I have been fiddling with this blog for some time. The George Peppard character in the 1980s television series, The A-Team, immortalised the phrase “I love it when a plan comes together”; but this blog had manifestly not been coming together…….until I paged through the on-line tributes to actress, Maggie Smith, who died recently. One correspondent wrote: “May she go forth shining from this world, our hymns of praise and wails of grief echoing as she flies free from mortality to dwell forever among the stars in the firmament.” Those effusive, over-the-top, but nevertheless sublime words have spurred me to action, to finish the job. So here are more observations on some 80-years-old books in the Britain in Pictures series.
#25 British Cartoonists Caricaturists and Comic Artists by David Low
When I started this series of Britain in Pictures blogs I decided not to incorporate pictures from the books themselves – other than an image of the front cover. This was a bold resolve given that the theme of the series is Britain “in pictures”. But as I have worked through I have been surprised, indeed reassured, by how little the books rely on their illustrations. Until now that is. An essay about graphic art with no representations of the subject matter does seem a bit incongruous!
It’s my guess that everybody, but everybody, who reads paper version newspapers invariably looks at the day’s cartoons, although not perhaps the “comic strips” - which aren’t necessarily comic. Actually, Number 25 in the Britain in Pictures series doesn’t disavow comics and comic strips, but they are not in the spotlight. The focus is cartoons - which might occasionally be comic but mainly are serious, if you get the drift. The author is David Low, long-time cartoonist for the London afternoon newspaper, the Evening Standard. Low was an expatriate from Down Under, and I’m not qualified to comment on whether the inevitable spin that his antipodean origins imparted to his comic sensibilities was discernible in the work of his years in London. Anyway, this book is not about Low the illustrious cartoonist, it’s Low in words, Low’s treatise on the world of perceptive and (possibly) humorous pen and ink.
Before leaving our author, however, I’m prompted to add some further biography. David Low was born at Dunedin, New Zealand, in 1891, and moved to Sydney in 1911. He contributed work to The Bulletin. He migrated to the UK in 1919 to work for The Star in London. He was with the Evening Standard from 1927 to 1950, ending his career with The Manchester Guardian. Low was knighted in 1962; and died in 1963. His obituary in The Guardian described him as “the dominant cartoonist of the Western world”. To give an idea, I paraphrase from the Wikipedia description of Low’s 20 September, 1939, Evening Standard cartoon titled “Rendezvous”. The Second World War was less than a month old. The cartoon shows two recognisable military figures bowing politely and doffing their caps to each other across a dead figure marked Poland. It is a take-off of the occasion when Stanley found Livingstone in the African jungle. The figure portraying Hitler says: “The scum of the Earth, I believe?”, while the figure portraying Stalin says: “The bloody assassin of the workers, I presume?”. [The more I consider this cartoon the more I feel that the two captions are back to front. Surely irony requires that Hitler would have uttered the words of greeting referencing the suppression of the workers, but these are, instead, ascribed to Stalin.]
Low starts us with something to ponder. “It is widely supposed that the English have a sense of humour but no sense of wit. There are, of course, some Englishmen under the impression that wit pointed against the things they disapprove or disdain is humour, and wit pointed against the things they approve or respect is offensive vulgarity.”
Having thus set the scene, Low spends more than half his book in “an account of the progress of British cartooning up to the time of its arrival in the daily newspapers” – esoteric territory indeed, a period in time before the recollection of any of his readers. He references many artists and their work, demonstrating - whether intentional or not - that mostly they had their funny bones in a different spot than later generations.
The central section of Low’s book focusses on The Comic Artists. By this point it is clear that Low is not only comprehensively familiar with the history of his craft but of the generations of practitioners and their individual styles and attributes. One after another he describes and evaluates them, places them in context, compares them with their contemporaries and those who followed; while, at the same time, providing an intellectual overview: “It is supposed by the ignorant that satire, wit, and humour are interchangeable terms meaning the same thing. But satire, though essentially witty, is not infrequently serious in intent and solemn in treatment; and, conversely, humour requires no wit nor satire to be first-rate as humour.”
