The fantasy of Scotland’s history

In an exclusive extract from his book The Invention of Scotland: Myth and History, the late historian tells how the country’s story is based on fiction

Hugh Trevor-Roper

In Scotland, it seems to me, myth has played a far more important part in history than it has in England. Indeed, I believe that the whole history of Scotland has been coloured by myth; and that myth, in Scotland, is never driven out by reality, or by reason, but lingers on until another myth has been discovered, or elaborated, to replace it.

I believe that three consecutive myths have successively filled the 400 years of Scottish history from the 16th century to the 20th. The political myth, the literary myth and the sartorial myth, which is with us still.

These myths, though they may explode on contact with the evidence, are nevertheless historically important. It became a part of the national honour to maintain them – at least until a new myth should be imported to drive them out.

The Political Myth: Scotia’s Rise to Glory

The early history of all countries is obscure; but the mist which envelops the early history of Scotland is unique, both in density and duration. It was thickened and prolonged by national pride and deliberate myth-making. As late as the end of the 18th century, the racial origins of the Scots and their relationship with the Irish was a matter of learned dispute; and the ablest scholars were led, by blind or interested guides, and by deliberate forgeries, into the grossest errors.

In 1729, the first and greatest of Scottish antiquaries, Father Thomas Innes – an exiled Catholic priest and Jacobite who stood outside the interested intellectual establishment of Scotland – had destroyed the basis of the Scottish myths. But his work was barely noticed; and in 1776 even Edward Gibbon, misled by “two learned and ingenious Highlanders”, would be totally wrong about the origin of the Scots. A few years later Gibbon would discover another and better guide. John Pinkerton, whom he would patronise and encourage, would prove to be the ablest Scottish antiquary after Innes. But he too would fall into error when he came to the origin of the Picts. It was not until the late 19th century that the mists of myth would be scientifically cleared away and at least the outline of early Scottish history become visible.

Until the late 11th century, at least, Scottish history was preserved, with reasonable accuracy, in record or memory, and commemorated by the bards who recited royal succession lists on ceremonial occasions. But from that time the mists began to gather and that outline was gradually obscured and distorted by an ever-thickening cloud of mythology: a cloud that would not be effectively dispersed till another seven centuries had passed.

The process began spontaneously among the Scots as a bid to capture history, like everything else, from the Picts. It was quickened by an external force: the national struggle with England for independence. It was consecrated, in the 16th century, by the most advanced thinkers of the time: the cultivated, cosmopolitan Scottish humanists of the Renaissance.

For the 200 years between Kenneth MacAlpin in the mid-9th century and Malcolm III in the later 11th century we have, essentially, two kinds of sources that tell us something of how the Scots recorded and interpreted their history. Lists of kings in the royal succession were preserved: these would be recited publicly at enthronements and no doubt on other important occasions. The length and continuity of the royal succession, thus proclaimed, would emphasise the crucial role played by the monarchy in the fortunes of its people. There were also folk memories, stories about the origin and character of the people, which crystallised occasionally as fragments embedded in the chronicles kept by monks, but which might also appear in connection with the king-lists.

The information in the king-lists is narrow; that in the folk stories wider, but also woollier. These two kinds of sources, exiguous as they are, reveal, separately or in conjunction, at least an outline of the Scottish self-image as it developed.

Of the king-lists there are several versions, reflecting the periodic need to revise and update them, and also their copying and deposit in different parts of the country – not to mention their diffusion outside Scotland itself – and, of course, the hazards of their survival or destruction.

The process of copying and revision always entailed a risk of scribal error: through misreading, misspelling, or accidental omission or intrusion of names. Another technical problem was just how to display, for the unified monarchy of later times, its inheritance from the earlier dual monarchies: from the parallel monarchies of the Picts and the Scots, which had coexisted for some 300 years.

The problem could be dealt with in different ways: there were separate lists of Pictish kings and of Dalriadan kings, and lists which attempted a combination. It is by tracing the changes made to these king-lists over time that we can observe the gradually developing current that was, in the end, to sweep the Picts out of the historical record, and produce, instead, an ever-longer and more glorious past for the Scots.

The Literary Myth: The Search for a Celtic Homer

After the Union of 1707, and more especially after the defeat of the last Jacobite rebellion in 1746, the Scots looked for other ways of expressing their cultural identity. Recognising that the development of their country in the past two centuries had been arrested, and that their political activity had been (to say the least) unconstructive, they welcomed the end of political independence and devoted themselves to “improvement”.

It was natural that Scots, seeking compensation for the end of their independent history and politics, should turn to discover and appreciate their native literature. Unfortunately, when they looked for it, they could not find it. There was none.

In 1757, a young Scotch Highlander offered, in effect, to discover the epic poem of Celtic Scotland. A year after that he produced it. It had all the qualities which the age required. It was epic, melancholy and sublime. It was primitive and yet pure: pure in morals, pure in sentiment. It dated from the heroic age of the ancient Caledonians, who, at the beginning of the 3rd century AD, had gloriously resisted the legions of the Roman Emperor Septimius Severus; and yet it was suffused with tragedy: for that heroic generation had entered its twilight.

The poet himself, like Homer, was blind; but unlike Homer, he was not a mere wandering bard: he was a king’s son, a royal but now lonely figure who had seen all his peers, and his own son, perish in the wars and himself had survived only to lament their fate in majestic poetry. The poet’s name was Ossian and the young Highlander who discovered and translated his work, and thus gave Scotland the great literature which it had so far totally lacked and which now it so desperately needed, was James MacPherson.

