Scottish to the Bone?

Something seems to be stopping me from delivering on my promise to reveal the essence of the Scottish soul. Perhaps the sheer impossibility of the task? I know the country too well to be comfortable with cultural generalisations. We like, for example, to think of ourselves as egalitarian and, on Burns’ Night, wallow in sentiment and whisky about our values.  But I grew up in a shipbuilding town deeply riven with class (and religious) divisions – which undermined the myths the country tried to sell…

·       The professional classes lived in the West End and attended the fee-paying school there.

·       The working class lived next to the shipyards to the east of the town and went to the state schools. 

It’s true that the Calvinist reformation brought educational opportunities to Scottish people noticed even by English visitors - 

schools paid for by the Church of Scotland and local landowners were established in all rural parishes and burghs by an Act of Parliament in 1696. These educational ssocial status. The democratic nature of the Scottish system so impressed the 18th century writer Daniel Defoe that he remarked that while England was a land 'full of ignorance', in Scotland the 'poorest people have their children taught and instructed'. The openness of the Scottish system ran all the way from the schoolroom to the university. A talented working class boy the 'lad o'pairts' through intelligence and hard work and by utilising a generous system of bursaries was able to gain a university education, something largely unthinkable in England in the 18th century.   

and the Scottish Enlightenment seemed to supply the proof of the benefits of that system – although, arguably, it’s been downhill since then with historians tracing the misery into which the working class sank until the Labour Government of 1924 began to offer some hope – particularly with John Wheatley’s historic Bill on Social Housing which started a process confirmed by Atlee’s pioneering government of 1945-51. TC Smout’s “A century of the Scottish people 1730-1850” catches the change well    

Economic historians see a ‘triumphal progression’ from the success of textiles in the first phase of industrialisation through that of iron and coal in the second, followed by a surge in ‘steel, ships, jute, tweed and high farming’ which crashed dismally with the post-1920 depression. But the social historian notices that life in the heydays of success was commonly brutish and that the inter-war years show a marked improvement for ordinary people in terms of health and housing, real income and recreation. The grandchildren of the ‘vibrant’ Scots who worked for heroic industrial success under Beardmore, or strove for a new world order with Keir Hardie, have settled cannily, Smout’s overview implies, for bread and circuses, alias sliced loaf and East Enders. This he most controversially tends to attribute to what he sees as the malign effects of the Scottish education system – still complacently admired by many of those whom he deems to have been its victims.

 

The general ethos of Scottish education, he argues, was throughout his ‘century’ anti-egalitarian. It aimed ‘firstly at providing, as cheaply as possible, the bulk of the population with the bare minimum of education combined with adequate social discipline, and secondly, at giving a small number of children of all classes, but especially of the higher classes, a more respectable academic education, to qualify them for their role as a controlling élite.’ Following the Education Act of 1872, old burgh schools which had given some kind of general access to learning were either transformed, as in 13 cases, into ‘Higher Class Schools’, fee-paying at first, or made into essentially elementary board schools. Edinburgh’s professional middle class successfully captured for its own purposes the funds of the Merchant Company schools and of the Heriot Trust, which had originally been intended for the unprivileged. As a present-day resident, I can confirm that educational snobbery is uniquely widespread in Edinburgh.

For the mass of the population, education thus came to involve a syllabus restricted to the three R’s, thrashed home with the tawse, instilling what A.S. Neill called ‘a gigantic inferiority complex’. Smout sees this as the key ‘to some of the more depressing aspects of modern Scotland’, where there are ‘too many people who fear what is new, believe the difficult to be impossible, draw back from responsibility, and afford established authority and tradition an exaggerated respect.’ 

The experience of housing tends to be ignored by most historians – one blog which has tried to remedy that is Municipal Dreams whose John Boughton has produced a fascinating recent book Municipal Dreams – the Rise and Fall of Council Housing (2018) which traces a tragic trajectory not only of british housing but of the Labour Party. Scotland was Labour to the core for a century – with a brief exception in the 1950s and now since 2007. When I came to political maturity in the 1960s I was proud to be a Labour councillor – although ashamed of how it was managing its housing and educational responsibilities. 

What exactly happened then? Was it just power going to heads? Or was it the sort of deeper arrogance exposed by James C Scott in “Seeing Like a State” and by David Graeber? However it happened, the transition is brilliantly captured in the television series “Our Friends from the North” whose 9 episodes started in 1964 and finished thirty years later just before New Labour th 

Some Lighter Moments

What happens when Scots are asked what it’s like to be Scottish

What is a Burns’ Night supper? Apologies for the Covid warning

What is “Scots wha Hae”?? 

And the best insights

·       The most insightful read on Scotland is Independence of the Scottish Mind by Gerry Hassan (2014)

·       Tom Devine is the country’s foremost historian and has a fascinating discussion here which raises the important question of whether the new historiography anticipated or post-dated the political resurgence of recent decades. This article of his gives a good sense of his opus is this one of 300 years of living next to an Elephant. Any reader willing to wade through a large book has to read Scotland – a Modern History which covers the period from 1700-2007. It will need conversion from epub

·       Understanding Scotland – the sociology of a stateless nation David McCrone (1992) is an important read

·       As is The Scots’ Crisis of Confidence by Carol Craig (2003)

Previous posts in the series

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2022/06/journeys-in-scotland.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2022/06/the-scottish-soul-insiders-tale.html