The Scottish Jacobite Party

I took the day off yesterday to commune with my ancestors. Nothing too deep or mystic, just a wander around Berwickshire checking my roots, my purpose.

The run up to the May 3rd Election is ahead, a major commitment of time, meagre resources and I wanted to feel the country, understand my relationship to it and my connection to the people of the Borders and of Scotland.

Last week Gordon Brown tried to buy the Scottish Election for £1.85 billion. It was all tastefully done and packaged as part of the Budget. But it was a bribe to the Scottish voters. It would make sense if it was his own money he was using, but its our taxes that's funding this latest effort to buy us off.

Robert Burns summed up the National sentiment to the bribery and corruption that let to the 1707 Act of Union:-

SUCH A PARCEL OF ROGUES IN A NATION

Fareweel to a' our Scottish fame,
Fareweel our ancient glory;
Fareweel ev'n to the Scottish name,
Sae fam'd in martial story.
Now Sark rins over Soway sands,
An' Tweed rins to the ocean,
To mark where England's province stands -
Such a parcel of rogues in a nation!

What force or guile could not subdue,
Thro' many warlike ages,
Is wrought now by a coward few,
For hireling traitor's wages.
The English steel we could disdain,
Secure in valour's station;
But English gold has been our bane -
Such a parcel of rogues in a nation!

O would, ere I had seen the day
That Treason thus could sell us,
My auld grey head had lien in clay,
Wi' Bruce and loyal Wallace!
But pith and power, till my last hour,
I'll mak this declaration;
We're bought and sold for English gold -
Such a parcel of rogues in a nation!

Three hundred years on and what has changed?

Do we come so cheap?

So, it was time to take stock. Check the kitty.

I did spend £5 on a taxi last week. I was in Edinburgh and had walked from Waverley Station to the Scotsman offices. I wanted to check on Pride and Passion, the group who are promoting improved Scottish services. The address I had got from the Visitor Centre in Waverley Place was 22 Drumsheugh Gardens which is at the west end of Princess Street.

I decided to live it large and got a taxi.

Taxis in Edinburgh now have TV in the back. TV that can't be turned off by the driver. Not a good move.

I believe that we have lost the power of critical thought in this country.

You have a captive audience in the back of a cab with a knowledgeable local driver up front. A golden opportunity to educated the visitors in the back, to answer their questions, make suggestions of places they could go. The best possible salesman for Edinburgh and the council lets the cab company add to its bottom line by making a few quid by installing a TV system the driver can't turn off, making intelligent conversation impossible.

Dumb.

To make matters worse, I had to listen to a penguin with a Robin Williams accent instead of a travelog about Scotland.

It must take years of work to get the penguin's impersonation of Robin Williams up to that standard.

So £5 for the taxi and the budget is down to £61.80.

With five weeks to go, its a reasonable sum of money especially since I have a bus pass and can keep travel costs down.

I got a receipt for the taxi. In this day and age, you can't be too careful. There was that Tory bloke who lost a couple of receipts and look what happened to him. In politics, you are always on the knife edge.

It turns out that I got the address wrong. Number 22 is the Alzheimer Foundation. The nice women in reception let me in but they didn't know where Pride and Passion were at.

I must have passed muster since the ladies at reception let me out again.

So the state of play is that Gordon has just spent £1,850,000,000 of our money to win the election and I have £62 to do the same thing.

I like the odds.

I went into William Hill last week to lay a couple of pounds on it, but they weren't offering odds. If you find a bookie that is offering odds on an outsider victory, my advice is to try a flutter. The Scottish Jacobite Party to win at anything longer than 10,000 to 1 has to be worth a wee bet.

Meanwhile back to the ancestors.

The past is important since it links to the future through the present. Tomorrow will be yesterday the day after next. A productive future requires a critical examination of our past and should guide our present conduct.

My dad's folks are from Berwickshire for a few generations back. They were farm labourers working the land. Go back just a few generations and the math is that I am related to just about everybody in the region.

This means that my ancestors and probably yours built and lived in Edin's Hall Broch.

The broch was built at around the time of Christ and predates the Roman occupation of Scotland. The site contains the remains of a number of hill forts and the very impressive stone foundations for the broch.

The interior of Edin's Hall is about 18m wide which makes it much larger in diameter than the brochs of the Orkneys and Hebrides. The walls are 5 to 6m in width.

It is impossible to say from the remains of the building today, what it looked like in its complete state. It does however represent the work product of a group of people who were able to work together on communal projects of impressive scale and scope. It was built to last.

A couple of large ingots of copper weighing about 40 kg total were found buried inside the broch which suggests that the community were working and profiting from nearby copper mines.

To get to the broch, follow the signs from the Duns/Grantshouse Road. Park at the bottom of the hill follow the signs across the suspension bridge for the 2 1/4 miles to the broch.

Yesterday was ideal walking punctuated by the lark high above, the pheasants celebrating the end of the shooting season, wood pigeons, crows and a woodpecker ratt, ratat, rattatting on a dead tree.

On to the cemetery at Chirnside where my grandfather, grandmother, great grandfather and great grandmother are buried. My great grandfather was a joiner and set up a family business in Chirnside as a Joiner and Undertaker. Although my grandfather was the oldest son, for some reason he was sent off to Hutton Castle to become a gardener.