Initially the literati was united in complacency at having brought to light this treasure of ancient Scottish literature. But over time the more critical literary men and scholars of London were beginning to entertain grave doubts. First, there was the style: the style of Ossian was not that of a “primitive” poet. Second, there were historical objections. Finally, there was the problem of Ossian’s language.

If the poems of Ossian had been preserved in their original form, in ancient manuscripts, they must necessarily have been written in an archaic language very different from that still spoken in the Highlands. On the other hand, if they had been transmitted orally, and gradually modernised in the process, could they really be regarded as ancient poems at all? And anyway, could they really have been so transmitted? Was there any other instance of a long epic poem carried by oral tradition through 15 centuries? On the face of it, there seemed no way out of this dilemma that did not require assent to absurdity.

It emerged that the genuine Ossian poems belong to a cycle of Irish Gaelic poems originally composed in Leinster in the later Middle Ages. Essentially, the poems were Irish in origin, Irish in susbstance and Irish in preservation.

By 1775 the public controversy about Ossian had died down, and it seemed that there was a tacit agreement not to revive it. The English did not believe in Ossian; but why deprive the Scots?

If Scottish belief in the authenticity of Ossian weakened in the course of the 19th century, that was not because the Scots, however belatedly, yielded to reason. Ossian’s poems lost their authenticity, not when they were disproved, but when changing circumstances made them no longer necessary – and when another myth was available to supersede them.

The myth of Ossian had been accepted because it filled a need – the need for a purely Scottish literature. In 1760 there had been no such literature, and Ossian had come to fill the void. To jettison it, to deny its authenticity, was to re-create that void. But by the early 19th century that was no longer true. In 1802 appeared the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border; in 1805 the Lay of the Last Minstrel; Marmion, Rokeby and The Lady of the Lake followed. With the rediscovery of genuine traditional Scottish poetry and the creation of genuine modern Scottish poetry, Scott had filled the void, and Ossian was no longer necessary.

The Sartorial Myth: The Coming of the Kilt

Before the 16th century there is no evidence of distinctive Highland dress. Medieval writers, like Froissart, who refer to the sauvages d’Ecosse, say nothing about any peculiarity of garb. But in the 16th century evidence of such peculiarity begins to accumulate. All of these accounts are in substantial agreement. They show that the ordinary dress of the Highlanders was a long “Irish” shirt (in Gaelic léine), which the higher classes dyed with saffron (leni-croich); a tunic or failuin; and a cloak or plaid, which the higher classes had woven in many colours or stripes, but which in general was of a russet or brown effect, as protective colouring in the heather.

In addition, the Highlanders wore shoes with a single sole (the higher classes might wear buskins) and flat soft caps, generally blue. In battle, the leaders wore chain mail, while the lower classes wore a padded linen shirt painted or daubed with pitch, and covered with deerskins.

This was the normal Highland dress. However, there was also a variation used, probably, only by the chieftains and great men who had contact with the more sophisticated inhabitants of the Lowlands. This was the trews, a combination of breeches and stockings. The trews could not be used conveniently out of doors in wild country and all weathers except by men who had attendants to protect or carry them. It was therefore a mark of social distinction. Both trews and, probably, plaid were made of tartan.

The essential fact is that, as yet, there was no mention of the kilt, as we know it today. At the end of the 17th century, as far as the written evidence goes – and we have some explicit accounts – the alternative was simple. A Highlander wore either the plaid and the trews, or the “belted plaid” ending, below the belt, in a skirt. The former was the dress of an officer, or a gentleman; the latter of a common soldier, or peasant.

Against this clear conclusion of the literary sources, certain pieces of pictorial evidence have been advanced to suggest that the kilt, as a separate garment, was worn in Scotland before the Union with England. However, the illustrations used are a 19thcentury representation of a worn stone carving and cannot be implicitly trusted. In any case, they do not necessarily show a kilt. Close examination suggests that the servile habit is, in fact, the belted plaid.

The name “kilt”, in its early form of “quelt”, first appears 20 years after the Union; but only as a term for the belted plaid, not for a distinct garment. The author who first uses it is Edward Burt, an English officer posted to Scotland in the reign of George 1 as chief surveyor. The “quelt”, he says, is the “common habit of the ordinary Highlands”, adding that it is “far from being acceptable to the eye”. This quelt, he explains, is not a distinct garment, but simply a particular method of wearing the plaid. This “petticoat”, says Burt, was normally worn “so very short that in a windy day, going up a hill, or stooping, the indecency of it is plainly discovered”.

Burt was explicit about the Highland dress because already, in his time, it was a subject of political controversy. After the suppression of the Jacobite rebellion of 1715, proposals had been made to ban this dress. So the “Disarming Act”, presented to the British parliament by Duncan Forbes of Culloden, had originally included such a ban. However, it had been resisted, and – since the rebellion had been so easily dispersed – had not been pressed. But the discussion had continued, and Burt records the arguments used on both sides. The advocates of the ban argued that the Highland dress distinguished the Highlanders from the rest of British subjects and bound them together in a narrow introverted community: that the plaid, in particular, encouraged their idle way of life, “lying about upon the heath in the daytime instead of following some lawful employment”; that, being “composed of such colours as altogether in the mass so nearly resemble the heath on which they lie, that it is hardly to be distinguished from it until one is so near them as to be within their power”, it facilitated their robberies and depredations; that it made them, “as they carry continually their tents about them”, ready to join a rebellion at a moment’s notice.

