, which is in the collection. Go Google that. Perfumed death. It is the most rich … Egyptian influence that looks like a ritual. It’s this black canvas that’s absolutely exquisite. Here’s a painting that comes at what seems to be towards the end of her artistic career which is perhaps the best that she’s ever been. When she ultimately dies, things are destroyed.

[JB]
What happens: Charles dies first. He dies of tongue cancer in 1928. He was only 60. Margaret died in 1933, and their possessions – I read that they were valued at £88, 12s and 2d, including £1 for 4 of Charles’s chairs. His designed chairs.

[RC]
Yeah, it’s shocking and heart-breaking when you look at it that way. And for whatever reasons, the contents of her studio and her home were mostly destroyed. They were just got rid of. What letters, sketches, diaries etc – who knows what was gone.

[JB]
But in the years that followed, friends worked very hard to reestablish Charles’s reputation. Why not Margaret? Why did we lose all of her archive?

[RC]
Modernism! Modernism! There was a 1933 memorial exhibition that was put on by their friend Davidson who at this point had purchased the home that they had made here in Glasgow, and there was an architectural critic that wrote to him. I should just clarify this was never published publicly; this was a private letter, but scholarship has brought this out many times since then. He basically says to him, ‘I hope you’re not planning to give Margaret any sort of attention in this memorial exhibition. Some of Mackintosh’s work had her unfortunate feminine influence’. It is literally ‘feminine’ the word that is used. At this point, art nouveau as a style has fallen very much out of favour. It was seen to be, retrospectively, as overly feminine and we’re now in the period of the rise of the Bauhaus and modern architecture.

As you mentioned, the war in between had a huge impact on design economy really. You weren’t going to be making things that were overly done and overly blown. However, we are also in the period now of art deco. There’s a lot of different things going on there, but particularly in relationship to Mackintosh there were some critics who just thought ‘oh, they weren’t as good’. When I say ‘they’, by the way, MacNair’s in there too. Charles Rennie Mackintosh, he’s the one who had the vision and the X-ray specs into the future, who could see the direction of modern design better than the rest of them could, which is a complete over-simplification. Probably gives Mackintosh too much credit, quite frankly. I think there’s a lot of talk about him seeing the future of design, but actually he was very much a contemporary in the way he was working.

[JB]
At the end of the day, in terms of Margaret’s overall success and her reputation – and you’re the expert; I’ve just dipped my toe in this – could I offer (and this is probably heresy) that although she was mightily talented, she maybe was not as ambitious? She was a collaborator, as evidenced by her work with her sister; she was happiest as part of a team. And then with her husband. Does that hold water or is that just heresy? You can tell me!

[RC]
I will tell you! I think it does hold water, Jackie. I think as much as I am Team Margaret and have been for almost two decades, it just seems like that is perhaps the case. She wasn’t submitting to every single competition or exhibition; she didn’t have a prolific output. Some of her best work does seem to arise from Mackintosh’s commissions; they’re part of those commissions. I think she was quite content to be working in that way, and there’s nothing wrong with that. That’s not to say she didn’t exhibit internationally. Beyond what I’ve mentioned, she did exhibit in Chicago; there were shows in Russia; and she exhibited on her own at watercolour and Arts & Crafts societies, etc. She did do that but she wasn’t nearly as ambitious and prolific as someone like Jessie M King – just to throw another Glasgow name in there. It seems like she was quite content to live that life.

When they went down to ultimately settle in Chelsea, they are in a really rich artistic community down there. They’re friends with Margaret Morris the dancer and they’re on the fringes of the Bloomsbury Set. Although clearly money wasn’t a strong point there, it seems like they were at least living a happy life together. There is a really beautiful quote by one of their friends that says: ‘Margaret and Toshie were hand in glove the entirety of their lives.’ I’m paraphrasing but the entirety of their lives – it is a really beautiful love story if it doesn’t necessarily have the successful happy ending that we would all want for them.

[JB]
I think that’s a happy enough ending. Robyne, thank you so much for your expertise. I thoroughly enjoyed that; thank you.

[RC]
Thank you so much. It was wonderful to chat with you about this.

[JB]
If you’d like to see some more of Margaret’s work for yourself, you can take a trip to the Hill House in Helensburgh. I think it’s only when you see the designs close up that you’re struck by the detail and by how subtle, but paradoxically how striking they are, that you appreciate Margaret’s talent. As you know, crucial conservation work by the National Trust for Scotland to protect the house continues. The chainmail box, which has become an attraction in its own right, has been protecting the building and it’s now dryer than it’s been for decades, which is a great step forward. Experts have been busy carrying out sampling and analysis at the Hill House to help decide what to do next. Keep an eye on nts.org.uk for more information. I would like to think that Margaret and Toshie would have approved of the innovation.

But that’s all from this edition of Love Scotland. 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.

Transcript

Three voices: male voiceover [MV]; Jackie Bird [JB]; Janet Brennan-Inglis [JBI]

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

[JB]
Driving an American friend around on his first trip to Scotland, I realised that in addition to his appreciation of our breathtaking scenery, it was the man-made magnificence and history of our castles and historic buildings that provided some of the most rewarding, jaw-dropping reactions, certainly for this tour guide.

The actor Alan Cumming tells a similar tale of friends from abroad demanding excitedly that he stopped the car as they drove past a castle, and him nonchalantly reassuring them, don’t worry, there’ll be another one around the corner. So far, so smug for the home team.

And of course, the National Trust for Scotland looks after some of the most splendid examples of our architectural heritage. But it’s not just about buildings. Each tells a story of Scotland’s past, and although most of us care about their protection and take the permanence of these impressive structures for granted, that wasn’t always the case.

Long before concerns about conservation were mainstream, two Victorian architects David MacGibbon and Thomas Ross were on the case. For years, they left their rather understanding wives and spent just about every weekend travelling the country by train, by ferry, by bicycle and on foot, surveying, measuring and sketching more than 700 castles and historic buildings.

And thank goodness they did, because their pioneering work back in the 1880s was to transform not only our perceptions of these magnificent structures, but indirectly help a few of them survive. The story of this dedicated duo is told in A Passion for Castles by Janet Brennan-Inglis, who is my guest today. Welcome to the podcast, Janet.

[JBI]
Thank you. Pleased to be here.

[JB]
Now, I thoroughly enjoyed your book, and not just because it’s crammed with details of pictures and the history of castles and drawings and tower houses. But it also tells the human stories of these men of MacGibbon and Ross. So, what particularly sparked your interest?

[JBI]
Well, like lots of people who are interested in castles, I had been using MacGibbon and Ross for years. If I wanted to know something about a particular building, I’d turn to MacGibbon and Ross. Amongst people who love castles, it’s a shorthand term for where you find out anything you need to know about a particular building. And then I came across an essay by Professor David Walker that talked about the lives of David MacGibbon and Thomas Ross.

And to be honest, I had never really thought about the two men. When I read some of their back story, I thought, gosh, how fascinating! These two men were really, really interesting. I decided to look further into their lives. I had for a long time been trying to do a ‘then and now’ comparison between the castles that they surveyed and what’s happened to them nowadays. And then when I looked into how interesting their lives were, I couldn’t not investigate further because they were fascinating.

[JB]
They shared a passion for castles. Were they similar characters?

[JBI]
No, they were not; not at all. David MacGibbon was the only child of a very wealthy family. His father Charles MacGibbon had been Master of the Royal Company of Merchants in Edinburgh. He’d been Dean of the Guild Court, and his father, who was David’s grandfather, had been responsible for building large parts of the New Town in the early 19th century. David MacGibbon went to the Edinburgh Academy. He then went on to the University of Edinburgh, but he didn’t graduate because wealthy young men didn’t graduate in those days – he didn’t need to bother. He was then sent on the Grand Tour of Europe, where he spent many months sketching and studying the great buildings across many countries in Europe.

So, his background was incredibly privileged. In some ways, he was a bit like Robert Adam. He came from a dynasty of builders and he had a life of great privilege. And then he used his talent accordingly.

Whereas Thomas Ross, on the other hand, was one of 12 children and he was the son of a tenant farmer. They weren’t poor tenant farmers, but they were not well off at all. His father had come from poverty himself and had pulled himself up by his bootstraps. They rented their home from the Drummonds of Megginch Castle, and I wonder whether it was living on that estate with Megginch so close by that had sparked young Thomas’s interest.

He was spotted, I think, by a travelling art master who came to his school and said, this boy’s got talent. And he was articled and he won various competitions, and he eventually came to work with David MacGibbon in Edinburgh. They were quite a contrasting couple. We don’t know a lot about David MacGibbon’s personality, but we do know that Thomas Ross was very accommodating, very sunny-natured, a lovely man by all accounts.

[JB]
So luckily, fate threw them together, and the fruits of their labour – now, let me get this right – The Castellated and Domestic Architecture of Scotland, Volume One (snappy title!), first published in 1887. How did it differ from what had gone before? Because I find it hard to believe that no one had thought, wait a minute, we have all of these fabulous buildings – why don’t we have some sort of comprehensive inventory?

[JBI]
They certainly weren’t the first to survey historic buildings across Scotland. There was quite a tradition of gentlemen historians such as William Daniell, Daniel Defoe, William Billings, taking tours across Scotland and sketching and writing about the buildings that they saw.

But MacGibbon and Ross were the first to do it at scale, the 720. They were also the first to provide plans for all of the buildings that they surveyed. They had over 2,500 measured drawings – and they’re rather charming, their drawings and their sketches. But further to that, they were the first people to put forward a comprehensive theory of castle history. They divided the history into four periods and they set forth their ideas about how castles had developed over the centuries. And nobody had done that before.

[JB]
Because what actually constitutes a castellated building? Is that just a Victorian term for a castle? And does it take in fortresses, tower houses, palaces, mansions, etc?

[JBI]
Yes, it does indeed. MacGibbon and Ross were very, very relaxed about what they called a castle. And they interchangeably used the terms castle, mansion, tower house, fortress, fortelus. They didn’t make a thing about it, and they never defined what they meant by a castle.

Sometimes people nowadays say, well, that can’t be a castle and that can’t be a castle. But MacGibbon and Ross saw that if something looked like a castle, then it was included.

[JB]
Why did they begin their mammoth task?

[JBI]
Why did they begin it? Well, they were architects, and they had a busy architects practice in Edinburgh. They did not do very much at all by way of what we now call conservation architecture. They didn’t work on castles much at all. They did more bread-and-butter stuff. They did the tenement housing, they did hotels, they did churches. They went where the money was, I think really. But their passion, their interest outside of all that, was for castles.

David MacGibbon started giving a series of lectures which he wrote up, and I think Thomas Ross probably helped him with these – and then they snowballed into them. They didn’t start off expecting to do 5 volumes; they started off with one volume and then they decided they would do another volume, and then another and then another. So, it grew like Topsy, their set of volumes.

[JB]
Were they early conservationists or just ahead of their time?

[JBI]
They were indeed. And I should have said that – they were campaigning conservationists, and they were aghast at the state of many of the buildings that they surveyed. They were aghast at the danger that they saw for many of these buildings, and they campaigned fervently. And although they didn’t always succeed – there was the Knights Hospitallers’ building in Linlithgow which was destroyed and they were very upset about that, and there was a mansion house in Greenock that was destroyed – but maybe they saved Earlshall with their campaigning. That was saved by Sir Robert Lorimer, but I think we can attribute that saving to MacGibbon and Ross’s campaigning.

[JB]
When you say they were pessimistic about the future of a lot of the castles, this is a quote from your book, with apologies to our listeners – and we do have a lot – from abroad, because they feared that Scotland would end up like New World cities of America and Australia, and that we’d lose anything that pre-dated the 18th century.

[JBI]
Sadly, though that may have been an exaggeration in the end, we have lost so much of our towns’ early architecture. Towns like Dumfries and Ayr, and many towns across Scotland, have lost a great deal of their architecture in the 1950s and 1960s when there was almost a mania for pulling down old stuff.

[JB]
I found your book, as I said at the beginning, fascinating. But I also found it very, very sad because we have a lot of pictures of castles and palaces and fortresses etc that are no longer with us. And it does seem that, as a country, we spent most of the 20th century blowing up and demolishing many of our historic buildings.

[JBI]
We did. There was an estimation that in 1955 – this is for the whole of the United Kingdom – that one historic building was demolished every three days in 1955.

[JB]
And the reasoning behind the demolition reasons were many and varied. Your book tells us that, and these are just a couple of examples that caught my eye, one large house that was set to be demolished in the 1920s was almost saved due to a public outcry. However, the building firm sent out a letter saying the men who were employed to knock it down would be out of a job if it didn’t happen, so the local authority caved in at the last minute and so too did the building.

And there’s another one, another bizarre story of Rossend Castle in Fife where Mary, Queen of Scots stayed back in the 16th century. In 1972 Burntisland Council decided, and I quote from your book, that ‘its ancient castle should be destroyed as a symbol of former feudal oppression’. Now, that was saved, but my goodness, to knock something down because of an ideology.

[JBI]
Indeed, indeed.

[JB]
And of course I found it quite sad. But in terms of things that I really didn’t know, when I began reading the book, I was of the misapprehension that the castles had all begun their lives for military purposes. But that was very much not the case in Scotland.

[JBI]
Well, not in the sense that MacGibbon and Ross looked at them. Most of the tower houses in Scotland – and Scotland has hundreds of tower houses – they were lairds’ houses. They were lairds’ towers; they weren’t there for military purposes at all. They were built tall and grand to mark out status, but they were not there in order to either protect or attack anybody.

There are relatively few castles across Scotland that have been military fortresses. Of course, there’s Edinburgh and Stirling and some of the great fortresses that still survive, but the majority of smaller houses were never military.

[JB]
Of the 720 buildings that they surveyed, how many have been demolished? How many have we lost?

[JBI]
At least 50 have been demolished since they wrote their survey. And when they wrote their survey, they described probably 20/25 that had been demolished in the years just before they were surveying, so ones that hadn’t been saved.

[JB]
Now, they measured, they sketched, and there are fantastic examples within the book. But these were the formative years of photography. Why didn’t they just take pictures?

[JBI]
Well, they did take pictures, but I think they were just on the cusp. They were just before printing became cheap and readily available for photographs. There were other books in that genre that used photographs, but they were very, very early. I’m really pleased that we have the sketches because they are so charming and they are much more visually appealing than early photography would have been.

[JB]
Oh, they certainly are impressive. David MacGibbon died in 1902 at the age of 71. And Thomas Ross, he lived until 1930, and he died at the grand old age of 91. Did they get the recognition they deserved in their lifetimes?

[JBI]
Well, yes, they did and they didn’t. They were both made honorary professors. They both had honorary doctorates anyway. David MacGibbon never felt he had the honours he deserved. Yes, I think they were. On the whole, I think they were recognised in the world of architecture for the wonderful work that they did at the time. Yes, I think they were.