Low has a section on The Portrait Caricaturists, where he begins: “Elsewhere I have distinguished between the ability to express ideas and the ability to draw caricatural likeness of persons. In other words, between a cartoonist of situation and a caricaturist of personality.” So, no themes or messages in this section, no story-telling, merely portraits in caricature. Low admiringly discusses Max Beerbohm, a contemporary for some 65 years. Beerbohm was an essayist, a drama critic, a broadcaster - and a caricaturist. “It was in the combination of his artistic and his literary wit that he reached his highest form as an interpreter of character.”
Low’s final section, Yesterday and To-Day, is simply more of the continuum, bringing the survey up to date (to 1942) with discussion of the luminaries of the time. He bemoans that Punch, alone, survives as a weekly printer of cartoons. He discusses, with discernment, both the perceptions and the techniques of the artists of the day and of the most recent years. He specifically references and discusses a number of cartoons. From the First World War, a cartoon pictures Kaiser Wilhelm confronting the King of the Belgians. “You have lost everything”, says the Kaiser. “Not my soul”, says the King.
With a nod to the word “British” in the book’s title, Low is free to consider contributors from the country of his youth. “The example of Punch has inspired emulation overseas. Sydney Punch burst forth in Australia, followed, as a reaction, by The Bulletin, an illustrated weekly specialising in topical cartoons, political and otherwise. The Bulletin had no use for imported traditions, but was a wholly indigenous article reflecting the native freshness of a new land; and its pungent and witty way of dealing with public affairs was all its own. Here was an ideal nursery for satire, and a school of cartoonists and caricaturists grew up around it.” Low adds: “As might be expected, in days when Britain used 'the colonies’ as a kind of ash-can for its ne’er-do-wells, The Bulletin was not always pro-English.”
While referencing The Bulletin, Low discusses Will Dyson. “Dyson was a Bulletin ‘portrait caricaturist’ who after trying his luck in London for a year became a cartoonist.” He began to offer “cartoons of socialist inspiration, drawn with an infusion of grotesque macabre, containing a sarcastic disrespect for orthodox standards”. He became an effective propogandist for Labour, not necessarily the Labour Party. “His incisive cartoons on the efforts of Germany [during the First World War] to pervert the gifts of science to destructive purposes frequently occupied full-pages in the national daily newspapers.”
Taking a breather from his survey, Low acknowledges the changing times from the purely practical viewpoint: “The cartoonist for the modern newspaper works under very different conditions from earlier times. The one cartoon a week has become one cartoon a day. The methods of preparing his work are more simple; but the very efficiency of the machine of which he is part circumscribes him within the limits of a rigid time-table, and forces him to an endless pursuit of ever-changing headlines.”
And Low concludes: “The crude scrawlings of primitive humourists have become the polished and specialised comic art. In Britain, at least, as befits an aspiring democracy, there is still an appreciation of the need for an expression both satirical and urbane, rude and polite. Perhaps the best is still to come.” We see some of that “best” in Australia’s newspapers today.
#102 English Popular and Traditional Art by Margaret Lambert and Enid Mark
One of the features of this Britain in Pictures series is that a subject can, in prospect, hold for you no interest whatever, and then prove to be fascinating. So it was with English Popular and Traditional Art. At the outset I didn’t even have a sense of subject matter; but then found it to be most involving. The authors’ opening words set the scene: “Popular and traditional art, in the sense here intended, is hard to define though easy enough to recognise when seen. It is the art which ordinary people have, from time immemorial, introduced into their everyday lives, sometimes making it themselves, at others imposing their own tastes on the products of the craftsman or the machine, in contrast to the more sophisticated art made by specialists for wealthy patrons. Its very lack of sophistication makes popular art one of the most revealing expressions of national characteristics.”
That really says it all: what remains for the authors is to provide a list, and to flesh it out with a bit of description and historical context. And, I suppose this is what our joint authors, Margaret Lambert and Enid Mark, do; and in doing so they give us a comprehensive survey, a fascinating dip into household and domestic byways. For my part, I can merely dip into that dip. Each section of the book deals with a different traditional area, and there is no final conclusion or summary. In a sense, that conclusion comes in the Introduction: “A curious fact that seems to emerge from this brief survey is that the last great impetus to popular art came from the Romantic Movement in the early years of the nineteenth century; there has been nothing comparable since.” Which observation invites a searching look at the two hundred-plus years since…….to which I must offer a shrug in response! The book was written in 1946
The range of traditional art unearthed and discussed by the authors is huge, including many pastimes long lost or so localised as never to have had widespread appreciation.