It is ironical that, if the Highland dress had been banned after the “Fifteen” instead of 30 years later, after the “Forty-Five”, the kilt, which is now regarded as one of the ancient traditions of Scotland, would probably never have come into existence. It came into existence a few years after Burt had made his observations – and very close to the area in which he had made them. Unknown in 1726, it suddenly appeared a few years later; and by 1745 it was sufficiently well established to be explicitly named in the Act of Parliament which forbade the Highland dress.

Its appearance can, in fact, be dated within a few years. For it did not evolve; it was invented. Its inventor was an English Quaker from Lancashire, Thomas Rawlinson.

The Invention of Scotland: Myth and History, by Hugh Trevor-Roper is published by Yale University Press, priced £18.99.

Why should Hugh Trevor-Roper scotch these myths?

Scotland’s traditions are a fiction. But they are better than England’s

Ben Macintyre

There is a certain sort of Englishman who, on seeing a man in a kilt, feels it incumbent on him to curl his stiff upper lip and point out that the wearing of tartan is nothing but a Victorian fad.

If that Englishman is feeling brave, he may go on to sneer that the entire system of clan tartans was invented in 1842 by a couple of fraudulent English brothers claiming to be grandsons of Bonnie Prince Charlie.

And if that Englishman is the late Hugh Trevor-Roper, a brilliant historian and champion lip-curler, he will write an entire book debunking Scottish mythology. Trevor-Roper died in 2003, but his assault on Scots myth-making, written almost 30 years ago, has just been published for the first time as The Invention of Scotland: Myth and History.

From a Scots point of view, it is Culloden, as three successive waves of cherished myth are brutally hacked down. First, historians are dispatched. Scots chroniclers, he says, simply filled in the gaps with heroic inventions of their own, tracing royal Scots lineage back to a Greek Prince, who married Scota, the daughter of an Egyptian Pharaoh.

Then literary types get skewered, as Trevor-Roper rehearses the tale of Ossian, the Gaelic bard whose verses were “discovered” in the 18th century, hailed as the work of “the Celtic Homer’ and finally exposed as an elaborate hoax.

The final assault is sartorial: the kilt, he declares, was invented by a Lancashire industrialist for his Scots employees, while the system of tartan patterns was published in the invented Vestiarium Scoticum by the Sobieski Stuart brothers, born John and Charles Allen in Egham, Surrey.

With magnificent disdain, Trevor-Roper dismisses all this as the purest nonsense, the “replacement of history by myth”, romantic fantasy “thickened and prolonged by national pride and deliberate myth-making”. He is right, of course. Scottish myths are not true. But that is because they are myths: self-sustaining, fictionalised narratives about the past that a group adheres to as part of its collective identity. All societies nurture national myths, particularly small countries with powerful neighbours.

In Scotland, this means a heroic past of poets and warriors in natty knee-length tartan. In France they cling to Charlemagne, and the legends of the Revolution; “Let them eat cake,” Marie Antoinette said; except that she never did. Estonians exalt the myth of Kalevipoeg the giant, while Albanians recall the 15th-century warrior Skanderbeg, leaping from mountain to mountain on his charger, slaying Ottomans. William Tell, the 14th-century Swiss hero, shot an apple off his son’s head, killed his Austrian oppressor and sparked the rebellion that led to the Swiss Confederation. He probably never existed, although 60 per cent of Swiss believe that he did.

We believe what we want or need to believe. In America that means Pocahontas, a future president who could not tell a lie and a Wild West image of true grit this is not true.

Trevor-Roper is dismissive of all this: “In Scotland, it seems to me, myth has played a far more important part in history than it has in England”. But that, it seems to me, is England’s loss.

There are English myths, of course, but they lack the cultural purchase of other national fictions: Alfred and his cakes, Arthur and his knights, the promised land of Milton, the green and pleasant land of Blake.

H.G. Wells, observing Germans in lederhosen, was proud that England had no national dress, but it seems sad that the closest England gets to a collective outfit is a bowler hat, a hoody or a St George’s cross T-shirt on football match days.

As the parts of the UK become ever more distinct, England seems to be searching for its own mythological figure. St George (who, if he existed, was probably born in Cappadocia, now part of Turkey) does not quite seem up to the job. Robin Hood is a hardy English myth, but, according to some historians, he may actually be Rabbie Hood, a Scot. His story, according to some, was adapted from that of William Wallace, or possibly Robin MacGilchrist, one of Wallace’s chief lieutenants. If tartan was the invention of two likely Surrey lads, Lincoln Green might just owe its origins to an Argyllshire aristocrat.

Trevor-Roper derides the Scottish intelligentsia for clinging to the Ossian fraud and other elements of mythology to bolster an unconfident identity. But Scots believed in a fictionalised past because they wanted it to be true. Scottish historians have been long aware of the gap between mythological history and the real thing.

Sometimes myths have to be sustained by artificial means. Everyone in England knows that if ravens quit the Tower of London, the monarchy will crumble; fewer know that the ravens’ wings are clipped.