[JB]
Well, that’s good to know, and that’s a good place to take a break because, as I said in my introduction, Scotland has a very broad range of castles and historic , and the National Trust for Scotland looks after many. So, stay with us and in Part 2 we’ll talk about how we view conservation and how things have changed and how we look after our ancient buildings these days. But we’ll also take a whistle-stop tour around some of the castles in the Trust’s care. And Janet, I’m warning you now, Janet, you’re going to tell us some significant aspects of their history for us to look out for. That’s your two-minute warning! 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 townhouses 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 podcast. Now, Janet Brennan-Inglis, it’s clear from your book and the work of MacGibbon and Ross, that just about every castle tells us not just an architectural story, in some cases about the families who lived there, who built or acquired the buildings and how they made their money. And some of them did it through the colonies and some as a result of slavery. A very hot topic these days. Does that/should that change how we view the buildings?

[JBI]
Well, yes and no. The buildings are still the buildings, but the stories of the owners, both good and bad, they help to build up a picture of the buildings and the castles. I think it’s important that we pay attention to recent research about families, because that gives us a more detailed and rounded understanding of where the wealth came from and the people that supported the sometimes lavish lifestyles of castle owners, who weren’t all rich but a lot were.

And these stories, they link into a wider narrative of the history of Scotland, and they present an opportunity for us to expand our knowledge about the country’s complex history. And why wouldn’t we welcome that?

[JB]
The interesting thing is that the buildings, you imagine that a castle is a static thing, but of course they change, they adapt – they’re extended, they’re remodelled over the centuries. As a castle enthusiast, how do you feel about this? Is something lost or is it just pragmatism?

[JBI]
Me, I fall on the pragmatic side of this, because castles – you’re quite right – they have always changed. They are dynamic entities, even if they’re just crumbling slightly, they’re always changing. They don’t stay greystone ruins or greystone buildings at all. The buildings that the Trust owns are examples of the ways in which people have added to and subtracted from their buildings over the years, according to fashion and according to their needs, I suppose.

[JB]
It also tells us about our past. I was doing some other research on this and what I didn’t know is even one of our most globally famous castles, Eilean Donan, that was crumbling – and when they restored it, there was an outcry by some people. Look at it now! It’s one of the most, to use that terrible word, iconic structures in the entire country.

Anyway, that’s just an aside. Let’s talk about some of the buildings in the Trust here. You’ve highlighted a few for us to take a look at. So, let’s begin with one of my favourites, because I remember going here. You know when you get roped in as a mum to a school trip? I got roped in to going to Culross, to Culross Palace, which isn’t even a palace, I believe. It’s going back in time; you are transported. A huge purchase for the Trust in its day, I understand?

[JBI]
Yes, it’s one of my favourites too. Obviously, it doesn’t look at all like a palace, but according to MacGibbon and Ross, it was called that because of a visit there by James VI in 1617. It’s a grand merchant’s house and it was built at the end of the 16th century. It was built to be big enough to house George Bruce’s eight children. He was a merchant and an engineer, and he came up with a revolutionary technique of mining coal from underneath the River Forth and extracting it via a mine shaft in the middle of the river, right onto boats.

Through this and various other enterprises, he became very, very wealthy, and his mansion reflected that. It has a splendid series of wood-lined ceilings with allegorical paintings; they really are worth going to look at. It’s in the loveliest position overlooking the water and, as you said, the National Trust for Scotland had to pay £700 for the palace in 1932. That wasn’t a huge sum then, but it was half of their very first gift.

MacGibbon and Ross had been desperately unhappy about how … they said they were very melancholy that it was falling into disrepair and would not last much longer. So had they been alive, they would have been delighted.

[JB]
Excellent. Well, let’s move on from Culross, which is old and impressive but, as you say, quite modest, unlike the majestic Culzean Castle. But that had very modest beginnings.

[JBI]
Yes, indeed. It, like many of these great country houses and palaces, had started out as a tower house. Places like, for example, Drumlanrig Castle also has a tower house buried inside it. Culzean started out in the 1590s a relatively modest tower house, and it wasn’t until the 1740s where Sir Thomas Kennedy, who was the 9th Earl, began to modernise his estate lands and he modernised the tower. In 1750, he created a lovely new dining room with views out onto the terraces. And later, it was extended upwards by Robert Adam to become the glorious building that it is now. It’s glorious both from the seaside and the land side. I was there yesterday, and I never tire of going to Culzean. It’s so lovely.

[JB]
There’s so much to do there. I was there maybe a few years ago now and I was taken by the Trust’s Head of Archaeology underneath the castle to the Smuggler’s Cave. So, if anyone fancies a trip there, that’s definitely something to do.

Aberdeenshire, of course. Aberdeenshire has an embarrassment of riches as far as castles are concerned. Let’s talk about Fyvie. Again, the book of MacGibbon and Ross, they don’t just give us an architectural history, they tell stories. They give us a social history. They tell of the rise and fall of dynasties and what happens in this instance when you back the wrong team, in this case the Jacobites.

[JBI]
Yes, they did. MacGibbon and Ross were tremendous storytellers. They didn’t just survey the buildings; they told social history about them. Fyvie Castle has lots and lots of ghost stories. It’s got royal guests, including Robert the Bruce, and Charles I went there. It has five towers and they are supposed to represent the five great families into whose ownership the castle came: the Prestons, the Meldrums, the Setons, the Gordons and the Leiths.

They didn’t actually build the five towers named after them, but it’s a really nice story that can’t quite be validated. Another story is that the Gordons used to ride their horses on what is the widest spiral or wheel staircase I believe in Britain. That’s 10ft wide. Each step is 10ft wide.

[JB]
As you do. As you do! And what was this bit I read about them backing the wrong horse and they lost a lot of their property because they backed the Jacobites?

[JBI]
Lots of great families lost, and it reverted to the Crown in 1694 when the 4th Earl of Dunfermline forfeited the estate due to his allegiance to the Jacobite cause. And then it was sold on to the Gordon family after that.

[JB]
Let’s do a couple more briefly. Drum Castle, also in Aberdeenshire, now that is another prime example of how a tower house was adapted over the centuries.

[JBI]
Yes, it’s slightly different though. It’s different to the way that Culzean adapted its tower house, in that this huge 13th-century – it’s a very, very early building, this huge massive tower – instead of trying to incorporate it into a new building, they just bolted on a Jacobite wing to the side of it. So, they still had the ancestral tall tower that could be seen as a symbol of lordly power, and they had the convenience of a Jacobite tower to the right of it. That’s a different way of changing and accommodating the needs of your families.

[JB]
Let’s do one more – what about Brodick on Arran? It looks like it’s centuries and centuries old, but in its current form it’s not really very old at all?

[JBI]
No, it dates back to 1844. It’s your quintessentially Romantic Baronial castle, and it’s on the island of Arran, which is often called Scotland in miniature. It was given to William, the future Duke of Hamilton, and his bride Princess Marie of Baden, as a marital home. It was they in the 1840s who expanded the building to make it a comfortable country home as it is now. But I believe there’s some exciting archaeology going on there at the moment.

[JB]
In your book, you ask some questions. Did we treat our castles and historic houses better in the 20th century than in the 19th? I think I might know the answer to that. And what of the future? What would you say? What are your answers?

[JBI]
Well, we certainly treated them very badly in the 50s, 60s and 70s. I think in the last quarter of the 20th century, there was a much greater awareness of the joys of preserving heritage buildings and the need not to squander our history. I fear that, as we’re now in the 21st century, perhaps the pendulum is swinging again, and I hear people talk about buildings ‘dying a good death’. No, we must not let buildings that represent Scotland’s history just wither away.

[JB]
Are you saying that there is a growing body of people opposing restoration conservation? Who say we shouldn’t really get in the way of progress; we shouldn’t be too sentimental; we should move on?

[JBI]
There is a body of opinion that says that, but there are also many, many people who like me are concerned to preserve and conserve our history through the buildings that are such a rich evocation of Scotland’s past.

[JB]
Did you wander around the country on foot and on bicycles and ferries, visiting all the castles yourself?

[JBI]
I did not. I was in a car with sat nav!

[JB]
Well, that makes me feel better because if you’d said no, I just used Dr Google, I would have been very disappointed! But you did go around them, because you found out that they’re used for all sorts of things. They’re wedding venues. They are community venues. They are hotels, and many, many are lived in as you live in one. Tell me about where you live and how you came across it.

[JBI]
We were driving along the A75 one day and saw a sign saying Castle for Sale, and I said to my husband, ooh, let’s go and look.

[JB]
That’s always a bad thing!

[JBI]
I know! We fell in love with this ruined tower house, which was selling for an incredibly cheap price! And gradually, gradually, we restored it. And that’s where I’m speaking to you now from.

[JB]
What’s the best thing about living in a castle? And the worst thing?

[JBI]
Well, at the moment I think the worst thing must be the stairs, because my hips are playing up at the moment. The best thing about our particular castle or tower house is the views, because we’re elevated as so many of these places were – and we have fabulous views across the bay, across the water. We have hills behind us, a lovely garden, although I say it myself. So yes, it’s the situation as much as the building itself, which is lovely. The building’s lovely.

[JB]
And do you feel that sense of history yourself?

[JBI]
Yes, I do. Every time I go up our staircase – we have a spiral staircase – every time I go up, I look at the underside of these stairs and I think about the men – and it would always be men – who put these steps in position. They had to have so much strength and so much skill. It’s just a work of art, our staircase. And it would have just been stonemasons and ordinary men from around the countryside who did that. And they’ve created something really special.

[JB]
Well, long may you continue to do that. And I just have to add one more thing: that when we do talk about these fabulous buildings and castles, we’re not just learning about the families that built and owned them, we learn about the servants. We learn about the gardeners. We learn about the communities that lived and worked around them. So that’s another reason, if it was necessary, to get yourself out there and visit some of our fabulous buildings.

It has been a pleasure, Janet. Thank you very much for joining us on the Love Scotland podcast.

[JBI]
Thank you.

[JB]
Janet’s book A Passion for Castles: The story of MacGibbon and Ross and the castles they surveyed is out now and is published by Birlinn. And of course, if we have whetted your appetite for any of the castles mentioned, or indeed the entire gamut of castles, palaces, towers, whatever in the Trust’s care, head to the website for more information.

And remember, it is your membership and your generous donations that keep them here for future generations to marvel at. Well, that’s all from us for now. I’ll be back with another Love Scotland 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

Three voices: male voiceover [MV]; Jackie Bird [JB]; Rob Mackean [RM]

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

[JB]
Tucked away in the North West Highlands on the banks of a loch lies Inverewe Garden. This is no ordinary garden. It’s sublimely beautiful, yes, but Inverewe is also a bucket list destination for those who love plants and want to see how the nearby Gulf Stream allows many of its species to defy the Scottish climate. It allows a tropical oasis to exist cheek by jowl to a traditional Highland landscape.

But today’s podcast isn’t about Inverewe Garden; it’s about the man who created it: Osgood Mackenzie. His horticultural legacy is well known, but today’s visitors to Inverewe may not be aware that, for a time, Osgood’s personal life overshadowed his garden paradise. That was when this man of high status, with an impeccable pedigree, became embroiled in a family court case, its bitter machinations widely covered in the newspapers of the day. That story is now a play which has been performed at the Edinburgh Fringe and at Inverewe.

It’s called The Curious Case of Osgood Mackenzie, written by Rob Mackean, who is my guest today. Welcome, Rob.

[RM]
Thank you, Jackie. Nice to be here.

[JB]
What’s the thinking behind the play’s name? The curious case of Osgood Mackenzie …

[RM]
So, the thinking behind it is that Osgood has been held up as this scion of Victorian society and he established these gardens. But when I started to learn a bit more about his background, both through his own book A Hundred Years in the Highlands but there was very little about him in the book. There was mention of a daughter, and in fact in one of the editions of the book I’ve read, his daughter did an extra chapter and an introduction. Clearly, he had a wife at some point because there’s a daughter, but he doesn't mention the wife at all and there’s absolutely nothing about her in the book.

And I then came across another book called Eighty Years in the Highlands by a lady called Pauline Butler, which filled in some of the background. And it turns out that Osgood did indeed have a wife. The marriage seemed to go off the rails fairly quickly. They did have a daughter and she became something of a weapon between him and his wife, and eventually he tried to divorce his wife twice because the divorce wasn’t allowed. So, he appealed it, and it wasn’t allowed on appeal either.

[JB]
So, that was your starting point. This book that he wrote was enough to set you on the trail. That was in 1921. He was aged about what, 78 then? Is that correct?

[RM]
Yes, 78-ish.

[JB]
And the book itself, it’s an autobiography of a sort. It’s a window into a privileged Highland life at the time. It deals with everything, from his forebears – it’s an odd book – to his first dog …

[RM]
And his first gun! Aged 9!

[JB]
He was obsessive with Highland pursuits, outdoor pursuits. It’s a page-turner if you are into how many fish he caught and their weight … but not really one to set the literary heather on fire. It’s not a people book – and we will get on to the absence, as you spoke about, of his wife – but who figures greatly is his mother. Tell us about Lady Mary.

[RM]
Yes. Lady Mary, she was a girl from London who married his father. She was his father’s second wife. His first wife died in childbirth after giving him two sons, so he married again. Mary Hanbury, who then became Lady Mary Mackenzie, and she came up to Gairloch from London society and had to become the wife of a Highland laird, which she took to with gusto, which included learning to speak Gaelic fluently and managing the estates and everything else.

Unfortunately, they had only been married for a short while when the strains of managing the estate and so on led him to, I think, have what we would call a nervous breakdown. Of course, it wasn’t called that then, and they ended up going off to France, with her pregnant, for a rest cure. He died within a year of Osgood being born, and Lady Mary was left with two Highland estates, two stepsons, one direct son – and she had to just pick it all up and go with it, because neither of her stepsons were in their majority. Kenneth Mackenzie wasn’t able to manage the estate so somebody had to do it, and she did.

[JB]
It seems that even from those early years, they had a very, very close bond – she became mother and father to Osgood.

[RM]
Yes. He had no significant male role model in his life directly because she did it all. Now, when he was very young, they were still in France. They employed a French accoucheuse is the French name – I guess we may well call her a wet nurse – and within a very short space of time, possibly as little as a day, Lady Mary heard Osgood gurning somewhere in the middle of the night. Got up, she came in and found the nursemaid sleeping and Osgood gurning in the way that babies do, and after I think a fairly brief discussion she sacked her on the spot and more or less said no woman would ever look after her baby again.

[JB]
And from that moment on, it seems they were inseparable. His mother toured Europe with him. She eventually bought him the tracts of land that were to become Inverewe. This was in 1864, when he was around 22. Let’s leap now to the age of 35. Osgood is 35 and he decides, or perhaps his mother decides, it’s time to get married, and that’s when the problems begin.

