A Penny for your thoughts

Written by Roger Turner

Strange that this saying should come to my mind! I think it was prompted in some way by an equally ambivalent invitation, I suppose you might call it, from an eminent social intercourse page, where I encountered the phrase “What’s on your mind Roger”?

I was actually thinking and have been for a while – that’s thinking of Viv`s predicament, or, to come down to brass tacks: “whither Independence Daily”, and I was quite taken by some of the other correspondents’ suggestions, particularly those who confessed to be avid readers of historical books. Surely amidst all that brain cluttering they must come upon parallels with events of the present day, I thought.

Running through my brain (yes! Even at my antique stage, I can sometimes detect one or two still active cells!) is the heading: “Have you read any good books lately”? In fact, I can answer my own question and kick off Book Corner with one of my own.

You’ll have to bear with me, as it’s a bit of a shaggy book story, before you get to the meat, as it were!

But here goes. My daughter rang me up and told me she had been reading a book online with the marvellous title of, wait for it, it’s nearly as long as the book itself:

“Wrecks and Reminiscences of St.Andrews Bay: with the history of the lifeboat, and a sketch of the fishing population in the city, with a glance at its early history” (With plates)  Written by George Bruce, first published in 1884 and reprinted by the British Library under History of Britain and Ireland.”

It is, I suppose, what one would call a Journal, assembled, collected from local sources and commented upon on a personal basis by the author and my, does he comment! He leaves no stone unturned, very few reputations intact, local political corruption on an alarming scale resulting in the “peasants” being deprived of their inherited rights to gather mussel bait for their fishing hooks, the shortcomings of the lifeboat committee when the forerunners of the RNLI supplied a lifeboat, and the “shame” they brought on the city and its fishing based inhabitants. 

He details the plentitude of the very fish, in striking detail, such that one can understand how overfishing has wiped out stocks over the ages since, particularly by the onset of steam vessels and trawl nets.

But the insight into the structure of a society in those days is highly relevant to the contrast now: the cohesion and tensions of a people completely governed by the sea in a city reckoned to be the primary centre of learning in Scotland and the behaviour of their supposed betters who should have known better.

Overshadowing all however are the wrecks, the loss and saving of lives, the often tempestuous weather and the long battles of sailing ships, once caught in its maw, to evade their inevitable fate of being stranded and utterly wrecked and destroyed on the waiting rocks – and the failure of the authorities to mitigate the problems by extending a sheltering pier, even though they had collected dues specifically over many years for that purpose.

The reason for my daughter’s interest (and for mine, married to a Scottish girl and producing two 62% Scottish daughters, for whom I must imbibe my wife’s history) is that some of my wife’s ancestors have a leading role as some of the characters mentioned in the narrative, both as pilots and members of the early lifeboat crews.

Of  primary modern day interest, I believe, is that the author was something of an early Scottish Nationalist. I will leave you with a number of his quotations from the journal which perhaps throw a light on the long history of Scottish perception of injustice from the English, beginning with (not mentioned in this book) their virtual expulsion, at great cost, to their New World colony which they hoped to establish in Darien (but that’s a story from another book I have in my library, written in the 1860’s).

Apparently George Bruce was a devotee of Shakespeare and Burns, and the following poem of Burns he quotes in this book is indicative of the feelings of many Scots of the period towards the “ENGLISH”:

Fareweel to a` our Scottish fame,

  Fareweel to our ancient glory,

Fareweel even to the Scottish name,

  Sae famed in martial story.

Now Sark rins o`er the Solway sands,

  And Tweed rins to the ocean,

To mark where Englands province stands–

  Such  a parcel of rogues in a nation.  

What force or guile could not subdue

  Through many warlike ages,

Is wrought now by a coward few

  For hireling traitors` 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 

Oh, would ere I had seen the day,

  That treason thus could sell us,

My auld grey head had lain 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   

George Bruce  writes or quotes:

“We all hail the union of the Three Kingdoms, but love the truth and when we read of the British press, on nearly all occasions substituting the word “England” for the stipulated and better name of Great Britain and see such a thoroughly national Scottish Poet as Robert Burns transmogrified into an English poet and the Old Black Watch of Scotland, the famous 42nd  Highlanders called in Government dispatches as English Highlanders”

From the above we may start to gather the long-term roots of the above hurt feelings and present naked anger. He goes on to say:

“For truth’s sake, if you do not care for Scotland’s preserve the united name of Britain  – at least on this side of the Tweed, as solemnly and sacredly agreed upon at the Union” 

Burns in a note to his song quoted above indignantly exclaims:

“What are all the advantages which my country reaps from the Union, that can counterbalance the annihilation of her independence, and even her very name? Nothing can reconcile me to the terms ‘English Ambassador’, ‘English Courts’, &c &c

It’s not all about wrecks and the hated English rather than the true use of British – George Bruce also alludes to local corruption, hence the quotes: “Rascally throwing away of the Town’s patrimony” and “Well meant gifts [i.e. to the town and its people] have been turned from their original channels, and the public robbed by designing  officials and their self-interested so-called representatives.”

Doesn’t that quote ring great big clanging bells today? When we think of the conduct of many of our officials stretching out their grasping hands at local and national  level (and now international level)?

And wouldn’t we give our eye teeth for the return of Rabbie Burns today, to lead and articulate the swindles we are going to face nationally over the Great Reset and its equally big brother of Global Warming and its attendant Greenbobbery? 

~~~   ooo   ~~~

There’s a PS:  I’ve just been through the book again and found another quote, I hope you have patience to read it:

“Let the Anglo-Saxon element of the British Empire beware ! For if ever there was a solemn contract between two kingdoms it was when England and Scotland freely and equally joined, ceased to be separate states, and merged into one– the island of Britain to be “forever after called by the united name of Great Britain […] but it was such overweening presumption that made “England” –God save the mark!– lose America through their own pride, and the published “Common Sense” of Tom Paine.”

Photo by Tour Scotland Photographs