It is human nature to believe what we fervently hope might be true, and to defend the version that we find most appealing. No historian knew this better than Trevor-Roper. In 1982 he set aside his demolition of Scottish mythology. A year later he authenticated the forged Hitler diaries.

Englishman’s rewriting of Scots history ‘as false as the idea they gave us kilts’

A last book by the late Hugh Trevor-Roper, that claims to debunk the myths of Scottish nationhood, has been challenged

Magnus Linklater

From beyond the grave, one of Britain’s most controversial historians has found himself caught up in yet another historical dispute.

Although he died five years ago, the last book written by Hugh Trevor-Roper, former Regius Professor of History at Oxford, and the man who authenticated the Hitler diaries, has just been published. The Invention of Scotland challenges some of the cherished myths of Scottish history by seeking to prove that most of them are based on deliberate falsehood and manufactured stories – “thickened and prolonged by national pride and deliberate myth-making,” as he puts it.

Detailing a long line of invented kings and spurious connections to the classical world, dreamt-up in medieval times to bolster the Scottish identity, he goes on to accuse the Scots of being willing dupes by accepting the fake Gaelic poems of Ossian, believing bogus claimants to the Stuart line, and swathing themselves in tartan at the behest of a lowlander – Sir Walter Scott.

His lowest blow is reserved for the kilt – it was, he says, invented by an Englishman.

Trevor-Roper’s views have, however, run into immediate trouble. Tom Devine, of Aberdeen Univerity, the editor of the recently published Scotland and the Union 1707-2007 accuses him of having been a “Johnny-come-lately” to the art of revisiting ancient stories, most of which have long since been disproved, mainly by Scots-based historians. “The greatest destroyer of the Scottish myth has been the Scots themselves,” he said. “In the 18th century entire works by leading historians and an army of lesser people were devoted to rubbishing early, misleading versions of Scotland’s story.”

He said that the Scots were no different from many other small nations in needing to develop their own versions of their early history – “but they have also developed a fairly rigorous critique at the same time”.

Trevor-Roper’s thesis is that, in the Middle Ages, Scotland was a country of mixed races with uncertain origins.

Early historians, such as Hector Boece and George Buchanan, set out to show instead that Scotland’s credentials had been established impeccably from the earliest times, with a long line of Scottish kings – with connections to the Greeks, to Spain and to Ireland – all demonstrating the virtues of a civilised race.

To fill gaps in this history, historians simply invented the names of non-existent kings. This tendency to believe the myth at the expense of facts, says Trevor-Roper, continued through the great 18th-century controversy over Ossian, an entirely imaginary Gaelic bard, and the embracing of tartans and pipe music, which had nothing to do with the majority of lowland Scots.

Professor Devine is scathing about this approach: “Historians have long gone past the stage of simply debunking myths,” he said.

“It’s an easy thing to do, and frankly, it’s rather an undergraduate activity. Far more interesting these days is to ask why those beliefs were developed, and to see what it is about a particular age that gives rise to popular myths. There are often rational reasons for it.”

He points out that most small nations that exist alongside larger ones find the need to invent stories about themselves to maintain and bolster their identity.

He argues that, instead of looking back to widely discredited early versions of Scottish history, Trevor-Roper would have been better off examining how it was that the Scots became willing empire-builders in the service of the British Crown while emphasising – rather than eliminating – their separate Scottish character.

“The classic emblem of nationhood in the 19th century was the Highland soldier: unambiguously Scottish, but an imperial warrior nevertheless. It was a case of sartorial nationalism.”

There is, he adds, nothing to be criticised about myth-making, provided that those myths are kept in perspective. “The society that doesn’t create myths has lost one of the best ways of melding its people into society,” he said.

As to the idea that the kilt was invented by an Englishman, it is, he says “arrant nonsense”.

Trevor-Roper maintains that Thomas Rawlinson, an English Quaker from Lancashire, invented the short kilt in 1727 to give Highland workers more room for manoeuvre than they had when wearing their long plaids.

Not so, says Professor Devine. Long before 1727 there are pictures of Highlanders gathering up their plaids into the short kilt.

The Invention of Scotland: Myth and History by Hugh Trevor-Roper

The Sunday Times review by Tim Blanning

How the publishers of this remarkable volume must have hugged themselves when Wendy Alexander, the leader of the Scottish Labour party, recently thrust her hand into the hornets’ nest of Scottish independence. On the face of it, a book on the history of Scotland by an academic who died five years ago is not the most marketable of items. But now it has a topicality that should propel it straight on to the bestseller lists. It was first drafted in the mid-1970s as part of Hugh Trevor-Roper’s campaign against Scottish devolution. Once that danger was nullified by the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979, he could lay the manuscript on one side and move on to the more urgent business of making a mark in the House of Lords, to which the new prime minister had promptly elevated him.

Now that outright independence is the issue, the book’s polemical purpose has a fresh urgency. It sets out to strip away the layers of myth that encrust three of the main components of Scottish identity: historical, literary and sartorial. All nations have their myths, of course, but, in Trevor-Roper’s vigorously expressed opinion, the Scots are in a class by themselves when it comes to creating a fictitious past. Nothing if not audacious, the medieval chroniclers found the original Scottish hero in the Greek prince, Gaedil Glas, who married a pharaoh’s daughter named Scota. Fleeing from Jehovah’s chastisement of the Egyptian persecutors of the children of Israel, they made their way to Spain, from where their descendants moved first to Ireland and then, in 333BC, to Scotland.