And so to dip.
Paper and printing –
A wide range of paper-based curios is discussed by the authors: instance, printed hand-out copies of latest songs. Or so-called “broadsides” with dramatic stories, distributed by pedlars, invariably on a strip of paper with a bold woodcut at the top to attract the not-so-literate public. Often sensationalist – murder, public executions, gallows confessions, high moral tone – in doggerel verse, and lack of realism.
Complementary with “broadsides” were Chapbooks, named for their originator, Chapman: slim, pocket-sized, with paper-wrapped cover usually ornamented with a woodcut and often gaily coloured (usually hand-coloured). We’re told that “the contents can rarely claim any literary merit” and yet their variety of subject matter ranges through Religious, Diabolical, Supernatural, Superstitious, Romantic, Humorous, Legendary, Historical, Biographical, and Criminal – so their readership was clearly not illiterate.
Much information is advanced about the origins and history of the Valentines card: originally an amateur verse embellished with a paper cut-out or pasted-on bits of silk or satin. Later: more serious messages and more complex architecture for the card; and do it yourself versions; and humorous instead of sentimental.
And paper cut-out silhouettes, such shadow portraits “filling the need for cheap likenesses before the invention of photography”; and, as remembered by me from Agricultural Shows of earlier times, still an attraction for the admiring and the curious long after photography was available to all.
Pottery and glass –
Curiously, I found that there is no reference in this section to the great chinaware manufacturers such as Worcester or Minton, nor to the great pottery-maker, Wedgewood, nor to equivalent glassmakers; but then I twigged that the book is about “popular and traditional”, not about industrial-scale. Mind you, the dividing line is thin – none of the cited examples of pottery is minus a degree of mass production. And those examples are endless – too numerous to be cited, even too numerous to be cherry-picked.
The authors note the range of engraved glass screens and windows, typically installed in public houses, with decorative designs of scrolls, festoons, fruit and flowers, with a [for instance] inscription: “Drunk for a penny, dead drunk for tuppence.”.
Regarding inscriptions on pottery, it is asserted that although “each district had its peculiarities of shape and decoration” the sentiments expressed thereon are universal. From a pottery jug:
When I was in my native place
I was a lump of clay
And digged was I from out the earth
And brought from thence away.
But now I am a jug become
By potters art and skill
And now your servant am become
And carry ale I will.
Painting, carving and metalwork –
This field is both diverse and abundant, and the authors bemoan [with their “only” in the wrong place] that they “can only pick a few examples”. They note that carving is a longstanding art, and “comparatively durable”, hence with multiple extant examples – for instance early Christian crosses, and the Cerne Abbas giant carved out of the chalk Downs. They light on wooden figureheads as one of England’s most characteristic forms of wood carving – from Tudor times, but found today as museum pieces only. The range of figureheads was universal, from paddle-steamer to sleek clipper to man-o-war, placed from horizontal through to vertical, all colourfully decorated.
The landlubber equivalent of the ship’s figurehead was the shop sign - typically for the inn; but of many shapes and sizes…..carved in wood, moulded in plaster, fashioned in metal. Standard designs for trades and professions, geographical subjects, heraldic and religious motifs. The authors cite an extensive range, and throw into the mix all manner of ironwork for displays and supports, not to forget weather vanes.
“The elaborately carved and decorated roundabouts and swings of the fair-ground” are arrived at via the hobby-horse of ancient folk-dancing, through the rocking-horses of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to the1870s hand-propelled merry-go-rounds with wooden horses. Thence to the application of steam to fairground entertainment – leading to bigger, grander, and more-highly decorated apparatus. This “decorative exuberance”, the authors tell us, derives from “the romanticised rococo of early nineteenth-century theatre decoration”, still seen in Toy Theatre sets. Then a quick jump to the painting on English canal barges. As with the fairground, there is a traditional canal boat decoration: river scene with picturesque castle, plus flowers. Free-style painting, broad strokes, loud colours – much in the way of gypsy caravans. Tick.