[RM]
Well, he gets married because the estates needed money, and the figure of £5,000 is mentioned somewhere. He had met Minna Moss on a couple of occasions and his mother found out when they would be in London; the Mosses would rent one of the big houses around Gairloch as a hunting place.

[JB]
So Minna Moss came from a family who were not short of a bob or two.

[RM]
Her father was a wealthy banker in Liverpool, yes.

[JB]
So, the Mackenzies had the Highland estate but not a lot of cash; Minna did. OK, continue with the story.

[RM]
Yes, her father was a baronet as well, which I think went down rather well with Lady Mary. And she had money, had even said that she could live in the Highlands. Her mother basically said, well, she’s going to be in London, I know when; so, you’re going to be in London too and you should go and call on her.

[JB]
So not exactly a love match here, are we? We’re not talking about a great love.

[RM]
No, it was not a marriage of passion, that’s for sure.

[JB]
Do we know what Minna thought of Osgood?

[RM]
The direct answer to that is no, we don’t. Nothing in her own words. We do, however, know that the first time he proposed, she refused because she believed his mother would live with them.

[JB]
How did they sort that out?

[RM]
Well, her father asked for reassurances from his mother that this would not be the case, so she wrote a letter to that effect, which Osgood took the second time he proposed … which clearly from subsequent events she had absolutely no intention of sticking by. But this was what it would take to get her son married to the money.

[JB]
Crikey. Didn’t Minna’s dad build a house for Lady Mary on the estate to encourage her perhaps to leave the family home?

[RM]
No, I think it was more that she went to live in another one of the houses on the estate called Kerrisdale. And it was more that, for whatever reason, it was decided that she needed her own residence. She couldn’t go and live with one of her stepsons. So, Osgood wanted to build her a house, which he borrowed the money from Minna’s father to build the house.

[JB]
Ah, that was it.

[RM]
It wasn’t that Sir Thomas Moss built it, but he ended up financing it.

[JB]
Clearly Minna was onto this. She knew their relationship could potentially be trouble. I also read that in the house, Gaelic was spoken almost exclusively, so that must have been a very, very difficult situation for Minna. Although no shrinking violet herself, not exactly welcoming if you can’t understand what everyone’s saying.

[RM]
Not at all. And when she was having her baby, she was under the influence of chloroform, which can disinhibit you. And she said ‘They speak in Gaelic. I know they’re talking about me. They just want to get the baby away from me’. So, you’re absolutely right. It reinforces the feeling of she’s just an outsider. She’s just come in; she’s good for the money, but she’s no good for anything else.

[JB]
They had a child, Mairi, and she was born in 1879. It was two years into the marriage. Things had already gone off the rails a bit. I think they realised that it wasn’t a happy one. When did that become obvious that the marriage was maybe going to end in scandal? That was divorce in those days.

[RM]
Not for some years. I think, from memory, Mairi was 4/5/6 … I mean, still very, very young. The signs were very firmly there though, because Minna was not well after the birth and she had to go for a rest down in Buxton as was prescribed by the doctor. Don’t know why Buxton, apart from the waters, but on the way back, Osgood went up to Scotland, came back, picked her up and took her back. And they stopped in Edinburgh where he consulted his lawyer as to his rights over the child, and it was established there that they were absolute under Scots law. It wasn’t quite the case in England at that stage, but under Scots law at that time, the father had absolute right. The mother had no rights.

[JB]
Is that when he started divorce proceedings?

[RM]
No, not for some time. He kept trying to bend Minna to his will. And a lot of this came from the subsequent court cases and verbatim reporting. There were letters between them as well, so it ended up that they were corresponding by letter.

[JB]
In what way was he trying to bend her to his will?

[RM]
Oh, just saying that she was wilful and disobedient and not what was expected, and she was supposed to obey his commands without question, which just beggars belief nowadays. And, she had this curious idea that she came from a family with money and was clearly in many ways a very modern character. She wasn’t expecting to obey her husband’s every whim. That certainly wasn’t the model that she had grown up with, so she didn’t do it, and she kicked back.

[JB]
He had chosen the right woman in terms of her inheritance and in terms of the money that her family had, but the wrong woman because she had come from a privileged background herself and she wasn’t going to go quietly. She was going to fight him all the way. When did this go to court and how big a scandal was it? How widely was it covered in the newspapers?

[RM]
It was covered very widely. It was known as the Mackenzie case. I would say it came to a head where Osgood and his mother one morning took the child forcefully away from Minna, which ended up with bruising on her arms, which was well documented as part of the divorce proceedings. His brother Sir Kenneth witnessed the bruising and testified to that effect in court, at which point Minna left the house and never stayed under the same roof again.

[JB]
And her daughter was how old then, roughly?

[RM]
6. There were some years before the whole thing came to court.

[JB]
And did Osgood take Minna to court on grounds of her unreasonable behaviour?

[RM]
He tried to prove desertion. The grounds for divorce, then, were either desertion or adultery, and he couldn’t prove adultery but he could try to prove desertion because basically she had walked out and said right, that’s it, I’m done. I’m never staying under the same roof as you again.

He tried to do that, but with the extensive testimony from members of the family and lots of other people around it, the judges sided with Minna and refused the action for divorce. Divorce then was … effectively, the woman was regarded as legally dead, so all of her property went to her husband.

[JB]
Now we’ve spent a little bit of time talking about the relationship between Osgood and his mother, and this is something that the judges also commented on during the court case.

[RM]
Absolutely, absolutely. And it was mentioned in the judgement very specifically that Lady Mary was of an imperious temper. She was a dominating character. I love the phrase ‘imperious temper’. I imagine exactly what that was like. And they specifically said that had it not been for her influence over the marriage, it may well have been a perfectly happy and long-lasting marriage. But her love for her son went ‘beyond the normal’, very specifically was mentioned in the judges’ summing up.

[JB]
My goodness. Well, let’s take a quick break and when we come back, the curious case of Osgood Mackenzie becomes even curiouser.

[MV]
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[JB]
Welcome back. I’m with Rob Mackean and we are talking about the life and not-so-happy love life of Osgood Mackenzie. So, Rob, Osgood has tried to divorce his wife once on the grounds of desertion. That’s thrown out. He tries again on what grounds?

[RM]
So, he appealed. He appealed the original judgement because he thought it ridiculous. So, he went to court as he so often did and threw money at it, despite the fact that money was apparently relatively scarce, but there was always money for a court case. He appealed to the Court of Session and what came out of the appeal was actually something that was very important later on, because again, he was appealing and trying to divorce her on the grounds of desertion. But the judge summing up on the appeal said that not only was he not allowing the divorce, but he noted specifically that Minna had not sought a decree of separation, which would have basically given her own independent legal existence. But had she done so, it would have been granted.

[JB]
You can explain the relevance of that later. In the meantime, I’m concerned about Mairi. Young Mairi. Was she having any contact with her mother during the court case? Was she allowed any contact by Osgood and Lady Mary?

[RM]
She was allowed minimal contact: two hours, one day a week was mentioned at one point. There was an Act of Parliament which gave more rights to the mother during the time of this case, so she was able to go to court to establish more visiting rights, including Mairi spending August and September, periods in the summer holidays with her, but she was being schooled at home by Lady Mary. Eventually at the age of 12, Mairi wrote to Minna, her mother, to say I don’t want to see you anymore.

[JB]
What a terrible letter for a mother to receive.

[RM]
Must have been devastating, but she received the letter. Minna then met Mairi in person and heard it from her directly, so it wasn’t that it was dictated by somebody else. But given the imperious temper of Lady Mary and the sway on a 12-year-old that she might have, who is to know where that voice was actually coming from.

It is interesting that actually in the house, in the current Inverewe House, there is a book inscribed from Minna to her daughter, to her ‘little T’ – she used to call her Thyo, which was her middle name, and she was forbidden from doing that. That is just about the only present, gift, anything that can be found from Minna to her daughter. It was pretty sudden, pretty severe that her daughter didn’t want to see her anymore.

[JB]
And do we know what the relationship was like between Mairi and her father at that time?

[RM]
It seems to have been very good. They seem to have been close. It was the relationship of a girl with her father, as far as one can tell, and subsequently, Mairi wrote forewords to A hundred years and she took on her father’s work when he died in 1921, of developing the garden and maintaining it and so on.

[JB]
Well, the book that you mentioned by Osgood is dedicated to Mairi, and the inscription I have here, it says ‘To my daughter who loves the Gairloch, who keeps our simple Highland ways, and for whose strong, unchanging love I am forever grateful’. These were different times. Part of me as a parent myself was saying, why didn’t you, as you got older, as you began to understand what had happened, did you try to make contact with your mother? Did she?

[RM]
There’s no evidence of that. There are rumours that her mother came to her wedding. Mairi married Robert Hanbury. The Hanbury name has come up previously, so she married a cousin as her first marriage. There are rumours that her mother appeared at the back of the church and then went away again. But no, there’s no evidence of any direct contact.

[JB]
How sad. And then there is another twist in the tale: Minna died in 1909. How old was she?

[RM]
In 1909 she would have been 57.

[JB]
OK. And Mairi would have been about 30 then, so she was an adult. Osgood then made a very strange decision.

[RM]
Yes. Because they were still married, when her Will was published, he found that there was no provision in it for either Mairi or him. So, he followed the money and decided to challenge her Will in court on the basis that he was still her husband and under Scots law at that time, and in fact under the Married Women’s Property Act, he had rights. He had rights as her husband, even though they had been separated for so long, so he went to court again.

Luckily, of course, her executives were fairly well funded because she had also inherited her brother’s share of her father’s estate. Her brother died of typhoid in the 1890s and left his estate to Minna, so there was plenty of money there. There was plenty of money to defend. It eventually went on to the courts, and this is the point at which the judge’s comments from the House of Lords appeal on the divorce case become really important. Because they looked at the marriage contract that was drawn up. They looked at the Married Women’s Property Act, but they also looked at that previous judgement and said that because the judge then had said, had she asked for a decree of separation, it would have been granted. There were no grounds for regarding her property as being under Scots law. She was resident in England, domiciled in England, therefore English law applied. There wasn’t any property in Scotland for Osgood to have any claim over.

[JB]
So, Osgood failed again.

[RM]
Yet again, and I have given Minna a line that’s gone down very well in every performance of this play so far, which is ‘so even in death I win … again’. And the audience seem to love that! So yes, she did. Absolutely, absolutely. But of course, this was also the influence of his mother, in my view, reaching out in true melodrama fashion from beyond the grave. Her influence on Osgood extended way beyond her death, to the point where he thought, oh, I’ll just go for some more money to help run the estate.

JB]
You mentioned earlier that there’s no real evidence of any relationship between Mairi and her mother. And going even further than that, we haven’t been able to find any photographs of Minna at all. It’s like she’s been airbrushed from history.

[RM]
Indeed. And of course, given the times, photography was developing. You would have thought that somewhere between the 1870s and 1909 there would have been at least one picture. So, there are still avenues to explore in this. There’s still mysteries to solve.

[JB]
Was this just the case of a young English socialite making a bad choice in marriage, who had different expectations of where she was going to live and the life she was going to lead? Or was it clearly a domineering husband with an interfering mother who orchestrated the marriage and then who helped make sure that it was never going to survive? What’s your view?

[RM]
It wasn’t just a bad choice. Lots of people have made bad choices in the past. And ok, you make a bad choice. But actually, they can learn to live with their partner because they just do. That’s the choice they made. There was far more to it than this. And Minna said several times, through the divorce courts and letters and things, I am not going to be second fiddle to your mother.Can you say you’ve cleaved to your wife as you cleaved to your mother. Can you say that you obey your wife’s every command as you obey your mother’s? So no, it wasn’t just a slightly bad decision and a bit of buyer’s remorse. There was something far deeper going on.

[JB]
I think one of the most unsettling things you’ve said is his visit to the lawyer, long before anything overt happened in the marriage to indicate that things were not going well. That he was preparing for a fight and he just wanted to make sure and he bided his time, which is not nice.

[RM]
No, no. Well, the other thing which we didn’t touch on is when they were first married, within a couple of weeks his draft Will arrived. His mother drafted his Will; and in the Will, Minna was expressly not left any part of Inverewe House. She was given £800. That was it.

[JB]
Within a few weeks of marriage?

[RM]
Within a few weeks of marriage, yes. And his mother did not attend the wedding. She was too ill apparently. Even at that stage, his mother was, like, great, got the money? Fine. Cut her out. She’s not going to have a normal inheritance of property if you die. Oh no, I’m going to get my house back.

[JB]
This is such a sad tale of a family breakdown. But it’s also a sort of social narrative of its time, isn’t it? Of the lives of the upper classes and the subjugation of women in family law.

[RM]
Yes, absolutely. But the fact that it wasn’t static, it was developing. And of course, through that time, through the late 19th and into the early 20th centuries, Osgood would have seen the beginnings of the suffragette movement and makes no reference to it at all in his book of course.

[JB]
Mairi went on to take over at Inverewe and to continue her father’s legacy. So, there was a warm and loving relationship between them despite all that had gone on when perhaps she was a child and far too young to know?

[RM]
Yes, yes indeed.

[JB]
What about people who might argue that we should not be retelling a rather unsavoury episode in the private life of a man long dead who can’t answer back?

[RM]
Yes, that is one point of view, absolutely. The feedback has actually been really interesting because we have had a couple of family members from the Mackenzie line because Osgood himself or Mairi didn’t have any surviving children. She did have two children who died in infancy.The family have their own archives and we’ve had a couple of people saying, ‘actually this is something we don’t talk about in the family enough. It’s a thing that we don’t know how to deal with’.

To me, exploration of something that went on – I have a number of strong women in my life: my mother, my wife, my daughter – and it was thinking, how would they have reacted in that situation? It was an interesting … it’s not judging; it’s not preachy as a play, but it does illustrate the inherent contradictions of many, many things in Victorian times. This ability to say, ‘I killed this, I killed that, I killed hundreds of things. I don’t understand why all the wildlife’s disappearing’. Which he pretty much says in his book, alongside the fact that elsewhere, like in Dickson’s book, there’s a chapter on botany where it basically says, here’s where all the rare plants are. Please don’t go and pick them, because there won’t be any left for anybody else.

It’s all of these contradictions. But that is part of the era and I think yes, it would be very easy to say he can’t answer back; there’s no justice in this. We have so many contradictions in our own times. I think it would be far too easy to look at it through that lens and say yeah, we’re perfect. And no, they weren’t. And in many ways, there was this other side to him, which is it took him decades to build the garden and that requires a love for the plants and the ability to nurture them and develop them and plan out and think very long term and so on. And he could do that with plants, but he couldn’t do it with these very close personal relationships.