This was not to be the last time that the Egyptian connection contributed to Scottish history. In the early 16th century, Hector Boece, the Aberdonian humanist, recorded proudly that in the second century BC, Ptolemy II had sent envoys to his Scottish kinsman, including in their baggage the works of Aristotle, which the cultured Caledonians hastened to read in the original Greek. Boece also filled in an awkward lacuna in his country’s genealogy by the simple expedient of inventing 40 kings covering 22 generations, complete with detailed biographies for each. They were presented in a contrapuntal sequence of heroes and villains, the latter exemplified by the vile King Lugtachus, who mixed murder with incest, repeatedly raping his aunts, daughters and sisters before moving on to their various offspring.

Of course there were dissenting voices. But Trevor-Roper insists that, whereas in other European countries these fanciful “histories” could not survive the critical eye of the Renaissance humanists, in Scotland “the whole troupe of primitive Scottish kings, so happily refloated and redecorated, would sail in their newly gilded ship, to the accompaniment of flutes and hautboys, like Cleopatra on the Nile, down the sacred river of tradition, while devout cheers arose from either bank: from Left and Right alike”. This single sentence is sufficient to demonstrate the literary qualities of this book. Even when Trevor-Roper is dealing with the less than riveting details of medieval historical scholarship, he is a pleasure to read. The prose is elegant, the argument incisive, the tone ironic.

Patrician disdain is also on display when he turns to literary myth-making. With the Union firmly established by the crushing of the Jacobite rebellion of 1745 (“’the last fling of an archaic society, already on the verge of dissolution”), Scots turned to culture to express their separate identity. An early example was the Rev John Home’s tragedy Douglas, which enjoyed a brief success at Covent Garden in 1757, inspiring a Scot in the audience to cry out, “Whaur’s your Wully Shakespeare noo?”

That proved a false dawn. Much greater staying power was shown by the epic poems of the Celtic bard “Ossian” published in the 1760s by James Macpherson. Claimed to be compiled from recently discovered ancient manuscripts, in reality they were almost entirely the work of Macpherson himself. In Edinburgh, men of letters fell on this evidence of an immemorial literary culture with delight. Even after so prominent an intellectual as David Hume had declared that the opinions of “50 bare-arsed Highlanders” would never persuade him of their authenticity, Ossian’s reputation – and Macpherson’s fortune – grew and grew. In London, Sheridan opined that Ossian excelled both Homer and Virgil. In Germany, Goethe sang his praises. Napoleon took his poems on both his first overseas expedition (to Egypt) and his last (to St Helena).

It is at this point that the limitations of Trevor-Roper’s demythologising project become apparent. His own view, expressed with characteristic trenchancy, is that Macpherson’s Ossianic epics were complete rubbish, “totally unreadable…of inexpressible tedium; its characters as bloodless as the ghosts who provide its supernatural machinery”. Everyone to his own taste, of course, but the range and durability of the responses to Ossian suggest that there was more here than a cynical fraud. There was both more literary merit and more historical substance behind the myth than Trevor-Roper allows.

He is on firmer ground when he turns to sartorial myth-making. In two wonderfully entertaining chapters he exposes just how recent were those two Scottish symbols, the kilt and the tartan. The former was invented in the 1720s by an Lancastrian iron-master seeking a form of clothing for his Scottish workforce more practical than the traditional belted plaid, or cloak. After the kilt’s prohibition as a symbol of Jacobitism in the aftermath of the ‘45, it was taken up by the elites as an emblem of Scottish identity. This association was then consolidated by the same sort of romantic and nationalist impulses that fostered the Ossianic myth. Ironically, the kilt was also given a boost by the exemption of the army from the ban. Within a few years, the tradition was well and truly established that Scottish regiments had been wearing it since time immemorial. As it was they who then became the sharp end of the rapidly expanding British Empire, their kilts became the most distinctive sartorial sign of nationality in the world.

The tartans now associated with the clans were bought off the peg from an enterprising Bannockburn haberdasher in the early 19th century. Once “authenticated” by a clan chief, a particular design could be applied to kilts, plaids, bonnets, biscuit tins and all the other souvenirs flowing out of the newly romanticised Highlands. A tartan that started out simply as “No.155” was first authenticated by Clan Kidd before being taken over by the Clan MacGregor. The whole industry expanded mightily following the visit of George IV to Edinburgh in 1822, when he appeared swathed in acres of Royal Stuart tartan. As one observer complained “the whole land was tartanised, in the royal eye, from Pentland to Solway”. The tartans were then codified by two English brothers who started out as John and Charles Allen, then “scotified”their names as Hay, before finally promoting themselves to royal status as John Sobieski Stuart and Charles Edward Stuart with the claim that their father was the legitimate son of Bonnie Prince Charlie and thus King Thomas I of Great Britain. This material on the kilt and the tartans was first published back in 1983, but fits the rest of this volume very well. It is to be hoped that Trevor-Roper’s literary estate contains more unpublished gems.

The Invention of Scotland by Hugh Trevor-Roper
Yale £18.99 pp282

Salmond: England’s taking the myth

The first minister hits back over claims that Scottish history is ‘fraudulent’

Saint George

Tom Gordon

Alex Salmond has provoked a row with English patriots by dismissing St George as a mythical figure who didn’t exist. The first minister said Scotland had a more credible patron saint than England because there was historical evidence that St Andrew had lived.

