Innholdsfortegnelse for May-June 2022 i History Scotland

Welcome to our May/June issue and as you’ll have seen from the magazine cover, we have an enticing mix of subjects and time periods for you this month. As a major new edition of Allan Ramsay’s The Gentle Shepherd is published, we take a look at how the author’s legacy can be highlighted today. We also share some new – and topical – research on a little-remembered outbreak of plague in Glasgow at the start of the 20th century, looking at how the authorities responded to the disease. We also launch our new Climate Change Heritage Action series, where we’ll be looking at the people and projects working to protect our built heritage for centuries to come. Turn to page 55 for more on the work being carried out, and…

The Aberdeen Children of the 1950s are a group of more than 12,000 people who took part in a test when they were in primary school and have since gone on to contribute to dozens of important studies. Researchers continue to use the data collected from these children to investigate a wide range of questions about society. They recently worked with members of the cohort, who are now in their 70s, to create an online exhibition exploring the history of the cohort study, and memories of 1950s Aberdeen. Aberdeen Children of the 1950s includes copies of the tests the children took, as well as personal memories of daily life, holidays and pastimes of the era. It was funded by the Wellcome Trust and the University of Aberdeen ISSF fund. See…

ONLINE EVENTS Fair Game, ongoing A major online exhibition from Shetland Museum and Archives, part of their Between Islands project. Each museum in the group has approached the project theme creatively and used it to produce their own online exhibition which is inspired by each other’s history and collections. The Shetland exhibition examines three customs that are nowadays seen by some as ‘politically incorrect’: hunting seabirds and eggs, whaling, and harvesting peat. Museum nan Eilean in the Hebrides focuses on unexpected aspects of island culture highlighting some misconceptions about life on the island groups, looking at designers, living traditions and industry, whilst Orkney Museum’s Orkney: Between Islands explores the inspiration and legacy of the islands in arts, crafts and literature. Visit https://shetland.betweenislands.com ‘By the Power of the Sword’: Orkney and…

Depending upon which contemporary account one reads, descriptions of the Jacobite army’s behaviour during the 1745 rising can paint a number of strikingly different pictures. Embellished narratives and biased propaganda on both sides of the conflict alternately portray Charles Edward Stuart’s troops as infantophagic savages who carved a trail of rapine and destruction through Britain, and a benevolent cadre of altruistic revolutionaries who only took what was freely given, while charming inhabitants in both village and burgh. The reality is, of course, somewhere in between, and eyewitness descriptions provide some validation to both characterisations, which are slanted according to who is telling the story. Less commonly explored, however, are the operational accounts of how the Jacobite army conducted itself administratively as it moved through towns in Scotland, solidifying control of…

From our vantage point in the 3rd millennium, the early modern witch-hunts seem difficult to understand. Over the course of the 16th and 17th centuries, some 50,000 people were executed for a crime we no longer believe to exist. The end of the trials, on the other hand, strike us as easy to explain. We suppose that the learned men of Europe simply shook off their superstitious belief in diabolic magic, and came to their senses. But the truth is more complicated. In Scotland, the figure who played a greater part than any other in bringing the witch-hunt to a close was Sir George Mackenzie, a jurist with a modern legal sensibility and a deep sensitivity to injustice who nonetheless believed piously in the existence of witches. From his early…

Women and Scottish Society, 1700-2000 W. W. J. Knox Routledge, 2021 268 pages Hardback, £120.00 / ebook, £31.44 ISBN: 9780367700096 / 9781003144212 In the introduction to Women and Scottish Society, 1700–2000, W. W. J. Knox explains that source material on the lives of past Scottish women is limited. Most 18th- and 19th-century documents relating to women focus on those from the upper classes or those associated with prominent men. This reflects the patriarchal nature of society at a time when women were first the property of their fathers, then their husbands. Knox nevertheless provides a comprehensive overview of women’s social roles. The book covers the family and household, education, the workplace, politics, sexuality, religion, and crime and punishment. Each chapter starts with a useful summary and is then divided into…

How important is it to your work to focus on local, rather than national or global, weather patterns and their consequences? Of course, we need all these approaches, which is why it’s such a research challenge across several scientific disciplines. It’s possible to overlook some types of local impact, or else fail to relate them to wider climatic trends, so scientists need to be aware of the regional climate projections from the computer models yet also be able to relate these to what we see happening in the landscape at a local level through observing changes in hillslopes, river channels and places where land is being eroded and material redeposited. One challenge is to identify a longer-term trend within all the year-to-year variability which is typical of natural systems. Could…

Professor Murray Pittock is pro-vice principal and Bradley chair of English literature at the University of Glasgow, and principal investigator on the ‘Collected Works of Allan Ramsay’ project. Dr Brianna Robertson-Kirkland is an expert on historical musicology, currently serving as research associate on the Allan Ramsay project. On page 23 they reflect on the making and significance of Allan Ramsay’s The Gentle Shepherd, and ask what a soon to be released new edition can do to highlight Ramsay’s legacy. Dr David M. Smale served in the Royal Marines and Lothian and Borders Police. He studied at the Open University and the University of Edinburgh, and is presently researching various aspects of the history of policing in Scotland. In this issue (page 30), he explores the challenging nature of the relationship between police…

In February 2021, after moving to Falkirk, I noticed a brick building at the bottom of my new garden. Covered in decades of household rubbish, green waste and unchecked growth, I was unsure if this building was a forsaken garden shed or, perhaps, something less mundane. My curiosity piqued, I contacted Historic Environment Scotland (HES) via Twitter, enquiring about my find. I was asked to submit additional photos to HES for their evaluation. At the time, I could barely see inside the building. Several weeks later, I was contacted by Allan Kilpatrick. In his initial assessment of the building, he confirmed that I had ‘uncovered an air raid shelter’. He also noted that this shelter is a ‘rather unusual design’ when compared to other domestic shelters. The excavation begins Thoroughly…