[JB]
Osgood McKenzie, as colourful as the garden he created. Rob Mackean, thank you very much indeed for sharing that story with us.

[RM]
Thank you.

[JB]
The curious case of Osgood Mackenzie, who may have had a difficult period in his personal life but, as Rob says, his horticultural legacy lives on at Inverewe Garden. And you can find out all about Inverewe, including the garden’s opening times, on the Trust website at nts.org.uk

It is a spectacular location and well worth a visit. And that’s all from this edition of Love Scotland. 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]; Caroline Hirst [CH]

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

[JB]
I wish my words could do justice to the beauty of my surroundings right now. I’m in the walled garden of Kellie Castle, near Pittenweem in Fife. The glorious late summer colour of the garden is overlooked by the baronial splendour of the castle itself. It’s a scene of deep peace, untroubled by contemporary life. In fact, I could have time-travelled to a date any time over the past few hundred years and my surroundings would be just about the same. And that is the wonderful consequence of protecting our heritage. We know what people built and how they lived because it’s still there to experience.

But just as our fortunes ebb and flow, so do those of buildings. Not so very long ago, this castle was a crumble away from ruin and its ultimate downfall. However, salvation was at hand, not in the shape of the National Trust for Scotland – that part of the story comes later – but at the hands of a remarkable multi-talented family who poured so much time, money and love into this place that they pretty much willed it back to life.

I’m now inside Kellie in a small room high up in the north-west tower, whose base dates back to the 14th century. If you can hear any squeaking in the distance, I’m told we’ve got some bats behind the panelling. Well, I’m not alone. Joining me is Caroline Hirst, the property manager here, who like me has fallen under the spell of Kellie and its history. Welcome to the podcast, Caroline.

[CH]
Thank you, it’s a real pleasure.

[JB]
I’m very glad you’re here, not least because of the bats! I am daunted by the scope of Kellie’s story. Give me a whistle-stop tour of the earliest origins and let’s say you stop around the mid-1800s.

[CH]
The first known mention of Kellie Castle is around about 1150 in a charter. Then, the Seward family who came up from Northumberland, had it for a number of years. The oldest part of the castle as it stands today dates to 1360 – that is the north-west tower, as we are here today. Basically, that was the first 3 floors of that tower. It was the Oliphant clan or family who had this area; it was purely for defensive reasons. They subsequently had Kellie for 250 years and developed Kellie as it stands today. It really is a remarkable building.
Between around 1573, when the east tower was built separate to the north-west tower; then they created the south-west tower between 1592 and 1606, and added all towers together by the central part, creating almost like a mansion house rather than a defensive castle as we think of a castle. That was subsequently sold to the Erskine family, who are still very much a local family in Fife. They had it for 10 generations before there wasn’t an heir available to take it on. It was then passed to the Earls of Mar and Kellie through a dispute that was held over the title and the lands. Sadly, it was then left, basically, to rack and ruin.

[JB]
How bad was it?

[CH]
The Lorimers first stumbled across it in the 1870s. Professor James Lorimer, who we’ll be hearing about shortly, he had chronic asthma and he used to come up every summer from Edinburgh. He was a professor of public law at Edinburgh University. They would come up to gain the sea air, to make him feel a lot better. They were looking for a friend for somewhere to rent in the area and they stumbled across this farm track. There are records of them coming up through the old gates up to the castle. They came across this semi-ruinous castle with the roof slightly falling in; there weren’t any windows intact. They decided to have a picnic and explore. There are records of them going round, saying ‘wow, this is incredible!’ It almost looked like something they couldn’t take on, and they were still thinking of their friend at that point.
It wasn’t until they went home and started to really think about Kellie, that they thought ‘We could make this possible’. Hence, they contacted the Earl of Mar and Kellie and had an agreement drawn up for 38 years as what they call an ‘improver tenant’. The Earl of Mar and Kellie made it wind- and water-tight, and they paid a very small sum of £25 a year to basically make this possible as a summer residence. They obviously then spent a lot of time using local craftsmen.

[JB]
Before we do that though, I think we’re under-playing the state of it. I found some memoirs of Louise, one of the daughters of James Lorimer, who said that neighbouring landowners thought they were daft for taking it on. She wrote that ‘there were great holes letting the rain and snow through the roofs; many of the floors had become unsafe; every pane of glass was broken; swallows built in the coronets on the ceilings while the ceilings themselves sagged and in some cases fell into the rooms.’ It was a project!

[CH]
It was a project, and I think that’s why at first they were thought a bit crazy to take it on. But as they thought about it, what was important about Kellie and why they made this big decision is that this property had been almost lost in a time capsule. Like a lot of properties in Scotland like this, they would often have had in the Victorian era quite a big change of interiors. What you have at Kellie is a time capsule right the way back to the 14th century to a degree in the north-west tower, and then to the 16th and 17th centuries – just sat waiting to be restored.

[JB]
Although it was in a terrible state of disrepair, it had dodged a bullet. Because the Victorians were quite keen on coming in and saying ‘let’s gut this place’ in a kind of 1960s/70s way.

[CH]
That’s right. All the previous decoration had been lost at that point. That’s why Kellie was so significant. They realised that. They were a highly educated family, highly creative and they knew what Kellie represented.

[JB]
Tell me about the family themselves.

[CH]
Professor James Lorimer was a Professor of Public Law at the University of Edinburgh, a very well-educated gentleman. He had first met his wife Hannah coming across on a boat from Leith to Fife. She was extremely seasick, and she was a lot younger; she was 16 at the time and he was 32. Unknown to him, four years later they would be married. It was a true love match; they were truly in love with one another. She was a real beauty and they had 6 children.
All of the children were influenced by their parents’ artistic interests. Certainly the 6 children, apart from James who was the eldest and became a merchant and travelled extensively – and finally died sadly in his early 40s in South Africa – the other 5 children were influenced, boys and girls. They all had the opportunities to develop their skills. Even the girls go to Edinburgh University.

[JB]
Let’s nail some dates here. It’s 1878 eventually and that’s the night the family first moved in here. And it’s still terrible, and you can see the stars through the roof! It wasn’t habitable in winter, so they came here in the summer, but then Kellie began to work its magic. When James Lorimer, the father, decided to start the renovation, he could have just got a whole load of workmen in and say ‘just do what you have to do’. But no. He decided to do it authentically and get artisans, I suppose is the best word.

[CH]
Very much in that Arts & Crafts ethos. We know about William Morris down in England and the Arts & Crafts movement down below the Scottish Border into England. What they were doing up here was a movement in a similar sense and time. Using local craftsmen and local materials – that is what is so important at Kellie Castle. They were using a local architect in Elie to come up and help them; also local plasterworkers from Pittenweem to come and copy some of the plasterwork that was already there and create copies of moulds. The Vine Room, if anybody’s been in there, you can see part of the relief isn’t quite as deep. That is exactly what they copied from what was already there. It showed real skill.

[JB]
We’re going to talk a lot about the influence of Kellie and the influence of those craftsmen on the children and what they did later in their careers. But before we do that, I’d like to talk about Hannah, their mother – this beautiful young woman who eventually knocked out 6 children in 12 years. She was pretty busy. Women are so often air-brushed from history because of the social confines of the time, but she was artistic. She was a gifted painter; she had all those children, but she was a driving force. She knew she wanted her children to achieve.

[CH]
Yes. Certainly, she would set little projects for the children in art, drawing, needlework, to the point where Hannah would even start doing plaster casts. She spent time with the plasterworkers learning how to do …

[JB]
This is young Hannah, the daughter?

[CH]
Young Hannah. The girls were given equal opportunities to the boys. As I say, they all went to Edinburgh University to study. I look to Professor James Lorimer, because the father was a very modern-thinking man. He was not a man of his time where girls should be married off, have children and be home-makers. He was very much of the thought that girls should have equal opportunities like the sons.

[JB]
They were so unusual for their time because whenever Hannah and her three daughters went to Edinburgh, they attended classes in Greek, French, German, philosophy, Bible studies and geology. Women weren’t allowed to graduate but you can imagine what someone like Hannah the mother could have achieved but for restrictions of the day.

[CH]
But luckily, they had those opportunities. Those opportunities and that experience that she had in the creative arts then followed on to create such a phenomenal dynasty.

[JB]
As we’re at the top of the castle, which was a hideaway artist’s studio, let’s talk about one of the sons first of all: John Henry, who was the third Lorimer child. He was born in 1856. Photographs of him, Caroline, show a sort of intense, slightly shy man? What was he like?

[CH]
He was a quiet man. There’s actually a picture just to the side of us while we’re sat here, sat with his dog Burley. He was quite a tall gentleman. He retired after his mother’s death in 1916 to Kellie, staying here on his own until his death in 1936. He was quite happy on his own – he was a bachelor; he had never married.

[JB]
He painted his first watercolour at 8. I don’t know what I was doing at 8, but I wasn’t painting watercolours! His first oil painting 3 years later, so he had a prodigious talent.

[CH]
Incredible! By his 40s, he had property in London, Edinburgh – albeit he always came back to his beloved Kellie Castle. He had first gone down to do portraiture – that’s where the money was, in a sense. That’s how he gained his small fortune. He did 130 portraits in his career.

[JB]
But he didn’t like doing it?

[CH]
He didn’t and he always retreated back to what I would call genre paintings.

[JB]
He wrote to his sister when he was in London and said, ‘The only hope for me is when I am free from the genre of portraiture.’ He said that he wanted to tell stories. Although his portraiture, I think – and you know far better than me – doesn’t just show likeness but shows character. So, he is achieving that.

[CH]
His portrait paintings … if you go into the John Henry Gallery here, if anybody comes to visit, you look at his mother and father – beautiful, sat side by side. It’s almost as if they’re life size; it’s almost as if they could get up from where they’re seated and walk out into the room and greet you. He really captures character and personality. In the one of his younger sister Janet Alice, he creates something that is almost like Singer Sargent, it has this feeling where he captures in paint the feeling, the satin. He’s influenced by so many people, even down to the Dutch painters and Vermeer. This idea of capturing light that is quite incredible in his paintings, even of his interiors.

[JB]
Do you know what’s incredible? It’s that we are sitting here in the studio where he created. The castle itself, for anyone who’s interested in art, the walls are laden with John Henry’s work.

[CH]
This new publication has come out recently – Reflections – and it really captures chapter by chapter the idea of home, family; the idea of a spirit of place that Kellie represents. It’s not just a property; it has a being in essence that has worked through all of the Lorimer family.

[JB]
You say he never married. Can you talk to me about one particular painting, which absolutely captivated me: The 11th Hour. It’s here.

[CH]
The 11th Hour has finally come home, just in this past year. Very kindly, the Lorimer family have gifted it to the National Trust for Scotland. The painting is quite incredible. It’s very atmospheric; it’s actually influenced by the room it’s now hanging in – that’s the Vine Room. It shows a woman sat just prior to, or just after (it could be either), her marriage day. She’s sat there looking really quite forlorn.

[JB]
It’s the saddest wedding picture I’ve ever seen.

[CH]
It is. There is a discussion that it was also known as Marriage of Convenience. There’s also a discussion that it could represent sisters that had to depart Kellie.

[JB]
Because two of them did, didn’t they?

[CH]
When they married, both Hannah and Janet Alice actually left the property to marry and move abroad. Sadly, this could represent, as in the painting The Flight of the Swallows, it shows the sadness of people leaving Kellie Castle. They did return, but it was the feeling that the family was being changed. They were so close.

[JB]
The story I most like is the story that it could potentially be John Henry’s lost love.

[CH]
It could be! There are various stories about a lady called Harriet that he was madly in love with. Unfortunately, her family were not happy about the match because he was seen as somebody that wasn’t financially stable in his profession as a painter. There could be reasons … He maybe met his true love but he never had the opportunity to settle down with her.

[JB]
It is a poignant piece.

[CH]
There could be all sorts of reasons.

[JB]
He does seem a sad man but, as you say, perhaps happy in his own company. He took over the lease here in 1916 when his mother died, as you said. His paintings sort of went out of fashion and he lived here at his beloved Kellie until old age forced him to move.

[CH]
He also had a property down in Pittenweem called The Gyles that he would retreat to when he got particularly cold at Kellie. And I can tell you, it does get very, very cold! Without any central heating. As he was here on his own, maybe he wouldn’t have had servants to light fires. As a bachelor, I think he probably retreated down to Pittenweem in the worst months.
They do say that he used to wander round in a long, black coat with hot water bottles fastened to the front with a bit of string, to keep himself warm. He must have been quite a vision because he was a tall, quite well-made gentleman. I think in the end, I feel he was almost married to Kellie; it became his muse in a way.

[JB]
How lovely.

[CH]
I can understand, as somebody who spends a lot of time here. It has a personality, this place. It has a spirit which becomes part of you and becomes almost like a friend.

[JB]
Well, on that note let’s take a short break from the considerable talents of the Lorimers. But don’t worry – when we come back, we’ve got more!

[MV]
Scotland’s history? Think battlefields; think castles; think great glens and historic homes. But think tenements too, and townhouses 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 podcast I suppose we should be calling ‘The Lorimers have got talent’ because they have it by the bucket load. Before the break, Caroline, we talked about John Henry, the third Lorimer – keep me right here. His older sister Hannah, she was another incredibly creative member of the family.

[CH]
She was so talented in so many ways. She could be an artist, she could carve, she …

[JB]
Her sculptures are in one of the bedrooms – beautiful!

[CH]
The Blue Room. The Mother and Child, which sits above the Lorimer cradle – she captured again the feeling of basically the human spirit very much in all her artwork. She was so taken by the work of the craftsmen that worked here, to the point where she even spent time with them almost like an apprentice, learning how to create the moulds of the plasterwork. She even went on to take on commissions and actually undertake work elsewhere. When she married Everard im Thurn, she was very accomplished at creating watercolours, botanical drawings namely, in this case orchids. They are now kept in the botanical collections at Kew Garden. They’re so notable and beautifully created.

[JB]
Once again, although you say a forward-thinking family, you wonder what the girls could have achieved if they had been born in another time.

[CH]
I think Hannah probably could have achieved anything she wanted. But I think she ultimately decided to become a wife. I think she could have become very, very successful in her own right, and there is this discussion with scholars now about why didn’t she. But she made that decision. She fell in love with this gentleman who was quite a bit older than her, and it was very sad for her to leave Kellie, especially when she was so close to John Henry. It was her ultimate decision. She was a really strong character. She was known as Lorrie – that was her nickname – and she was quite a driving force throughout especially John Henry’s career.

[JB]
But she was a woman of her time, wasn’t she? It’s easy for us to put our own values on her – why didn’t you become a sculptor? It was very difficult because, in terms of her station in life, it wasn’t expected of her to do something like that.

[CH]
That’s right.