Salmond’s remarks were in response to the publication of what he believes to be an “ill-informed” book by one of the world’s most eminent historians, which claims Scotland’s history is woven from a “fraudulent” fabric of “myths and falsehoods”.

In The Invention of Scotland: Myth and History, the late Hugh Trevor-Roper claims that many of Scotland’s literary and political traditions were invented in the 18th century.

The historian says that the kilt was created by an Englishman in the 1700s and that the Declaration of Arbroath, presented to the Pope in 1320 to confirm Scotland’s status as an independent nation, was riddled with inaccuracies and “imaginary” ancient kings.

“In Scotland, it seems to me, myth has played a far more important part in history than it has in England,” he concludes.

However, Salmond has hit back, claiming that English history is similarly grounded in myth, not least in the story of St George.

“England’s got a lovely history and a lovely mythology, but the one thing I would say is at least our patron saint was real,” he said. “St George is a mythological figure, and if George wasn’t, the dragon certainly was.

“All countries have a mythology as part of their history, as part of their consciousness, as part of their identity. England has a mythology as well.

“But we also have an authentic history as well as a mythology, and a great deal to be proud of. The Scottish enlightenment was no myth.”

Salmond added that Trevor-Roper’s critique of Scottish history was ill-informed.

“I’m not going to decry Hugh Trevor-Roper because he’s in no position to answer back but I don’t think his knowledge of Scotland was particularly comprehensive. I don’t think even his best friend would have considered him an authority on Scottish history.”

Very little is known about St George. Pope Gelasius I, who canonised George, described him as one of the saints “whose names are rightly reverenced among men, but whose actions are known only to God”.

He is said to have been born in the late third century to a noble Christian family in Cappadocia, now part of Turkey.

According to some accounts, George served in the army of Diocletian and refused to take part in the Roman emperor’s systematic persecution of Christians. George, who refused to renounce his faith, is said to have been tortured and executed in Palestine in 303, becoming an early Christian martyr.

The legend of George slaying a dragon to rescue a damsel in distress gained currency in the late 15th century after it was printed in Caxton’s The Golden Legend, which was based on a French bishop’s book about the fantastic exploits of saints.

According to the New Testament, Andrew was one of Jesus’s original 12 apostles, who lived and worked as a fisherman in Galilee. He is said to have travelled to Greece to preach Christianity and to have been crucified at Patras on an X-shaped cross.

His connection with Scotland comes from the legend that some of his remains were kept at a site that is now the town of St Andrews. He is also the patron saint of Russia and Greece.

Salmond’s comments were dismissed by the Royal Society of St George, a Folkestone-based English patriotic group founded in 1894, but based on similar societies founded in the American colonies in the 18th century.

Bob Peedle, the society’s vice-chairman, had never heard of Salmond and said that his organisation had compiled a detailed account of St George’s life.

“This man \ is a figure in Scotland but not in England so unless he knows for a fact that St George didn’t exist then the best thing he could have done was to make no comment at all,” he said.

“The story of the dragon may be mythological but I have absolutely no doubt that George was a real person. We know where he was born and we know where he was buried and his tomb is still in what is now Palestine.”

While Salmond conceded that imaginary ancient kings had been included in the Declaration of Arbroath, he said: “It was a very sophisticated piece of medieval political rhetoric. “It claimed the Scots were descended from the ancient Egyptians. This was to pre-date the English claim to Scotland, because the English claimed to be descended from the Greeks, and what you had to do in medieval psychology was establish precedence and prior right. This was deliberate to establish the Scots’ prior right to Scotland.”

www.giftsafari.co.uk

No, Lady Godiva wasn’t starkers and an apple didn’t really fall on Isacc Newton’s head… we reveal those other historical myths

30th May 2008

For decades, visitors to HMS Victory have stood solemnly by a plaque in gold lettering announcing the exact spot on the orlop deck where Nelson met his end.

But this week it was revealed he didn’t actually die there after all – it was 25 feet to the fore that he passed away – and the ship’s curator Peter Goodwin admitted: ‘History is not always what it appears to be.’ So what other historical ‘facts’ are wrong? Here, we uncover a surprising number.

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Contrary to popular belief the Emperor Napoleon I of France, never said, ‘Not tonight, Josephine’

The Emperor Napoleon I of France, never said, ‘Not tonight, Josephine’. The phrase first appeared in a play about Napoleon that was not written until 1835, 14 years after Napoleon’s death, and the audience roared with laughter because the Bonapartes’ marriage was notoriously lusty.

Nor was Napoleon particularly small, despite his nickname, Le Petit Corporal (’The Little Corporal’). He was in fact 5ft 7in, which was fairly tall for the average European male of the early 19th century.

It is also quite untrue that so-called ‘witches’ were burned at the stake after the notorious witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692.

Of the 150 men and women arrested, 31 were tried and 20 were executed, all by hanging except one who was crushed to death by a door that had heavy stones placed upon it.

Of course they were all terrible ways for innocent people to die, but the burning of witches was not standard practice, as it had been for people convicted of heresy in earlier times.

The story about Sir Isaac Newton discovering gravity when an apple fell on his head as he was sitting under an apple tree is an invention.