The authors conclude this section with reference to (another) “rapidly disappearing” traditional art, the painted decoration of farm carts - on the front and the tailboard, with sections showing the maker’s and owner’s names in fancy lettering, plus decorative scrolls and curls.
Textiles –
Patchworking offers great scope for individual decorative sense, for creativity in the use of colours and textures, and for imagination in the use of patch shapes. Surely patchworking is principal among the traditional textile arts, yet the authors give it one small paragraph only. Perhaps things were different in the austerity of the1940s, but the patchworker envisaged by our authors invariably uses “old material”, and is invariably a “she”! Rather more paragraphs are given to “quilting”, which the authors dissociate from patchworking. The quilter “usually designs her own pattern”, although naturally influenced by local tradition: Welsh geometric patterns; floral patterns from northern and western regions; cable, shell, feather, intersecting circles, diamonds in English quilts; raised corded designs…….all applied to wadded or padded quilts.
The authors quickly pass by knitting, other than to note that the traditional knitted jerseys worn by Yorkshire fishermen had village designs – allegedly so that in case of disaster bodies washed ashore could be readily identified! Identification was also to be had from smocking, another form of adding raised patterns, this time embroidered on the front of jerseys or jerkins. These embroidered patterns usually pictured the trade of the wearer – ploughman, shepherd, dairymaid - and, the authors suggest, facilitated the hiring process.
Under the “textiles” heading we also learn of the rugs and pin-cushions decorated “with buttons, beads and pin heads” (and tassells) made by soldiers and sailors, typically as gifts. And the printing of commemorative sporting and political pictures on cheap textiles.
And, “though not exactly textile decoration but so akin to it in motives and design that we cannot forbear to mention it here”, is tattooing. An ancient practice, across cultures, (re)discovered by sailors and soldiers in the East – this accounting for “the prevalence of exotic Oriental motives, especially dragons, amongst the hearts, linked initials, flowers, butterflies, anchors and other homely symbols of luck, fidelity and affection which we find repeated over and over again in other forms of popular art”.
Miscellaneous handiwork and decoration –
The theme, here, is simple items – natural and manufactured – to which have been added some decoration: handiwork created for personal pleasure or as gifts and tokens of affection. One such example: a piece of bone, fashioned into a staybusk, decorated with scratched hearts, and coloured. Since these items were intended to give rigidity to corsets one wonders how such artistic endeavours were expected to be seen and admired. Other examples: apple corers and cheese tasters with decorated knuckle bones for handles; whip or walking-stick handles in wood or bone; carved knitting needles, butter pats, tobacco pipes. And miniature items made by trade apprentices. And ships in bottles. And plaited straw “dollies”, often part of harvest celebrations. And souvenirs from holiday locations: “The use of sea shells for decorating boxes and frames, or of coloured sand for making patterns in glass weights, are but two examples which could be multiplied indefinitely.”
But not here! Indeed, as with most lists, this ending is abrupt……….
#21 The Story of Scotland by F. Fraser Darling
I have few mementos to remind me of my father, however there are three I might mention. There’s the decorative metal tobacco case engraved with his initials. When not in a “giving it up” phase he sometimes smoked a pipe, and at other times “rolled his own”. The fashioning of hand-made cigarettes from papers and loose tobacco was a laborious process, typically conducted at the kitchen table, resulting each time in rather unhandsome cylinders, pinched at each end; but with the case filled, ready for the pocket. This handsome little receptacle has been devoid of contents for more than sixty years, but still it gives off the odour of tobacco - or so I imagine.