[JB]
This is the family you do not want to live next door to if you have kids of your own, do you?! We’re moving on now to another child – this is the youngest one: Robert. When I was researching this, I really got the feeling that he was the child who was most influenced by growing up here because he was an impressionable 14-year-old when the family took on Kellie. By all accounts, it had a profound effect on him.

[CH]
Yes. Robert became an architect. But he was more than an architect; he was a designer. What he created was quite incredible.

[JB]
If John Henry was quiet and had an air of sadness, Robert not so much!

[CH]
He was much more forward-going, as you would say. He was outgoing, he knew how to develop himself, how to present himself, how to make the best of every situation. Quite the complete opposite, maybe, of John Henry, who was more retiring. Robert was very good at selling himself and what he was capable of achieving, certainly.

[JB]
He became an architect and he not only designed buildings, but he designed the furniture.

[CH]
He did interiors. If you look, for instance, at Hill of Tarvit Mansionhouse, it’s literally just a stone’s throw from Kellie, 20 minutes, near Cupar. He created the design of the building for the Sharp family, the interiors to actually help house the collections that the Sharp family collected …

[JB]
Don’t say too much about Hill of Tarvit because there’s an entire podcast coming soon! Spoiler alert! But also here, the rooms are full of his distinctive furniture. He was a hugely influential architect. He was remembered by people he worked with as ‘a frugal man who resented buying coal for his architect’s office’. You could say that, but because I know what Kellie was like, and because you’ve explained the fact that they didn’t really bother about heating and they were quite a bohemian family, that might not have been the fact that he was mean, but it was what he was used to!

[CH]
That’s it. When they first all moved in as children, they were literally all staying on the east tower – that was the only part that was habitable. Imagine! There was a little letter written by one of the children about how they woke up one morning and there was ice on the windows, and they had to scratch away the ice to look at the sun coming over the Firth of Forth. It’s quite incredible. They would have literally just put on a tweed shawl – wrap yourself up, keep warm, keep active – and that was the mindset of living in a property like this. Anyone who lives in an old house, it gets particularly cold, and you learn to adapt to it.

[JB]
Absolutely, we were far more stoical in those days. Something that you intimated: he knew how to sell himself. He was not short of a bit of ego. He is famous for, among other things, the magnificent Thistle Chapel in Edinburgh’s St Giles’s Cathedral. That tells you the level of the work he was doing. But he wasn’t the most diplomatic. Again, one of his staff wrote that he told a client ‘This house will be remembered because I designed it, not because you paid for it!’

[CH]
Oh, he had self-confidence! That’s for sure. The interesting thing is – there’s a lovely photograph of him in the Earl’s Room. We’ve created a little room – the Robert Lorimer study – just to show you some of his work and some of his designs relating to some of his furniture and his draughtsmanship. The drawings of the Vine Room ceiling done while he was staying here growing up are quite superb – the elevations of Kellie. What he always comes back to in a lot of his work, you’ll notice in his architectural designs, is that he’s highly influenced by the architecture of Kellie.

[JB]
Once again, it permeates them all, doesn’t it?

[CH]
It always comes through. Even though he was this man who was very good at selling himself, he still had his roots at Kellie. Kellie was again, in a way, a muse for him in his designs.

[JB]
My favourite Robert Lorimer – I think you know what I’m going to say – is the National War Memorial in Edinburgh Castle. If you haven’t been, anyone listening to this, it’s such a serene but reverential building. That should be a podcast in itself. The controversies though surrounding that – because it took a long time to be designed and built – that must have taken up a great deal of his life?

[CH]
It must have done. What an honour to have been given that task of creating that. That’s going to be here for generations to come. He was ultimately knighted for his work, so obviously that time and the issues he maybe faced were all worth it because he became Sir Robert Lorimer as a result of his work.

[JB]
But indirectly, Robert was responsible for Kellie’s salvation once again, through his son. Tell me about that.

[CH]
Yes. When John Henry died in 1936, obviously Kellie was left again to itself. It was coming up towards the Second World War. Hew Lorimer and his wife Mary – Hew being the son of Robert Lorimer – were living in Edinburgh at the time. There was a feeling that it was not safe to be staying in Edinburgh, so they moved actually up to The Gyles firstly in Pittenweem, to stay where John Henry had spent his winters. Mines had come in from the sea at The Gyles and had exploded – it had made quite an impact on the property. Hence, they decided to come back up to Kellie. They renewed the lease and came to a property that needed quite a lot of work doing once again. Mary was quite incredible. She had the true spirit of the Lorimers within her. To say she had married a Lorimer, she was very much of the ‘Mend and Make Do’ mentality of the time.

[JB]
Hew was a sculptor and they met at art school?

[CH]
They’d fallen deeply in love. When they first came to Kellie, they had children all, I think, below the age of 3. They had three children: Robin, Monica and Henry. All those children had rooms in the south-west tower, but their mother was quite a driving force in bringing that spirit of Kellie back to life, using found objects, going round the local auctions. They said she used to go round all the auctions in a little pony and trap, finding anything that was interesting for the castle to start to furnish it again, until they could bring furnishings up from Edinburgh.

[JB]
Eventually though, it became even too much for Hew, after Mary died.

[CH]
Once Mary died, sadly he made the ultimate decision. Although they had actually been able to buy the castle from the Earl of Mar & Kellie offering it for sale to them, they made the purchase from them. But sadly, a number of years later, after Mary had died, Hew Lorimer decided in 1970 … he already had a link to the National Trust for Scotland, which had been formed in 1931 … he decided the ideal thing would be to sell it to the National Trust for Scotland. He knew what an important property this was and what was included within it and the story it told.
So, it was sold in 1970 but the lovely thing is he stayed on as the property manager, living in the east tower until his older age. He was able to tell that story to the visitor; that continuity was there. Still keeping his workshop, which we still have to this day in the Stables area.

[JB]
A fabulous exhibition of his work.

[CH]
Incredible. We’ve kept a room of his work just off the shop area as well. Sadly, he then had to go to a nursing home in St Andrews prior to his death. Subsequently, we’ve had property managers – also known as Visitor Services Managers over time – that have kept that story alive. I think there’s very few people who’ve done my job who haven’t been touched by the place. As I say, it becomes quite a true friend; it’s more than a property. It’s very difficult to lock up at night, but it’s always good to come in and say good morning! You always feel when you come in of the morning that it’s something you have to say hello to!

[JB]
What I particularly like, and I’m sure visitors will sense this too, with the furniture, the paintings, the combined talents of the Lorimers, even the family members we haven’t managed to discuss, they’re all still within these walls, as you say. It isn’t a cold series of exhibits that were purchased down the years; it’s a family history.

[CH]
It is. And the friendship with the Lorimers has been maintained. I’ve been friends with them for many years. It’s wonderful to keep that relationship going. The Lorimer Society is still very much a strong part of what we do. Robin and Monica are still alive, Hew’s children. They still come back, and they tell the story of what it was actually like staying here as a child. It wasn’t quite as romantic sometimes as you would imagine. It would have been tough. When Hew and Mary came back during that Second World War period, there was no electricity; there was barely running water.

[JB]
What an adventure playground. I’m sure you won’t mind me sharing this, but you believe that you are not alone in this castle.

[CH]
No. People are going to think me a bit … as soon as you talk about the word ghosts, it conjures up this idea that someone’s a bit wacky. There is a presence here. That’s what I will describe – there’s a presence, there’s a feeling that you’re being watched. Again, somebody might say that sounds a bit creepy. It’s not. It’s a feeling that whoever it is – it may be more than one, it could be the whole family – are wanting you to be here. They’re watching you but they’re happy that the story’s continuing.

[JB]
You think it’s John Henry, don’t you?

[CH]
I think it’s John Henry Lorimer that I feel; certainly, I feel a male presence that is still wandering around. I sometimes feel I’m going to bump into him. I know when I came back after furlough, after Covid, I was the only one that was working here for that entire winter of 2020. I was up in the library looking at one of the paintings, to put some tissue over it to cover it, just to protect it. And there was certainly a presence of somebody walking behind on the floorboards, as if to say ‘yes, you’re doing the right thing’. I just gently walked round the edge of the room and out. I know that sounds quite a strange thing, but it’s having this feeling that you understand what has been before. And a property that dates back to 1360, the characters that have lived here, there cannot NOT be an energy left of some sort, whether you believe in ghosts or not. There must be some energy of the past, the people, the spirits that have lived here, and I think that’s what gives this spirit of place that Kellie imbues.

[JB]
Absolutely. What a story, Caroline. Thank you for sharing it with us, and well done to the Lorimers who were doing what the National Trust for Scotland does long before it was even a twinkle in John Stirling Maxwell’s eye.
If you’d like to visit Kellie Castle, and maybe even John Henry, you’ll find details on the National Trust for Scotland web pages. Entrance is by guided tour. Please check before you come to make sure the castle is open. That’s all from this edition of Love Scotland. 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

Four voices: male voiceover [MV]; Jackie Bird [JB]; Claudia Noble-Pyott [CNP]; second male voiceover from 1930s [MV2]

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

[JB]
Today we’re going to step back into the gilded age of Edwardian Britain, evocatively described as a leisurely time when women wore picture hats and did not vote, when the rich were not ashamed to live conspicuously, and the sun never really set on the British flag.

How much of that description, written as it was after the horrors of the Great War, was rose-tinted nostalgia? We’ll never know. But in the early 1900s, even though it was a time of great inequality, the Industrial Revolution had created a new social class which had become embedded in society – a wealthy, sometimes fantastically so, middle class.

Now heading along a tree-lined driveway to a National Trust for Scotland property which showcases that era of affluence. Hill of Tarvit Mansion, with its glorious design, fabulous interiors and its own hickory golf course, is a fascinating location in itself. But I think the most compelling part of Hill of Tarvit’s story isn’t the impressive house and its riches, but the tale of the family who built it, of their aspirations, enterprise and bravery, and ultimately of their tragedies. It confirms that at the same time you can have everything and nothing at all.

[music plays]

The interior of Hill of Tarvit Mansion does not disappoint. I’m in the French drawing room alongside Claudia Noble Pyott, who came here as a visitor and fell in love with the place as I have. Claudia, thank you for having me here.

[CNP]
It’s very good to have you here, Jackie. Welcome to Hill of Tarvit.

[JB]
Well, thank you. You are now the Trust boss here, I have to make that clear. I’m not great at doing justice to rooms like this. I will try and help you out, but can you describe where we are?

[CNP]
Now we are in a room that has beautifully carved ornate walls, wonderfully decorated ceilings with hand-cast flowers and silk bands between the flowers, a lovely oak floor, a beautiful big bay window on one side of the room overlooking the golf course, and the most spectacular marble fireplace with a gorgeous French clock on it.

[JB]
Now what is so interesting, if I’m correct, is that the room was designed around that clock.

[CNP]
It was designed around the clock. The space behind the clock was specially made for the mirror in it.

[JB]
And it’s not a large mirror; it’s about just over a metre wide, something like that, but the entire dimensions of the room … And if you think that sounds strange, then it’s not just this room, as it happened, because this is a mark of the entire house.

[CNP]
It absolutely is. The Great Hall, or the room designed in the style of a Great Hall …

[JB]
So we leave the French salon, we open the door and we’re into the Great Hall, yes?

[CNP]
And in that Great Hall you will see a massive tapestry. Now the tapestry is quite large, and the wall literally had to be made higher and wider just to fit the tapestry. So, all the rooms on the lower floor were literally designed around pieces either of furniture or clocks or tapestries or just because of some Chippendale-style furniture.

[JB]
Let’s find out about the mind of the man whose idea all of this was. This is the owner; this is Frederick Sharp. He was a collector of fine furniture and tapestries. Tell us more about Frederick.

[CNP]
Frederick Sharp grew up in a house that was very Gothic, very Victorian, with small rooms, lots of rooms – small rooms, small windows, everything very dark and full of knick-knacks. And he wanted the opposite. He wanted big rooms, high ceilings, really big windows that bring the outdoors in … and this is what was absolutely achieved.

[JB]
Where did the money come from?

[CNP]
The money came from the jute industry in Dundee. His grandfather had invented a heckling machine to help separate the jute fibres when they came over from India.

[JB]
So did that make the money then?

[CNP]
Sadly, it did not. He died in debt, but Frederick’s father John, also known as Honest John, he made money in the jute industry. He had three jute mills, quite a lot of workers that worked for him and he was able to leave his children £750,000, which at the time of his death was an absolutely vast amount of money.

[JB]
Can we translate that into what it might be today?

[CNP]
Well, it might be something like £124 million. A lot of money.

[JB]
OK, so he was quite well set up and he married Beatrice, again who wasn’t short of funds.

[CNP]
Oh, absolutely not. Her family was also in the jute and the linen industry.

[JB]
So the Sharps had money, but what they didn’t have, and what you couldn’t buy, you couldn’t buy yourself into the aristocracy. This was the time of this new, fabulously wealthy middle class. They wanted to become part of the fabric of society here. So how did they do that? Was the house part of it?

[CNP]
The house was part of it, but the land the house is on is part of it because this land belonged to a family called the Wemyss, who were very well connected. The hunt met here. To join the aristocracy, you go hunting with them. Frederick was a great huntsman, so he really enjoyed that, and he was a great golfer. St Andrews Royal & Ancient was another place where you could meet and get connected to the gentry.

[JB]
So they had the land. They needed a house. Who better to design the house than one of the most influential architects of the time?

[CNP]
Absolutely. They just asked a friend, who Frederick was introduced to at a dinner party at Earlshall in Leuchars, which is still a privately owned castle. William Mackenzie, who owned it at the time, he was friends with Robert Lorimer’s parents.

[JB]
Sir Robert Lorimer, no less.

[CNP]
Mm hmm. William Mackenzie had Robert Lorimer design a couple of rooms in his castle and introduced him at a dinner party to Frederick Sharp and to William Burrell.

[JB]
But it wasn’t just a house that was significant because it was built to house particularly a collection. We're talking now – I think the house was completed in about 1908 – it was a house that had extraordinary mod cons.

[CNP]
Oh yes, it had central heating. It had hot and cold running water. It had two bathrooms upstairs, a big cloakroom downstairs. Electricity. An electric fireplace.

[JB]
An internal phone system, I read!

[CNP]
It wasn’t just internal; that was even in 1910. Frederick actually had the line connected and the first number was Lethem 27. And the 2 7 is still the last two digits of our telephone number today and that means it was never disconnected in all that time.

[JB]
So Frederick and Beatrice had a fabulous home. They had a place in society and the picture was complete. They had two children. Tell me about their children.

[CNP]
They had Hugh. He moved in here with his parents in 1908. And baby Elizabeth, she was born in the house in 1910, and one of the wings was turned into a nursery wing for baby Elizabeth.

[JB]
So how old was Hugh when he came here?