Decades after Newton’s death in 1727, the French philosopher Voltaire put it in a book, claiming that Newton’s niece, Catherine Conduitt, believed it to be true.

If it had been, Newton would probably have made some kind of reference to it during his lifetime.

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Jean-Jacques Rousseau, wrote about Marie Antoinette who had ignorantly joked about the starving people of Paris but she was only 11

Volitaire’s fellow Enlightenment philosopher, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, wrote about a princess who had ignorantly joked about the starving people of Paris, telling a courtier: ‘Let them eat cake.’

That was in 1766, when Marie Antoinette was only 11 years old. Yet 20 years later, the story got around that it had been she who had made this remark, which went some way to creating the atmosphere of hatred that led to her execution in 1793.

Three of the things that everyone knows about the Elizabethan sailor-adventurer Sir Walter Raleigh was that he was responsible for bringing both potatoes and tobacco to England, and that he laid his gorgeous, bejeweled cloak in the mud for Queen Elizabeth I to step on and save her feet from getting dirty.

Yet all three are fictional. Potatoes had been brought to England (from Italy) the year before Raleigh popularized them in 1586 and the Frenchman, Jean Nicot (after whom nicotine is named) introduced tobacco a full 26 years before Raleigh had his first smoke.

The story of the Queen and Raleigh’s cloak emerged in 1584 without foundation, but became so connected with him that when he made up his coat of arms, he included a cloak in them, and pretended it was true.

And it wasn’t in fact Captain James Cook who discovered Australia when he sailed into Sydney in 1770, because years earlier the Dutchmen Abel Tasman (who gave his name to Tasmania) and Dirk Hartog, and an English pirate, William Dampier, had already got there.

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A travel poster for Australia, showing Captain Cook landing in 1770 but it had actually been discovered by a Dutchman

There were plenty of places Cook did discover on his great travels in the 1770s, but he can’t claim the whole continent of Australia, and nor was he strictly speaking a captain, holding the rank of lieutenant when he sailed there for the first time.

Nero could never have ‘ fiddled while Rome burned’. For all the movies that we see of the lunatic Emperor playing his violin maniacally as Rome burned around him in 64BC, caring nothing for his subjects as they died in the Great Fire that he himself had started, there is not a grain of truth in the story.

Fiddles weren’t invented for another millennium, and Nero was 35 miles outside the city at Antium when the fire broke out.

Although the Americans love their Fourth of July celebrations, with fireworks and parties, the signing of the Declaration did not actually take place then, but on July 2, 1776.

The 4th was merely the day that the document itself went to the printers. Nor did America legally become independent until much later, after the American War of Independence ended on September 3, 1783, with what was called the Definitive Treaty of Peace.

America’s greatest inventor, Thomas Edison, came up with the ideas for many great and world- changing things, but the electric lightbulb was not in fact one of them.

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Thomas Edison and the electric lightbulb which he invented, which is one from a box of 23 bulbs that were found in an attic and used in his 1890 patent court case

That was invented by the Englishman Sir Humphry Davy who thought up the concept of a carbon filament arc light.

What Edison, or at least his many engineers, managed to do was discover a better filament that would glow for long enough for the light to be worthwhile.

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The story of Lady Godiva riding through the streets naked sadly does not ring true

Edison did however, take out over a thousand patents in his lifetime, for inventions connected with telegraphy, megaphones, gramaphones, the kinetoscope, and metallurgy.

Although everyone loves the tale of the Tenth century Anglo-Saxon noblewoman Lady Godiva, who was supposed to have ridden naked through Coventry to pressure her husband Leofric into treating his tenants better, very little about it actually rings true.

Leofric was famously generous, endowing a Benedictine monastery in Coventry in 1043 under no apparent compulsion from Godiva, clothed or naked.

Some have claimed that the story originates from a custom in which penitents were forced to make a public procession in only their shift, a sleeveless white garment considered underwear, or that Lady Godiva’s nakedness refers to her riding through the streets stripped of her jewellery, the trademark of her upper-class rank.

But neither of these accounts accord with the plain fact of her husband Leofric’s legendary generosity.

The great Dutch artist Vincent Van Gogh did not actually cut off his own ear, as the most powerful legend in the history of art states – or at least not much of it.

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The popular myth about Van Gogh is exactly that – it was in fact Paul Gauguin who cut off a portion of his left lobe

In fact, after a great quarrel with fellow post-impressionist painter Paul Gauguin in 1890, Van Gogh cut off a portion of his left lobe. He did later commit suicide, however, taking two days to die from a gunshot wound.

George Washington was not the first of America’s 43 presidents. During the American War of Independence, the Continental Congress sitting in Pennsylvania chose Peyton Randolph as their first President.

He then appointed General Washington as commander of the Revolutionary army, called the Continental Army.

In 1781, John Hancock became president, and Washington wrote to him addressing the letter to ‘The President of the United States’. Washington only became the first popularly elected President of the United States.

The story is also told that George Washington as a young boy chopped down a cherry tree, but such was his honesty that when asked by his father who had done it, said: ‘Father, I cannot lie: it was me’. He was then beaten soundly. This too, is a complete fabrication.

Science probe for ’space pistols’

By Jonathan Fildes
Science and technology reporter, BBC News

Iron for the guns was thought to have come from Argentina

Given pride of place in an unassuming museum on the East Coast of America is a pair of 200-year-old duelling pistols shrouded in mystery.