Hutton Castle was to become the home of Sir William Burrell, the wealthy Glasgow shipowner and it is his art collection which forms the Burrell Collection in Glasgow.

I was looking around the cemetery when I came across a man tending to flowers at a memorial to his mother. I live on the West Coast and haven't been around Chirnside that much and haven't had too much contact with my Chirnside relations. So I didn't recognise my cousin James Black who now runs the family business of John Black and Sons.

His mother Ella died last year and James is going through the hard adjustment to life without a parent who has always been there supporting and approving. We talked a bit about appropriate memorials. It is important to be able to express our debt to our parents in a public way. To acknowledge our past.

James reminded me that Jim Clark is buried at Chirnside.

I started school at Chirnside Primary School and Jim Clark was a pupil there at the same time during the war. He was four years older and even if his driving talents had been obvious them it is unlikely that they would have registered on a 4 1/2 year old child.

Jim Clark was one of the great motor racing drivers. He was World Driving Champion in 1963 and 1965, won 25 Grand Prix races and the Indianapolis 500 in 1965.

He was killed when his car left the circuit during a Formula Two race at Hockenheim on April 7th 1968.

Next year will be the 40th anniversary of his death. There should be some event to mark the occasion and now is the time to start planning.

Clark is mentioned in the same high plateau of driving talent as Fangio, Senna and Schumacher.

He brought world wide attention to Chirnside, Duns and Edington Mains where he farmed and we should cherish his talent and Scottish heritage.

I was born in Fife in June of 1940. Six months later, my dad was called up and I went with my mother to live with my father's parents in a farm cottage near Chirnside.

Farming in Northumberland, Berwickshire and East Lothian followed a different course over recent centuries to that of the rest of Europe.

The traditional peasant farm was a runrig system with an infield and outfield. Portions of the infield and outfield were assigned to individuals on an annual basis. There were no economic resources to improve the land and short term tenancy with no recompense for improvements acted against this.

In the 1700s, the larger land owners of the East Coast cleared the peasant farmers off the land, enclosed the fields and gave long term leases of 20 or 30 years to qualified individuals.

The effect was the industrialisation of farming in these three areas. Farms with large acreages were formed with an educated farmer living in a large farm house employing upwards of thirty or forty men, women and children to work the farm.

Lime was introduced to fertilise the soil. Crop rotations were developed which improved the yield and restricted the spread of disease. New crops such as turnips provided winter forage for livestock.

For the land owner and farmer, life was good.

For the families cleared off the land who now had to travel to the annual hiring fairs it wasn't so good. There were one year contracts which included the house, a bag of oatmeal, coal for heating and the right to keep a pig.

The farm labourer or hind had to provide extra labour for harvest and other peaks times during the year. For older hinds with growing families, this wasn't a problem since they had a supply of extra labour on tap. Newly married younger men had to employ women to meet this requirement. These women called bondagers lived with the young couple.

Much is being made of the 200th anniversary of the ending of slavery. Slavery persisted in Scotland until the 1940s. The word bondager can be correctly interpreted as being kept in bondage. The Oxford Dictionary definition of bondage is serfdom or slavery.

These women were exploited with few rights of redress.

The industrialisation of farming in Northumberland, Berwickshire and East Lothian had important consequences. The consequences depended on two significant developments.

James Small developed the Scots Plough.

Farmers had been using a wooden plough share. This was inefficient and required a team of up to twelve oxen to pull the plough.

Around 1780 James Small carried out experiments in Berwickshire using an iron plough share. He tried various curvatures until he got what he wanted. An efficient iron plough share that could be pulled by a pair of horses.

Meanwhile further north in East Linton, Andrew Meikle, a millwright, was working on a drum threshing machine. His device which could use wind, water, horse of steam power was patented in 1788.

Before his invention, farmers had threshed grain by spreading the husks on a threshing floor where they were beaten with a flail to separate the kernel from the chaff. The mixture was then thrown into the wind to separate the chaff and kernel. Two labour intensive jobs.

These two inventions transformed agriculture by dramatically increasing the productivity of farming.

This increased productivity allowed rural labourers to move to the cities where they provided the labour for the industrial revolution.

James Small refused to profit from his work wanting the benefits to go to the farmers of Scotland. He died in poverty.

Andrew Meikle did patent his invention but made little money from it because of piracy and also died in poverty.

There are letters from George Washington and Thomas Jefferson enquiring about these inventions which would play a large role in the development of agriculture in America.

The smithy where James Small did his blacksmith work on the ploughshares still exists in a neglected state. This should form the basis for a Borders Regional Museum along the lines of The Museum of Country Life in East Kilbride.

This would house displays to explain the work of James Small and Andrew Meikle, the unique aspects of farming in Northumberland, Berwickshire and East Lothian.

The Jim Clark Room in Duns has a fine display of his trophies but no examples of the cars he drove. These could be included in The Museum along with a suitable tribute to Jimmy Guthrie and Steve Hislop, the Border's motor cycle stars.

The Museum would include an interpretation of Edin's Hall Broch for those who can't make the climb to the site itself.

We must preserve and display our heritage. It is an important National resource that suffers from neglect.

Monday 26th March 2007

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