[CNP]
He was about 11; so he was 12. He was nearly 13, actually, when Elizabeth was born, which meant that Elizabeth basically grew up as an only child because of the fact that when he was 13, he was sent to Rugby in Warwickshire in England, where he went to boarding school.

[JB]
So you would imagine that when he was home, there was an idyllic scene here and the family were all sports-mad. However, the shadow of World War One loomed. What happened then?

[JB]
Hugh had joined the Army Reserves at school and of course then, when he was of age, he was just 18 when he joined the Corps. Just a couple of weeks before his 19th birthday, he was sent to the Western Front.

[JB]
And I understand that he saw some of the most horrific and famous battles there was.

[CNP]
Yes, he was in the Battle of the Somme, the Battle of Ypres, Passchendaele, and then he also took part in campaigns in Italy.

[JB]
Do we have any indication of what he was doing in the war?

[CNP]
Well, we believe him to have been a forward observation officer.

[JB]
What was that?

[CNP]
That is somebody who goes right to the front line and just makes sure that the actual shelling is hitting the target.

[JB]
So he was part of the artillery regiment?

[CNP]
Yes. And then he goes back and reports, a bit more to the left, a bit more to the right, and you’ll be hitting what you’re meant to be hitting. And also, he had to go right to the front to get some reconnaissance, just to find out who’s there, what they’re doing, and then report all that back.

[JB]
And it was an extremely distinguished career.

[CNP]
Oh, it absolutely was because he got the Military Cross twice.

[JB]
Twice!

[CNP]
Absolutely. Once on 13 February 1917 and then again on 26 November 1917. And there was a lovely, lovely little article in the London Gazette about his Military Cross for the February. It said ‘it was with conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty. He went forward to capture position and returned through a heavy barrage with valuable information. On many occasions during a long period he has made valuable reconnaissances under rifle and shellfire.’

[JB]
So Hugh, immense bravery on the western fronts; and the family helping with the war effort at home. I know they were involved with local nursing units here. Let’s take a break, Claudia, and we’ll move location if we may, because I know that Hugh’s bedroom is preserved here. So, let’s head there, and when we come back, we’ll pick up our story.

[MV]
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[JB]
Welcome back. Claudia, we are now in a surprisingly small room, but I suspect of course Hugh was just a boy when he came here and then left to go to boarding school for most of it. But this is Hugh’s bedroom, dominated by a fantastic portrait of a young lad of about 9 or 10 in a kilt. I take it that’s Hugh.

[CNP]
That is Hugh. We have a photograph of him dressed very similarly and we do know that he, as a boy, played golf in his kilt as well.

[JB]
Not an easy thing to do. Now, we left Hugh in World War One with a distinguished military career. Let’s pick up the story there.

[CNP]
He was also awarded the Italian Silver Medal for Valour. And he was also given the French Medal of Valour, presented to him by the French President himself. So, he had quite a war.

[JB]
And remarkably, and thankfully, he came out of the war alive unlike so many of his comrades who were in the thick of the action. What did he do then? Because we’re talking now … I think it was 1919 by the time he was demobbed?

[CNP]
Yes, he went back to Oxford for a year after he was demobbed, but left Oxford in 1920 with no degree.

[JB]
Do we know why? Did he ever write letters home explaining that?

[CNP]
Sadly, we do not have letters.

[JB]
You could presume though, based on no fact whatsoever, if you have had that sort of experience, then you want to live life a little … if four years of your life have gone.

[CNP]
Yeah, I always like to think, well, he just thought, after what I’ve been through, quite honestly, this isn’t for me anymore. He decided to become a banker like his dad, so he went to London and went into the banking industry in the City. And he enjoyed life in London.

[JB]
Is that a euphemism?!

[CNP]
Well, yeah, he did. He enjoyed life. He just really lived.

[JB]
Well, he was a wealthy man about town. I come back to that depiction that he was an action man, because the walls here are also adorned with lots of photographs of Hugh hanging off a number of crevices. So he was into his rock climbing, mountain climbing?

[CNP]
Oh, he absolutely was. And someone actually wrote about him: ‘The first climbing he did was at the Aviemore Meet of 1922. He was so thrilled with getting to the top in very bad conditions that, for the next 12 years, he was seldom away from the hills.’

[JB]
He had so many outdoor pursuits but I presume that, alongside mountaineering, golf was a love not only for Hugh, but of his father Frederick – to the extent that one of the famous aspects of Hill of Tarvit Mansion is that it has its own golf course outside. I can see it from the window here.

[CNP]
Yes, and apparently, well, there is a rumour – we can’t prove it – but the rumour is that Hugh persuaded his father to build their own golf course, and they both had a hand in the design of it.

[JB]
Do you know what? I think if your only beloved son comes back from the trenches, you would do anything for him. And if you have the land, building him a golf course is possibly the least of them. So, the family spent many, many happy hours leaving the front door and they were on their own hickory golf course, which is the last in Europe, I believe.

[CNP]
It is, yes. It’s a very special course.

[JB]
Is it still playable?

[CNP]
It is! Absolutely. Anyone can book on to try. We provide all the equipment – so they get a pencil bag and all the old hickory clubs; and after their round, we provide shortbread and ginger beer!

[JB]
Lovely. Now, Hugh and his dad, they didn’t just share the love of golf; they also shared that love of collecting. Hugh began what became an impressive book collection.

[CNP]
Yes, he did. There were over 1,200 books that he collected.

[JB]
I was trying to look them up and he had first editions of Jane Austen, of the Brontes, of Mark Twain. He even had a first edition of the King James Bible and, like everything he did, he attacked it with gusto.

[CNP]
Oh, he absolutely did. The Sharp family I don’t think did anything by halves.

[JB]
I think that’s very true! Talking of not doing things by halves, one thing he didn’t do was get married, and I suppose that was expected of him.

[CNP]
Well, yes, as the son and heir to an estate like this, I suppose your first job in life should be thinking about a wife and producing an heir. And when he lived it up in London, he must have … It must have slipped his mind, I suppose.

[JB]
While Hugh was living it up, and understandably so, came Frederick’s death in 1932, just a week short of his 70th birthday. Hugh was reluctant even then to settle down, but eventually he met a love: Mabel Hogarth.

[CNP]
That’s right.

[JB]
What do we know about Mabel?

[CNP]
Mabel was from a shipping family over on the west coast of Scotland. What we do know is that Mabel attended a hunt ball in Perth in September 1931, and a Mr Hugh Frederick Bower Sharp – our Hugh – was also in attendance that day, so I suppose you could surmise they might have met there.

[JB]
They got engaged after quite a short courtship. He was nearly 40 at the time, wasn’t he?

[CNP]
Yes. They got engaged in the October of 1937, which meant he was actually 40 years old.

[JB]
But then, tragedy.

[MV2]
Words are inadequate to describe the tragedy of the train disaster at Castlecary, the worst crash since the first year of the war. Through the biting frost of a night blizzard, men have been working feverishly without ceasing to bring out the living; to recover the dead. Coaches were smashed like a matchbox crushed in the hand; a whole side torn away. In the wreckage, 35 were carried to their death, nearly 100 injured.

[JB]
And of course, Hugh Sharp perished in that crash. Do we know the circumstances of why he was on the train that day?

[CNP]
He was on the train because he wanted to go and see Mabel on the west coast. They were planning a big engagement bash in the village of Ceres, which is close here to Hill of Tarvit, and he was going to go and finalise details with her and her family. Because it was snowing that day, he decided against taking one of his Bentleys and he just decided to take the train, thinking he’d be safer.

[JB]
And it must have come, obviously stating the obvious here, as an absolutely devastating loss to Beatrice and to Elizabeth. Do we know what happened then, how they coped?

[CNP]
Well, they were absolutely grief stricken. It is said that the ladies had a bonfire with a lot of family photographs, family outings, Hugh’s photographs … and a lot of paperwork was allegedly burnt in that bonfire. Because they were so grief stricken, they just couldn’t bear to have it anymore.

[JB]
Gosh. Eventually, after bequeathing Hugh’s amazing book collection to the National Library of Scotland, Elizabeth carried on with her philanthropy. She was very keen on doing good work, so she was heavily involved in the Girl Guiding movement.

[CNP]
Oh, she was. She loved the outdoor life. Somebody called her ‘a creature of the open air’ and she really came to life outside. We have been given some photographs and found some clippings in newspapers, and you can see whenever a photograph was taken indoors, she doesn’t look happy; but yet when she’s outside, she’s smiling, she’s laughing. She’s there for her girls and with her girls, and she absolutely loved that life.

She was the District Commissioner for Fife for the Girl Guides. And she was the Commissioner for Camping. She did a lot of war work as well with the Guides, and she wrote a booklet about the village of Ceres and also what to do in case of a gas attack.

[JB]
Even though she was a member of an exceptionally wealthy family from an enormous country house, she didn’t dress as such, did she?

[CNP]
Oh, she absolutely didn’t. She was much more comfortable in, shall we say, less fashionable clothes than the fashion of the day. She would be walking around more in trousers than in skirts. But with her uniform came a skirt, so she would wear that too. She was described as being very different. There is a little quote by one of the Girl Guides saying: ‘Elizabeth used to run the messages from Hill of Tarvit barefoot across the hill into Cupar.’

[JB]
Sounds like an interesting woman to have known. But then there was more sadness for her because, I think, 7 years after Hugh’s death, she lost her mother Beatrice.

[CNP]
That’s right, yes.

[JB]
But then, more tragedy.

[CNP]
Yes, she was 34 years old when in 1944, she was diagnosed with terminal cancer. And the sad thing about it is her mother Beatrice passed away knowing there was never going to be an heir to all of this that her and Frederick had built.

[JB]
How utterly sad. But true to her father’s memory, Elizabeth just before she died … and how old was she when she finally passed?

[CNP]
She was 38 years old.

[JB]
… she had made provision because she was so keen that her father’s beloved collection and his house stayed together. How did she do that?

[CNP]
She knew a man who was Head of the Trust. His name was Jo Grimond. He had been a family friend. He became a Member of Parliament, I think, in the 1950s. He was from St Andrews, so he was a friend of her father’s. Jo Grimond and her must have obviously had a conversation at some point. And she decided to leave Hill of Tarvit to the National Trust for Scotland because she wanted people to be able to come and view it, especially the paintings. She was part of the Cupar Art Society and she would often lend the paintings to exhibitions in Cupar. I think it was really close to her heart that everyone would be able to come and enjoy the grounds – because they are magnificent, they are tranquil, they are just the most beautiful setting to walk your dog or just go for a walk yourself.

And she really wanted people to come in and enjoy the collection her father had built.

[JB]
There was another chapter in the history of Hill of Tarvit, because people did indeed receive solace from the house because it became a convalescence house for Marie Curie.

[CNP]
We were very lucky that the Marie Curie Foundation decided to rent it from 1952 to 1977. They rented the whole house. The patients moved into the bedrooms and the dressing rooms. Marie Curie had the house. They had the wings where the nurses would stay in the old servants’ rooms and Matron took over the old nursery where Elizabeth stayed her whole life. The Assistant Matron, she was in Forester’s Cottage, which is now the golf cottage of course. They had the grounds as well to look after. So, they paid the peppercorn rent of £1 a year, but they had all the overhead costs.

[JB]
When was the house restored to the perfect state it is today?

[CNP]
They started restoring it in the early 2000s, up here for the centenary celebrations in 2006. And we take that date from when the Great Hall was finished, because the fireplace is dated 1906. They started, especially with this back end of the house where Hugh’s bedroom is, and they came in with all kinds of different machineries to measure the walls, to find out about the colour pigments on the walls, just to see the colour scheme the Sharps originally had and try to recreate it as best we could.

[JB]
It is a time capsule of an Edwardian era, and a reminder to us all, though, that no matter how much you have, we’re all human. And I bet Beatrice would have given it all up just to know that her son and daughter could have lived long and happy lives.

[CNP]
Oh, absolutely. I agree with you there.

[JB]
Well, thank you so much, Claudia, for sharing the house and its story with me. And a footnote that even in the 21st century, through its charitable trust, the Sharp family was still creating jobs and opportunities in nearby Dundee. And Hugh’s book collection at the National Library of Scotland is also a reminder that many of our wealthy families gave back to the country as much as they made.

I heartily recommend you come to visit Hill of Tarvit. For opening times, go to the National Trust for Scotland website. You can also find information on the hickory golf course here, the only one left in Europe, I believe. Look out for its centenary in 2024 and if you’re heading to St Andrews, you can don your plus fours and have a hit around as if you are Hugh and Frederick on their front lawn.

It’s been a pleasure being here. I hope you join us for another podcast very soon. But from me, for now, bye bye.

[music plays]

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

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

Transcript

Five voices: male voiceover [MV]; Jackie Bird [JB]; Alistair Moffat [AM]; Derek Alexander [DA]; Iona Fyfe [IF]

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

[Applause]

[JB]
Hello and welcome to a special live recording of the Love Scotland podcast. We’re in Aberdeen with an enthusiastic audience to explore a turbulent period in Scottish history. For the majority of people who study history, it involves hours in libraries, poring over manuscripts and leafing through textbooks. But my two guests today are very physical explorers of history.

War Paths is the title of a new book by acclaimed writer and historian Alistair Moffat, in which he sets off in the footsteps of the fighting men of Scotland’s clans, taking us through key historical moments and battles that would change the country forever. Meanwhile, Derek Alexander is the National Trust for Scotland’s Head of Archaeology – our very own Indiana Jones! Derek has dug his way around much of Scotland; the Trust has approximately 12,000 archaeological sites. But unlike the movie action hero, Derek’s adventures are real! Welcome to our guests.

[Applause]

[JB]
Now Alistair, your book deals with a number of battles across the Jacobite era. And although all the strategic battle details are there, your quest was human. You said you wanted to understand the clansmen and the warriors. Why?

[AM]
Because they fought essentially with bladed weapons, just as the Roman legionaries did, just as the Greek hoplites did. They had pistols and muskets to some extent – as Derek will attest – but most of them had a dirk and a sword, and a little shield. And so, they were extraordinarily successful fighting against modern armies who were equipped with muskets, who had cannon, who had pistols and so on. And yet they won again, and again, and again. And I wanted to try and understand why that was. I think there were really two approaches I had. It was clear to me that because their major, their sole tactic in fact was the Highland Charge. That’s how they won, and I wanted to understand why that was so effective. That was the first thing. The second thing that I was interested in was courage – sheer, physical courage. To charge ranks of often professional soldiers with cannon in place and their muskets at the ready, and you have a bladed weapon. Now that takes guts to do that; that takes physical courage. I wanted to try to understand that.