I saw a parachutist come from the west, and pass over the village… towards the sea… I cannot understand how he disappeared so quickly if he had been wearing a ‘Mae West’ life jacket. These are the words of Constable Andrew Wood of Cockburnspath police station as he reported the death of a Royal Air Force airman. He was stunned that despite his best efforts sending out lifeboats and fishing boats within minutes of seeing the man land in the sea, his parachute was recovered but his body could not be found. Wood’s sense of helplessness encapsulates much of the work of the county police and their dealings with the RAF during the Second World War; they tried to help the young men in their burning aircraft, took charge of…

The Case for Scottish Independence: A History of Nationalist Political Thought in Modern Scotland Ben Jackson Cambridge University Press, 2020 210 pages Hardback, £59.99 / paperback, £18.99 ISBN: 9781108835350 / 9781108793186 The title of Ben Jackson’s book might mislead some. This isn’t a book making the case (or a case) for independence. The subtitle makes things clearer; ‘A History of Nationalist Political Thought in Modern Scotland’. So you can judge this book by its cover, so long as you read the small print. Jackson is associate professor of modern history at the University of Oxford and co-edits the journal Political Quarterly. He is also an engaging and involving writer. Even when navigating some of the more tortuous reaches of Scottish Nationalist thinking, he is both readable and informative. In a…

Archival maps held at Falkirk Library corroborate the theory that the house was a pre-war construction. A map revision of 1943 includes the entire housing scheme known as David’s Loan as complete, except for the last dozen remaining houses on Cobblebrae Cresent. A 1942 aerial photo provided to me by Allan Kilpatrick from the National Collection of Aerial Photography closely matches the 1943 map revision. The 1942 aerial image depicts my house, shelter and garden with mature garden growth and hedge rows as property boundaries. This evidence of mature growth coupled with the house’s proximity to the entrance of the scheme and the unique shelters found only on my block indicate that the six terraced houses on Haugh Street are of pre-war construction. Lastly, we come to the site evidence…

In 1725, Scottish bard Allan Ramsay (1684-1758), published the first edition of The Gentle Shepherd, a fiveact play that would quickly become one of the most successful works ever published. Just three years shy of its 300th anniversary, 2022 marks the release of a brandnew scholarly edition, edited by Steve Newman (Temple University) and David McGuinness (University of Glasgow). The new edition is the first of a multi-volume series to be produced by Arts and Humanities Research Council funded project, ‘The Collected Works of Allan Ramsay’, led by principal investigator Professor Murray Pittock, and published by Edinburgh University Press. The project Allan Ramsay was largely responsible for the development and preservation of Scots as a language for poetry; for creating (as Burns was later to do) a canonical collection of…

Throughout the course of time, women have had help and support when giving birth, usually in the form of another woman. In Scotland this role was known by various terms including ‘neighbour-woman’, ‘helping woman’ and most commonly a ‘howdie’. Early examples of midwifery can be explored in papers held by National Records of Scotland (NRS). Inverkeithing kirk session records from 1829 to 1850 include a list kept by a midwife of the children born in the parish, giving names of the father and mother, date and sex of the child. Birse kirk session records include a receipt by William Chalmers for two guineas for instructing Ann Hay in the practice of midwifery, 10 February 1782. Before 1915, midwifery was carried out by untrained howdies and unregulated nurses and midwives, some…

Published as a series between 1827 and 1838, Birds of America was a landmark work that achieved international renown due to the epic scale of the project and the book’s spectacular, life-sized ornithological illustrations. Complete sets were bound in four volumes, and today only 120 complete sets are known to exist, making Birds of America one of the rarest and most valuable books in the world. Audubon’s Birds of America showcases 45 unbound prints from National Museums Scotland’s collection, most of which have never been on display before, as well as a spectacular bound volume of the book, on loan from the Mitchell Library. It is a once in a generation opportunity to see so much of Audubon’s work in one place. Born in Haiti in 1785, Audubon was the…

Explore a selection of digital history guides in the History Scotland store https://scot.sh/hsdownload Edited by Dr Martha McGill reviews@historyscotland.com Anna of Denmark: The Material and Visual Culture of the Stuart Courts, 1589-1619 Jemma Field Manchester University Press, 2020 272 pages Hardback, £80.00 ISBN: 9781526142498 In recent years, the political role of royal women has become an increasingly popular field of research. Scholars have sought to understand the identities of royal women and the positions they held in their households, both by birth and by marriage. The power of queens and princesses varied dramatically, but they all made use of clothes, jewels and other personal belongings to demonstrate their standing. Anna of Denmark, who married James VI in 1589, was no different. Her interest in material culture has sometimes seen her…

A biographical dictionary of long-dead schoolmasters might initially seem like a very dull book indeed, but allow me to make the case that this volume is actually quite exciting for a number of reasons. It is the result of decades of painstaking archival study by the late Dr John Durkan (1914-2006), who for half a century was one of the giants of Scottish historical scholarship. The son of an Irish immigrant miner, Durkan made his living as a teacher, working on his scholarly articles during the school vacations. The volume in discussion was his last work – sadly, published shortly after his death – and was a tribute to those of his own profession who had created the foundation of Scottish literacy and education in Scotland’s post-Reformation grammar school system.…