Then there’s the monumental 776-page 1958 biography of Adolph Hitler, Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, by Alan Bullock. I recall buying this daunting tome as a birthday present before heading off for a stint as a national serviceman at Puckapunyal in 1959, and stashing it away until the date of the birthday soon upon my return from camp. Having lived through the Hitler era I doubt whether my father cared to read the book. After he died a year later, and the book was mine to keep, I discovered that many of the footnotes referenced Hitler’s manifesto Mein Kampf [My Struggle] (originally published in two parts in 1925 and 1926), specifically the one volume James Murphy English translation published in London in 1939. A little while later I sought out a copy of the Murphy translation for cross-referencing with the biography. It was an ex-lending library copy. It had one date stamp only on its rear end page - it had been borrowed on 1 April 1941, and never again. At 567 pages of small type this lack of readership is perhaps not surprising, quite apart from having little book of the month flavour at the time. Equally unsurprising is the fact that both the Bullock study and its companion piece evaded my gaze in 1960 and have continued to do so.
The third memento is a woollen tie, a rather more appropriate gift from son to father a few years before the Hitler episode. In 1955, when I was on a schoolboy tour of the UK, there was a dedicated “tartan” shop in Sauchiehall Street, Edinburgh….into which I marched, and asked to purchase a tie woven in Andrews tartan colours. The elderly, spare, imperious, snooty male shop assistant forthwith declaimed that there is no such thing - indeed, no such thing as Clan Andrews. However, if needs must, an Andrews would be entitled to use the tartan of the “half-brother” Anderson. Or to use the Ross tartan. After all, Andrews was the bastard son of Ross! Well, I sheepishly bought the Ross tie, and duly presented it to my father, but never felt entirely comfortable with the gesture or with our impugned ancestry. And, yes, I still have the tie, although it is many decades since it encircled my throat and, being woollen, it is now somewhat moth eaten.
My ancestry is undoubtedly Scottish or, at least, one strand of the genetic thread is. [The other three strands, by the way, are Cornish (Laity), Irish (Joyce) and Cornish (Stear).] And even though the sepia studio portraits of the numerous male and female Andrews who went before reveal a drab, unhandsome, bunch [and also, as my father would have said, short-arsed], they were doubtless a fair average lot, and I have no complaints. [I also have my father to thank for his description of some unprepossessing person as “ugly as a bag full of backsides!” – which the Andrews forebears undoubtedly also were.]
All of this is by way of special pleading that I have a few drops of Scottish blood and therefore some authentic connection to Scotland. The challenge for Dr. Fraser Darling, author of The Story of Scotland (1942), is to speak both to the in-crowd, and to the rest of you! And don't think that it's (simply) the history of Scotland that the author will be cramming into 36 pages of text and illustrations, it's the story. The further challenge for the author will be to make that story interesting; and to reveal Scotland's story to be something other than clan skirmishes and an incommodious climate. And there are further unflattering preconceptions to be acknowledged and overcome, including parsimony, and that dour demeanour. How to reconcile these with the banking prowess of the Scots, and with Scottish contributions to medical science, and to shipbuilding? And where in the story of Scotland will the author insert the invention and ubiquity of Scotch?
Sir Frank Fraser Darling (1903 – 1979), although English, and gaining his qualifications and working in England until his ‘30s, developed a focus on Scottish agriculture. He was, for a time, Director of the Commonwealth Bureau of Animal Breeding and Genetics at Edinburgh. Per Wikipedia: “Later, in the Summer Isles, Fraser Darling began the work that was to mark him as a naturalist-philosopher of original turn of mind and great intellectual drive.”
Fraser Darling adopts a three-section structure, The Face of Scotland, Scotland in History, and Life and Work in Scotland, and that suits just fine, I think. With this approach, it seems, we are to be focussing on geography, history and sociology.
When contemplating the face of Scotland, the author - inevitably - considers how the lie of the land and how the climate have affected the Scottish people; how, to a significant degree, these factors have "made them". He starts with a paradox. The so-called "border country" separates Scotland from England, but that separation is merely by hills sparsely populated and is no great barrier. So how come Scotland is a country to itself? Fraser Darling chooses not to answer the question at this point, but embarks on a sentimental journey around the country. “A prominent trait of Scottish character is nostalgia, which in various ways is a reaction to the beauty of the country…..the air and light have in themselves a quality of beauty felt deep in the heart of Scotsmen.” The face of Scotland through the eyes of our author is undoubtedly nostalgic. But he can be brutally acerbic, too: “Edinburgh is a beautiful city, there is no doubt about that, but it can show patches as disgraceful as any other town of less glittering façade.” “The few Highland towns are very much alike – Inverness, Oban, Fort William – in having no charm except their setting.” This chapter, though, is a comprehensive round-up of the country as it would have been for the inquisitive traveller of the day – all there: the scenic, the impact of humankind, the warts, and the all.