You mentioned in your very generous introduction – thank you! – that I like to go to places in order to understand what happened. I believe profoundly in the idea of genius loci – the spirit of place – except I translate it as ‘places of spirits’. If you go to somewhere that’s atmospheric … and we’ve all been to places like Iona and so on which are like that, that have atmosphere. But to try and understand how a battle happened and why it happened in a particular place, if you go to the place you also understand the mechanics of it, the physical logistics of it, as well as the spirit of the place. Derek will confirm this, because we were talking beforehand, these are places where many people died. They deserve respect without any doubt, and some of them are even unmarked – like Tippermuir outside Perth. You can’t find it, whereas Killiecrankie the Trust do a great job, and at Culloden too. And so, I wanted to go to these places to understand how the clansmen’s physical courage was translated into victory, what happened. As I said, the Charge was their sole tactic; if the Charge failed, they lost.

[JB]
That’s a great start. We will go into the Charge in greater detail because it was phenomenally successful. Derek, what about you? When you are out and about, as the job necessitates, is it all about the science? Or do you ever get that spine-tingling moment?

[DA]
Every now and again. As an archaeologist, my job is about understanding people in the past from what they’ve left behind. Very much we joke about it in the department – a department of 2 – that we’re landscape detectives. Understanding things in their context and how they came to be and what’s the evidence for telling those stories. That’s really key to understanding. I very rarely get that ‘have you found something that makes the hairs stand up on their back of your neck’ vibe. But I did when we were digging at Glenshiel – a Jacobite battle of 1719.

All of my volunteers had left and I went to check one of the sites that they had previously found a number of remains of ammunition that had been fired by the thing that won the battle at Glenshiel, which is these Coehorn mortars. They could fire uphill and the Jacobites were in these wonderful positions that they should have held because it was up slopes like that. I’ve walked up those slopes, and it gets back to the understanding of topography and what an effect that has on battles. It’s impossible. The only way government forces there were going to do that was to have the support of this artillery. I was out on my own with a metal detector, just checking a couple of spots and I found more parts of the mortar shell. A mortar shell is basically a spherical bomb with a fuse in it. If you think ‘comedy bomb’ – somebody running about like that with a fuse burning, this is exactly what it was. I bent down and picked out this, which is a fragment of Coehorn mortar shell that still has the hole where the fuse went in, which burnt down and exploded and basically sent the Jacobites – Lord George Murray on that side on the Jacobite right wing – heading for the hills. I looked around and there was nobody to share that moment with! It was like 300 years to the day that it had been fired, and it was in my hand. That’s probably the most recent time that that moment of spine tingling had actually happened. As an archaeologist you find a lot of things, but that was great.

[JB]
Do battlefields present any specific challenges to an archaeologist?

[DA]
Absolutely, because what archaeology is normally about is structural remains – you’re looking at houses and burials and that sort of thing. Battlefields are very irregular. They’re mobile things; people are moving all the time. Certain types of archaeology will survive. All the organic remains in Scotland’s acidic soils – leather, clothes, bones – will disintegrate. The things that we end up looking for are the things that survive best. You’re not looking here at pottery and glass, which is what you get on domestic sites; you’re looking at munitions like lead musket balls, pistol shot, pieces of artillery. If you were very very lucky, or unlucky, then you’re looking for a mass grave or something. But even then, the only thing that would probably mark that out would be a concentration of metal artefacts because the bones probably don’t survive.

[JB]
Mmm. Well, let’s talk about one of the earliest battles on the site, which as you say Alistair, happens to be looked after by the National Trust for Scotland: Killiecrankie. I’ll briefly set the scene. July 1689, part of the Jacobite Rising led by John Graham of Claverhouse, known to most of us as Bonnie Dundee, in support of the exiled king James VII & II. Alistair, why choose Killiecrankie?

[AM]
If you go there, what you see, even though the A9 slashes right through the middle of the battlefield, if you go there to the NTS centre and then walk down by the gorge – because Killiecrankie is a very very steep gorge – you see the concentration of roots and roads and railways and so on squashed into this. You understand the strategy, the importance of it as a strategic place. If you walk past the centre, down into the gorge and then up through the village and you get to the battlefield, even though the artics are thundering up to Inverness and so on on the A9, you nevertheless get a sense of the ground immediately. What Dundee liked, and the clan chiefs liked, was the sloping ground – that was important. It was really important for the Charge that they had what the Gaels called the advantage of the brae. George Murray, whom Derek mentioned, joked after the ’45 that even a haggis could charge downhill. If you’re charging downhill, clearly your momentum is greater.

The other good thing about Killiecrankie was that it was not boggy, and it still isn’t boggy! There’s a river – the Gurnock – that runs down into the Garry on one side, which is very rocky with huge boulders. You’re protected on one flank. What Dundee does is dispose the clans up the hill. General Mackay marches the government army through the gorge and he’s downhill, and he knows he’s got problems.

[JB]
Before we get to the action, what would the Highland army have looked like?

[AM]
What they looked like? I think they would have looked absolutely splendid. People think that Highlanders are sort of raggedy vagabonds – the bare-arsed banditti as they called them – but they were not. Some of these chiefs were dressed in their war splendour. They wore costumes that were scaly with gold and so on; they really dressed up. They looked fantastic; they rode white horses. There’s a description of the muster before Killiecrankie in Lochaber, which is extremely detailed, written by a man called James Phillip. It details what the chiefs wear. They are a rainbow of colours. The ordinary clansmen would have looked a little less splendid, I think, but nevertheless you went to war looking terrific. That was very important because it fed your sense of yourself; it fed your courage, that you looked the part, you were a great soldier.

[DA]
I think also it probably would reflect a full range of society – you’re going from the chiefs to the guys at the bottom as well. Also, there would have been that range of different dress and armaments.

[JB]
Let’s talk about this Highland Charge. It was there to create – I think it’s in your book – ‘operational paralysis’. That was its aim. What was the arrangement? Because it wasn’t just a load of ferocious warriors running amok.

[AM]
That’s right. It wasn’t a crazy melee of ululating savages running down the hill at all. It was perfected by an extraordinary man called Alistair McCulloch …

[JB]
Who wasn’t Scottish?

[AM]
He was a Macdonald general; he was a Macdonald.

[JB]
But he was of Irish descent?

[AM]
People forget that the Clan Donald have an Irish and Ulster branch. He is a Gael – let’s call him that. Alistair fought in Ulster in the 1640s and there is documentary evidence that he did something different. The Charge used to be as you described Jackie, but what he began to do was to perfect it, essentially the format. It didn’t always happen – it didn’t happen at Culloden – but I’m pretty certain it happened at Killiecrankie. What the clans would do would be to charge within about 50 yards of the lines of musketeers, let’s call them. As Derek will confirm, muskets are not accurate over 50 yards. That’s where courage comes in. You charge and you stop, and they fire at you. Then, what the Highlanders did was to charge even closer, and any that had muskets or pistols would fire them. When you’ve got the old flash in the pan, when you’ve got gunpowder, gun smoke is billowing; there’s loads of it, it’s like a fog. In the fog, McCulloch got his men to form wedges. 12, 10, 14 men, all related to each other, brothers …

[JB]
Why all related?

[AM]
Because the clansmen were. Wedges were put together with people who were brothers, who were uncles and nephews and cousins and so on. Although modern soldiers fight for their mates and fight for their country and for their king, the clansmen fought for their families. You put the oldest man in front because he knew what to expect, and they charged, and the wedges broke through. Once they got in behind a Redcoat line (let’s call it), the battle was over because these men were tremendous swordsmen. They were taught from childhood as swordsmen. Their weapons would have been razor-sharp; a glancing blow would slice into you. Once they got behind, it was all over.
At Prestonpans, which takes place in 1745, the battle lasted less than 10 minutes, because the Highlanders (the Camerons) broke through immediately.

[JB]
There’s a great passage in your book – you have your book in front of you, could you find it for us? – it tells us what it was like – it’s a primary source – of what it was like to be on the receiving end of a Highland Charge.

[AM]
That’s right. And this is at Killiecrankie. The lovely thing, Jackie, is that this is a guy who was a private solider; he wasn’t a general or an aristocrat or a clan chief or anything like that. He’s a man called Donald McBane, who was a tobacco spinner from Inverness! He left a record of what happened:

‘The Macdonalds came on down the hill upon us without either shoe, stocking or bonnet on their head. [The Highlanders stripped off to charge.] They gave a shout and then the fire began on both sides and continued a hot dispute for an hour. Then they broke in upon us with sword and targe and Lochaber axes, which obliged us to give way. Seeing my captain sore-wounded, and a great many more with heads lying cloven on every side, I was sadly affrighted. A Highlander attacked me with sword and targe and cut my wooden-handled bayonet out of the muzzle of my gun. I then clubbed my gun and gave him a stroke with it, which made the butt end fly off. Seeing the Highland men come fast upon me, I took to my heels and ran 30 miles before I looked behind me. [Laughter] Every person I saw or met, I took for my enemy.’

It’s a wonderful description because the other thing that I forget anyway is the sheer terror of watching this coming at you; and to stand fast, not to move, was an achievement. These men were terrific swordsmen and absolutely committed. As I was saying earlier, they won again and again and again. We think of Culloden as a disaster. But before Culloden, they were undefeated.

[JB]
Poor old Donald McBane. He was from Inverness – the background to Alistair’s quote there is that he joined the British army for some excitement. I think he got it!

[AM]
He did.

[JB]
All that ammunition – that must be manna for you, Derek. We hear about government troops carrying lead balls in their mouths and spitting them into their muskets.

[DA]
Well, that allows you to load quicker instead of going to your pouch to get the cartridge out, if you’ve not got the cartridge with the charge in it. Most of them would have had them in a pouch at the front and would be putting it in and ramming it down and then trying to fire it. Of course, at Killiecrankie some of them are using matchlock muskets which are quite old – you need to fire flash in the pan. Some of the others will have flintlocks, where that’s what’s firing. That’s what forms the archaeological record. You’re talking thousands and thousands of these things. If you’ve got, at Killiecrankie, 2,500 Jacobites on one side and 3,500 government troops on the other side all firing muskets, even if the government troops only get 3 rounds off like they say before the Charge hits home, you’re talking tens of thousands of musket balls. They should be out there marking concentrations.

[JB]
Have you found much?

[DA]
The National Trust for Scotland owns the area of the Pass going through, and Soldier’s Leap where McBane jumps across; we don’t own the bit beyond, which is where the main battle is. But as part of the A9 improvement, the widening of it, a lot of archaeological work has been undertaken there by commercial archaeology companies. What they use, and one of the best methods for doing battlefield archaeology, is metal detecting. They’ve got lots and lots of concentrations of musket balls, buttons – if people are coming and swinging a sword at you, it’s not just bits of flesh that are flying off. Anything like belts, …

[JB]
Buckles would be the least of your worries, wouldn’t it?!

[DA]
Exactly! That’s the sort of material culture that would be distributed on battlefields that you’ll get in concentrations.

[JB]
Alright. Let’s just say that Killiecrankie, although they were vastly outnumbered, was a great victory. 3 weeks later, not so much. A hasty second Rising at the Battle of Dunkeld. Briefly, I’d like to talk about the Battle of Dunkeld just before we go to the break, because that is where that advantage of the braes did not work. It couldn’t work because it wasn’t in such a rural hill.

[AM]
That’s right. Dunkeld is a beautiful town and it was a substantial settlement then with a cathedral that had been completed 50 years before. What happened was the government forces occupied the cathedral precinct and built up a wall around it. I often think of a parallel with Rorke’s Drift and Zulu, that amazing film. Dundee was killed at Killiecrankie, which was a great blow to the rebellion. Nevertheless, they carried on and they attacked Dunkeld. But they have to attack up the streets of this town.

[JB]
They’d been lured into Dunkeld, hadn’t they?

[AM]
Well, it’s not clear why strategically they thought it was so important. They could have bypassed it, frankly. Nevertheless, they take on the Cameronians, who were occupying the precinct, and they charged up what’s now Cathedral Street. And it’s narrow. The houses are still the houses they were then – it’s not much wider than from the edge of your chair to the edge of Derek’s. It’s really narrow. Of course, there’s no mass. So what the Cameronians are able to do is pick off the Highlanders frankly – the absolute smash of the Charge is not possible because they’ve also got this barrier. Eventually, after a day of this approximately, they retire; they have to give up because the ground is wrong. It will not work for them.

[JB]
Derek, have we managed to extract anything from there?

[DA]
From Dunkeld, we’ve excavated an area around Stanley Hill. The National Trust for Scotland owns that part of the town, and that side – the north side – was the bit that was burnt. One of the parts of the tactics of the attacking Jacobites and the defending Cameronians was to set fire to some of the thatched buildings where people were taking cover and firing from. A big part of the town was actually burnt and we’ve lost one of the streets that used to lead up to Dunkeld House, which did survive the battle but in fact burnt down a couple of hundred years later. There are elements there that we can pick up, and people have come to us with musket balls from their back gardens in Dunkeld over the years. It’s an interesting site and it’s a forgotten side of things.
We’re talking about Killiecrankie as being a great victory, but the impact on some of the charging – the Macdonalds on the left flank of the Jacobite force – they took a huge number of casualties from the volley fire as well. Even though the Highland Charge could work, it could take big casualties as you were exposed coming in. Troops that were able to withstand the terrifying sight of these guys coming at them.

[AM]
They were disciplined; that’s the key.

[JB]
Absolute discipline.

[AM]
Apart from Donald McBane, who ran for it!

[JB]
Let me instil some discipline here. We’ll stop for a second because, as befits a live podcast, we also have some live music. In a few short years, Aberdeenshire’s Iona Fyfe has become one of Scotland’s best known traditional folk singers. We are delighted to have her here today. Appropriately, the Battle of Killiecrankie offers us the perfect chance to hear some songs. First, Iona will be performing ‘Ye Jacobites by name’, a song that I only recently discovered was in fact anti-Jacobite and anti-war in nature, despite seeming to be a rousing call to arms. Please join me in welcoming Iona Fyfe.

[Applause]

[Iona sings ‘Ye Jacobites by name’]

[Applause]

[JB]
Thank you to Iona. And there will be more from Iona later in the podcast.

[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.
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[JB]
Welcome back to this special Love Scotland podcast where we are discussing the strategic and physical history of some of the conflicts of Jacobite Scotland. Alistair Moffat, we’ve discussed the Highland Charge and how it was exceptional when it worked. We’ve already alluded to Culloden when it did not work; that was another destination in your journey in your book. You called your chapter on Culloden ‘The army of the dead’ – why?