The obvious starting point for Fraser Darling’s history chapter is Scotland versus England, and he notes that the “division” between the two regions can be traced back to Hadrian’s Wall, built from the year 120AD. What follows is most instructive: civilised Roman England effectively disappeared under the onslaught of the Teutonic tribes while Scotland, north of the Wall, was largely unchanged. So, the question posed earlier, about the unchanged border country, is perhaps answered by the existence of Hadrian’s Wall. Later, we’re told that the border country was completely colonised in the subsequent Anglo-Saxon invasion from the south - although these invaders were not transient marauders, rather colonisers seeking land. Later again, after the Norman Conquest, the Norman push into Scotland was delayed until the Normans themselves had become Anglicised...... leaving Fraser Darling to assert that “the purest Anglo-Saxons in Britain today are the people of the Scottish Border and Central Plain”.
But this cosy story gives no sense of Scotland’s history of skirmishes and battles. Check out the Wikipedia entry “List of Battles Between England and Scotland”. In the first three hundred years of the two countries being identified as such (say 900AD to 1200AD) seven significant battles are noted; then in the Norman era we have the fourteen battles of the First War of Scottish Independence (1296 through 1307, including the exploits of William Wallace and Robert the Bruce). On to a further thirteen battles, between 1314 and 1327, leading into the Second War of Scottish Independence with its ten battles between 1332 and 1356. Oh, and several further wars - from 1372 to 1651 – during which Wikipedia identifies 28 battles and dust-ups between England and Scotland. The on-line article leaves it there, but Fraser Darling offers us much more bang for our buck, ending with the Scottish defeat by the Duke of Cumberland, son of George II, at Culloden Moor in 1746: “The battle of Culloden was one of the most poignant incidents in Highland history. The clans showed at one time their faults and virtues – magnificent bravery and dash, and unselfish sacrifice; inability to co-operate, to consolidate, or to rally after the first charge. Their defeat was complete, and the behaviour of Cumberland and his troops after the battle was a disgrace to England. The wanton cruelty which ensued in the Highlands is not yet forgotten.”
Fraser Darling’s chapter on life and work is, perhaps, more accessible to the contemporary reader, although 80 years on it evokes something of a fly in amber. There are several pages of concern about the fading fortunes of Scotland, including the exodus of “hundreds and thousands of well-trained young folk to whom it seldom occurs that their own country is desperately in need of their knowledge and service”…..although, it should be noted that since Fraser Darling’s time there has been some population increase, with the exodus being slowed, and counteracted by inward migration from Ireland and, moreover, from mainland Europe. Fraser Darling’s treatise pre-dates this development, and, predates the moves of recent years to semi-independence and, since 1999, the Scottish Parliament.
Confronted by the rather gloomy industrial and economic outlook, Fraser Darling is comfortable moving on to Scottish successes in the arts and sciences. His discussion produces a long list of notables, and who’s to know whether these are more illustrious, more numerous, or more virtuous than those on similar lists from other (comparable?) countries? Nevertheless, the pickings are rich: Watt, Macadam, and Telford in engineering; in mathematical and physical sciences, Clerk Maxwell, Napier (invertor of logarithms), and Kelvin; Hume and Adam Smith in philosophy and political economy; Livingstone the explorer; Adam and Mackintosh, architects; Burns, Scott, Stevenson and Buchan, writers. Fraser Darling cites others, but his many effusive words about worthies unremembered today leave the sense of old monochrome photographs yellowing in an abandoned portmanteau.
Regarding my earlier speculation as to what Fraser Darling’s Story might contain…..
# Clan skirmishes -
In the overall story it is not surprising that Fraser Darling focusses, not on internecine clan skirmishes, but on the hundreds of years of strife between Scotland and England.
# The incommodious climate -
Fraser Darling doesn’t so much talk about the Scottish climate per se as to use the “more environmental challenge to life in Scotland than in England” as an explanation of why over the years Scots have migrated to England. Furthermore, having left the land of “fish, milk, oatmeal and potatoes” the Scot “found himself at an advantage and he throve”. Moreover, the Scot also throve when he went to new lands: “his frugality and ability to cope with a new environment were the qualities needed.” A bold statement, case not proven. Maybe most immigrants, not only Scottish, thrive in their adopted environments.
# Parsimony -
If, indeed, the Scot is careful with his money, Fraser Darling does not identify this attribute as existing, let alone noteworthy.
# Dour demeanour -
Clearly, Scotland is a hard place, and Frank Fraser Darling cannot disguise this; and I get the sense that the man himself was not given to much levity. While he does not specifically reference the legendary dour demeanour of “the Scot” his book in no way dispels the myth.
# Banking prowess -
Being careful with your own money is an attribute that should happily translate to other people’s money, but the prudence of the Scottish banks is not mentioned by Fraser Darling. He does not even mention the existence of these banks. This is a shame, because the story is interesting. As of writing in 1942 there were a number of Scottish retail banks, banks with reputations intact – intact to the degree that they were empowered separately to issue their own pounds sterling banknotes; not strictly equivalent to the general issue of the Bank of England (because they were redeemable only by the relevant issuing bank), but with the complete acceptance and confidence of the Scottish people - although there was (and is) some reservation south of the Wall. Today, there remain three Scottish banks that continue to issue their own bank notes.
# Contribution to medical science -
“The fame of Scottish medical schools was wide during the nineteenth century, not only for the democratic tradition of the teaching and the hospitals, but for the real advances of knowledge…..the universal practice of anaesthesia in surgical operations dates from the work of James Simpson in the middle nineteenth century on the properties of chloroform….it was while in Glasgow that Lister developed with William MacEwan his epoch-making technique of aseptic surgery.” And Ronald Ross “discovered the mode of transmission of the protozoan which causes malaria through the bites of certain mosquitoes”. All this notwithstanding, Darling notes that “the incidence of rickets and bad teeth in Scotland is deplorable”. And he eloquently asserts: “The health services for children fall far short of the standard of educational service; the public conscience works slowly towards keeping these two horses of the chariot of state running abreast.”
# Shipbuilding -
The subject of Scottish shipbuilding exposes something of a textual inconsistency not picked up by the editors. In one place, the exigencies of the time of writing seem to have depressed Fraser Darling’s usual upbeat tenor. Instead, he references the economic hard times: “Industrial Scotland, particularly the western portion which includes the shipyards of the Clyde, has been a depressed area since 1920. The level of unemployment has been very high, much higher than unemployment in England. Empty shipyards have meant loss of skills, the effect of which is now [1942] being felt when every shipyard worker is needed.” He makes no mention of the great Glasgow shipbuilding triumphs of RMS Queen Mary (1936) and RMS Queen Elizabeth (1938). But, elsewhere we read: “Glasgow, is not only a big port but the Clyde is a great shipbuilding centre. The River has recently built Britain’s two largest liners.”
# Scotch -
Just so you know, in 2022 Scotch accounted for 26% of all UK food and drink exports. Wartime 1942 is no valid comparison, and I have no comparable figure for 1938, say, but it’s fair to assume that pre-War UK exports of Scotch were equally impressive. Regardless, Fraser Darling makes no mention…….which raises the question of why, in The Story of Scotland, such an important part of that story is ignored……..and to a more general speculation of how different the book would be if written today. I guarantee that today’s Story of Scotland would include the story of Scotch.
***********
Frank Fraser Darling began his book with the words: “Did so small a country ever provide such contrasts in life and scene, such paradox in social history, or reach further over the face of the modern world through the movement of its people?” His closing words, when acclaiming Robert Louis Stevenson: “Throughout Stevenson’s work there is that keynote of everything Scots – an individualism in action, an independence in thought, and a love of freedom.” I leave it at that.
Gary Andrews