[AM]
Because of something unique to clansmen that happened that day, what the Gaels called beul-aithris – literally ‘mouth history’, something that wasn’t written down. When they decided to fight in April 1746, the ground was a huge issue. It was not properly settled. There was also an idea that the Jacobite army, knowing that the Duke of Cumberland’s forces were approaching essentially from here, from Aberdeen, from the east – that they would march to Nairn and surprise them in their camp. But it didn’t work. It was also raining, and they were very very short of supplies, and so when the Jacobite army drew up at Culloden on Drummossie Moor, they essentially stood as they always did in clan groups; as I say, these were family armies. The government army march onto the field with their standards snapping in the wind, and they’re twiddling their drums, and their sergeant majors are shouting at the men ‘look to your fronts’, ‘stand fast’ and so on. They hear something coming across the battlefield; they’re about 400/500 yards away I think, Derek? So, they’re not close, but they hear what they think are psalms being sung. Soldiers often did that before battle because they were going to be closer to their god, many of them, by the end of the day.

But the Highlanders were not singing psalms. What they were doing was reciting their genealogy. Each man could go back 25 generations and they would recite and go back through the generations. The reason they did that was to centre themselves before the Charge. They had to remember who they were. They called Lowlanders cow-herds and people with no ancestry to speak of. Their ancestors were important and what they were doing, as you said Jackie, is they were summoning the army of the dead. The dead and all of their ancient glory, all of their war prowess, all of their splendour – they would charge beside them as they charged across the moor. It didn’t happen like that, sadly. But this was something that was attested at the Battle of Harlaw, as early as 1411, that the Highlanders did this. It’s unique to Gaelic culture, and it gives a sense of why they were there, why they were fighting. They were fighting for their history, for their land, for their homeplaces, for their culture. And of course, Culloden turned out to be a disaster.

The ground was disastrously bad, and still is very boggy. If you go to the NTS site, you will see it – pools of water. It forced the clans to slew into each other, so they were never able to form the wedges properly. The government army were much more disciplined this time. They got off lots of cannonade; in fact that’s what made the Atholl Brigade charge. They fired what they called canister shot, also called grape shot, which one government officer said ploughed lanes through the clansmen. It was devastating.

[JB]
What were the numbers in the battle?

[AM]
It’s difficult to be accurate. As ever, the government army outnumbered the Jacobites. At Falkirk, the January before, there were 8,000 Jacobites – it was the largest army that ever fought for them – but it had thinned out. I guess there were about 4,000/4,500 – something like that.

[JB]
Derek, how much of Culloden has been excavated?

[DA]
Oh! Hardly anything.

[JB]
Really? I imagine you’ve gone over that with a fine tooth comb.

[DA]
Again, it comes down to the opportunities to undertake fieldwork. The National Trust for Scotland owns everything to the south of the current road that was moved in the 1980s. That really takes in only about half of the deployment of the government troops; there’s more of the Jacobite troops on that side, on our ground. But then you look at the areas outside that, where the cavalry engagements took place on the left flank of the government troops (and even on their right flank). The opportunities were taken when the new visitor centre went in, when the car park’s going in – these things are done over time. Tony Pollard and I did research excavations before we built the visitor centre in 2007 to get a better understanding of the battlefield. In fact, if you go to the visitor centre now, many of the artefacts that were uncovered in that piece of fieldwork, which was mostly metal detecting, are on display.

[JB]
Ok, so whenever anyone says we’re going to build a visitor centre and car park, that’s manna for you as an archaeologist!

[DA]
Yes!

[JB]
Why can’t you just pick a site and say ‘we’re going to dig here’?

[DA]
We do as well. One thing about battlefields and understanding battlefields is doing a big area probably won’t help you. It’s about understanding the concentration of artefacts and how they’re distributed across the landscape, and understanding how that landscape has had an impact on the way the battle evolved over time during the day. Over the last few years, we’ve been doing further bits of fieldwork – we’ve been looking at the second line of the government troops. We were looking at the left flank, where the dragoons went out to go through the Culwhinniac Enclosure. In a couple of weeks’ time, we’ll be going to look at an area closer into the concentration of the fighting actually took place.

[JB]
Is that how you determine who was where, by the nature of the armaments? How does it work?

[DA]
There’s a bit of that, but Culloden is one of these battles that we’re very blessed with in terms of having multiple varieties of battlefield maps drawn at the time that pretty much show where individual regiments were, and we can start to play about with how they would have moved over the course of the battle. There are a couple of points that you can fix them in the landscape. We know where the edge of one of the enclosures were – the Culwhinniac enclosure formed the right-hand flank of the Jacobites as they lined up. We know approximately where the Culloden Parks were. That was the line when the Jacobites march out from their camp, they’re in columns and they march out onto the battlefield and they just take up a line onto that and then they turn and face the government troops as they’re coming forward. So, we know where those places are.

We know that they were actually set up slightly obliquely. A lot of these maps shows them as being like that, parallel. But because one side had moved forward to take cover of some stone dykes on the right-hand flank, that actually obliquely shifted the whole line, which meant the right-hand side of the Jacobites was closer to the government troops. [Much closer] They had less ground to cover. That’s the side of Jacobites that actually managed to engage, but they take such a beating because of the close musketry and cannon fire and then the second line coming in, that the other side of the line doesn’t actually reach. The left-hand flank of the Jacobites – the Macdonalds – get so far, let off a few volleys – but in fact by the time they’re over there, the right-hand side is already being repulsed. When you see that happening, there’s no way you’re going forward, so you start coming back yourself.

[JB]
Why such a bad choice of location, as we’ve heard, that did not play to their strengths?

[AM]
Well, one of the good things about Culloden is that in addition to the maps there’s also lots of written record. But it doesn’t always tally. People have different views of why what happened, happened. George Murray was in no doubt that the ground was wrong and they shouldn’t have fought in that place. Colonel John O’Sullivan, who was the Irish advisor to Prince Charles, he wanted to fight somewhere else – behind the visitor centre in the car park!

[JB]
Let’s hide behind that visitor centre!

[AM]
The car park was good ground! But nevertheless, there was lots and lots of dispute. The difficulty was that also, crucially, when the government army start this cannonade, there’s a kind of operational paralysis. They don’t do anything. Prince Charles doesn’t give an order to charge and when he does, the young man who had the order, had his head blown off with a cannonball. That’s why Colonel Harry Kerr is riding up and down the line, and the MacDonald regiments who are out on the left are 700 yards away? A long way away. And there’s bog between them. So, the government army is like that … and the Highlanders are like that. The Camerons are on the right and much closer, and so Kerr rides to try to get them to charge in echelon. He starts with the Macdonald regiments, who are insulted to be there on the left – that was a disaster for them, and their chiefs were not happy.

[JB]
Why?

[AM]
Because the place of honour is on the right. When the Clan Cameron, judged the bravest of the clans, they charge and despite the canister shot ploughing lanes through them, they actually break the first line. They break through, which is extraordinary. The second line, which was some distance away – you think 100 yards?

[DA]
Probably 100 yards because they have to leave enough room to manoeuvre that entire regiment, which is about 80 metres long.

[JB]
Even though we’re talking about the extraordinary bravery of the clansmen, they were not always well served by their commanders. There’s something in your book that George Murray was regarded, perhaps until then, as a great strategist. You wrote that someone had written at the time ‘if Prince Charles had fallen asleep for a year after the muster at Glenfinnan, he would have awakened with a crown on his head if it had all been left to Lord George Murray.’ So, Prince Charles didn’t cover himself in glory.

[AM]
He didn’t, and I agree with that estimate. Murray, I think was the outstanding strategic mind. He didn’t want to fight; he wanted the Jacobites to control the whole of Scotland because his judgement was that the Seven Years War that was taking place in Europe would soak up so much government material as well as men that they could hold Scotland, that they could do that. Prince Charles – I don’t believe that he was as feckless as he may appear. He was clearly a charismatic young man; he was only 24. He comes with one ship, drops anchor off Eriskay and he’s got seven old men with him and a few Clanranald soldiers. He comes to Glenfinnan and there’s nobody there! It looks like a disaster until the Camerons come. He’s clearly got charisma; he’s clearly got something about him. There’s no question in my mind about that, at the beginning.

[JB]
But he was no battle strategist.

[AM]
He was no battle strategist; I think he was an inspirer of men. I think he did that. For goodness sake, they got to Derby within 120 miles of London – that was an amazing achievement. Prestonpans sent a shiver of shock through Britain, that these primitive savages with their swords whirling above their heads could cut to pieces a government army in 10 minutes. Everybody thought ‘my god, what’s coming’?
But of course, in the Council of War (let’s call it that) the clan chiefs had different views; Murray and O’Sullivan were generally at daggers drawn; and so on. It was not a unified command, I don’t think. I think that’s the import of what you just quoted, Jackie. If Murray had seriously been in charge, with total control, yes I think it could have gone differently.

[DA]
But then the big issue with that is that you can’t plan for the unexpected. The night march went wrong. The surprise attack didn’t happen. They were tired …

[JB]
They got back, they hadn’t slept, they hadn’t eaten …

[DA]
They didn’t expect the government army to be coming so quickly. That’s war; that’s the nature of warfare. No matter how well you plan, there’s going to be things you’re not expecting. Actually, the ground at Culloden, they actually had their flanks pretty secure. If they’d held the right flank and stopped the government dragoons getting through the walls of the enclosure – there was a bit of debate about who was going to defend that side, it seems to have fallen through. If that had been held, they’d have had more of a chance.

[JB]
What about your methods? You mentioned earlier metal detectors, which sounds a very 20th-century tool [yeah!] – is that still the best?

[DA]
You know what? It is for battlefield archaeology because what you’re doing is you’re plotting concentrations of munitions and that tells you roughly where people were standing. What we have been using for modelling the terrain is LiDAR – laser scanning from Bourne’s Survey. That gives us a 3D model of the landscape, and the landscape is a key thing in the understanding of the Battle of Culloden in what you can see. It’s on a ridge. The guys on the left can’t see the guys on the right. They guys going through the enclosures can’t see folk, so they don’t know they’re being out-flanked on the right flank, the Jacobites, because they can’t see over that side. So, when you’ve got cavalry suddenly appearing in your rear, that sends a shiver through everybody. When that happens, you know … You can hold it off for so long but then it starts to go downhill quite rapidly from there.

[JB]
Do we know everything there is to know at this stage about the weaponry, about the injuries?

[AM]
Yes, I think there’s a good deal of information about that. Most Highlanders, as Derek was saying, you see shot fired on both sides. Many of them did have firearms although they were not their primary weapons. If a Highlander was right-handed, he would have a targe, which was not much bigger than these books. A shield, and a dirk, and his sword in his right hand. The targe was for parrying. It wasn’t for protecting your whole body like a legionary’s shield. If you were facing a bayonet, or ranks of bayonets, you knocked them up. The way the Highlanders charged was called ag dul scios, which means ‘going down’ because they ran at an angle. Also to avoid musketeers, because they tended to fire high, and so they wanted to avoid the musket balls. They were ready to knock up a bayonet and thrust – that was how it worked. That’s why the wedges were successful because they were able to get through one rank. If you got through one, momentum was everything. Absolutely everything.

Again, at Tippermuir for example, outside Perth, they broke through in many places. Alistair McCulloch’s Irish Brigade in particular broke through in many places. The Covenanter army commander, Lord Elcho, just froze because it was all falling apart. When that happened, it was all over. But at Culloden, the impression I have is that it all got bogged down. It wasn’t dynamic; there was no momentum. Although the Camerons broke through, James Wolfe, of Plains of Abraham fame, closed it up with Barrel’s Regiment.

[DA]
He comes in from the second line.

[AM]
That’s right. There’s a very very good description of that and how they did it. What happened at Culloden was the ferocity and the elan of the clans was cancelled by the terrain, by their exhaustion as you said – they were hungry and tired – but also countered by really terrific discipline.

[JB]
Derek, it seems unbelievable almost that such an important battle in Scottish and British history – global some say because of the ramifications had it gone the other way – such an important site is under threat. It’s constantly under threat.

[DA]
It appears to be constantly under threat. We’ve managed to check quite a few developments over time. There have been some house sites that have been built round some of the farmsteads and things that are there in the 19th century. Of course, it’s an ever-evolving landscape and it changed from 1746 onwards. Things were knocked down. The Culloden Parks were removed and are no longer visible. Parts of the turf dykes that formed the Culwhinniac enclosure have been ploughed flat, and we’ve actually rebuilt parts of those so people can fix themselves in the landscape again. We’ve had roads going through and things moved. Landscapes will always change.

The threats are real, but I would say Culloden is one of the better-protected battlefields in Scotland, probably because we know so much about it. We know very much where individual elements of it happened. As soon as you draw a line round anything on a map, there’s always a boundary and something close to the edge; there’s something you’ll see from the viewpoint. One of the things about Culloden is its sense of place. I think the biggest threat to Culloden is an impact on the feeling that you get when you go there. That open landscape, the wind blowing – if you go there in April and you’re on your own, it’s ‘wow, this is some place’.

[JB]
I interviewed Diana Gabaldon recently, the author of the phenomenally successful Outlander, who was moved to tears by just describing being there.
Let’s end where we started, Alistair. You said in the book’s introduction that you wanted to understand the warriors and where that much-feared courage had come from. What did you discover at the end of your journey?

[AM]
I think what I found was that these warriors in the 17th and 18th century were amongst the most feared in Europe. They almost toppled the British state; that is something that needs to be remembered. This was seismic; and Culloden, as you were saying earlier Jackie, was a place where history turned. There’s no question about that.

What I found – you try and put yourself in the position of both sides – in terms of the Highlanders, it was kinship, it was the sense of the past, and so on. But it was also the belief that you were with people who would protect you as well as fight alongside you. That’s not necessarily the case in many armies. I think that was the main thing. The other thing that was clear to me was the Culloden really was … I’m always suspicious about stories that talk about turning points, but Culloden was; there’s no doubt. It was followed by a genocide. It was followed by mass theft, rape – all sorts of dreadful things went on in the summer of 1746, but most of all people began to leave. They began to depart. The theme of Highland history after 1746 was departure, and Culloden was the huge stimulus in that. There were many other factors but that was a huge and dramatic moment in Highland history. That blasted heath, that empty place is more than a metaphor; it’s how the landscape began to look after April 1746.

[JB]
How evocative. Thanks to Alistair Moffat, whose book War Paths is out now, and to Derek Alexander who’ll continue to dig deep into Scotland’s history for the Trust. And thanks to you all for listening, whether it’s here in Aberdeen or through the Love Scotland podcast.

As you may already know, Culloden Moor is under threat from increased planning applications. The National Trust for Scotland has launched a Fighting Fund to help push against insensitive developments. It allows the Trust to continue to protect this hugely significant site, so if you’d like to support the Fighting Fund, you can do so at nts.org.uk/donate or by texting CULLODEN to 70970, which will donate £5. You can find out more information on the Fighting Fund by clicking the link on the online details for this episode.

We’re going to finish with some more music – a haunting song that perhaps best captures the poignant end of those daring Jacobite campaigns. My thanks to Iona Fyfe, who will take us out with ‘The Skye Boat Song’.
From all of us here, goodbye.

[Iona sings ‘The Skye Boat Song’]

[Applause]

[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.