The intricately decorated guns were said to have been forged from the iron of a fallen meteorite.

They were a unique gift from the commander of a South American region, which would later become Argentina, to the fourth US president, James Madison.

“Permit me therefore to present to your Excellency… a specimen of the first essays of the manufacture of arms established in the provinces of Buenos Ayres and Tucuman,” wrote General Ignacio Alvarez in an accompanying 14-page letter.

Over time, they passed into the hands of Madison’s successor – James Monroe – and are now on display at a museum dedicated to him.

Since that time, the story of their origin has gone unquestioned.

Now, scientists armed with a battery of hi-tech machines have probed the pistols in unprecedented detail.

Their findings cast doubt on the accepted theory of their origins and have thrown up a whole new set of questions for historians about the guns and the motives of the original protagonists.

“It’s made the mystery even more mysterious,” Meghan Budinger, curator at the James Monroe Museum and Memorial Library, told BBC News.

Atomic probe

To uncover the secrets of the pistols, they were sent on a world tour of some of the most advanced microscopes and scanners.

HOW ISIS WORKS

Neutrons blasted at sample

Neutrons created by accelerating protons to near light-speed

Pulses of protons smash into block of tungsten, dislodging neutrons from the nuclei of its atoms.

20,000 trillion neutrons dislodged each second

Neutrons channelled into beams and directed at sample of interest

Neutrons bounce off the molecular structure and collected by sensors which record position and energy

Scattering tells scientists about how target atoms are organised

They underwent X-ray fluorescence to reveal their surface detail, and were passed through a CT scanner to reveal their inner workings.

But the key test – whether they were forged from a lump of metal from space – was performed at the ISIS neutron source in Oxfordshire, UK.

The colossal machine is able to probe matter at the atomic level, giving scientists unique insights into the structure and make-up of materials.

“We give a different picture of what the world looks like,” said Professor Andrew Taylor, director of ISIS.

The facility, owned and operated by the UK’s Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), is currently being expanded to add the so-called Second Target Station, which will give the super-scope even more capability.

It is more commonly used by scientists designing and testing new materials, such as those used in the Airbus A380 and the turbine blades found in Rolls Royce jet engines.

“We didn’t set out to build a tool for archaeology,” said Professor Taylor.

However, its abilities are ideally suited to probing historical artefacts.

“What my neutron beams tell you are where atoms are and what atoms do,” said Professor Taylor. “We try to understand at a microscopic level the structure, arrangement and forces that hold materials together.”

Crucially, this process is non-destructive.

“Without [ISIS], we’d have to take a hacksaw and cut chunks out of the artefact to look at under the microscope,” explained Dr Evelyne Godfrey, who carried out the study.

‘Funny stuff’

The machine was used to compare Monroe’s pistols to a fragment of a meteorite from the Campo del Cielo crater in Argentina; the supposed origin of the metals from which they were forged.

ISIS has been used to test and develop materials for the Airbus A380

The results were conclusive.

“They were completely different,” Dr Godfrey told BBC News. “There were differences in microstructures, there were differences in carbon content, there were differences in chemical composition.

“We can say for sure they weren’t made from meteoritic iron.”

The results came as a blow to the museum.

“The results weren’t quite what we were hoping,” said Ms Budinger, diplomatically.

But, whilst the tests closed one chapter for the pistols, it opened another, packed full of new questions.

Curators of the objects had always assumed that the handles of the pistols were made of silver, but ISIS showed that this too was not the case.

“They were brass – and it was a funny type of brass, too,” explained Dr Godfrey.

The closest match was a distinctive alloy exported from Southeast Asia at around the time.

“It looks just like silver but is cheaper – so they were making tableware and replacing silver in other objects,” said Dr Godfrey.

Other tests revealed that the guns were not just ceremonial – as previously thought – but were fully functioning arms.

Questions, questions

“It brings up all kinds of questions,” said Ms Budinger.

“What exactly was General Alvarez’s motivation? He wrote this very flowery letter saying how much he admired the United States and how much he admired Madison but then he gives them a gift that was not where he said it was from and it was made from cheaper materials.”

There is a possibility that the General was duped – that he was told the pistols were made of meteoritic iron and gifted them in good faith.

“He may not have known what he was giving to Madison – at the time there would have been no way to prove it one way or the other,” said Ms Budinger.

The partially solved mystery could stop there; but the research team have one further avenue to explore.

A third pistol is mentioned in General Alvarez’s letter that was also supposedly forged from Campo del Cielo iron.

“We’re trying to track that down,” explained Ms Budinger.

If it is located and can be put through the same battery of tests as the first pair it could finally give historians clues to the real origin of the pistols.

“If it looks exactly the same that tells us that all three pistols were manufactured by the same person and that either General Alverez was duped or that it means he was lying and that none of the pistols were made from the Campo del Cielo crater.

“If the third pistol is different entirely then I think we have fairly good evidence that our pistols may not be the Madison pistols at all,” said Ms Budinger

“In which case it’s a whole new mystery.”

Pictured: Lancaster bomber in dramatic flypast to mark 65th anniversary of Dambusters raid

16th May 2008
Soaring over the green water of a Peak District reservoir the veteran Lancaster makes another swooping arc through the air.The Second World War bomber was the centrepiece of a thrilling flypast to mark the 65th anniversary of the Dambusters raid today.

Crowds packed the riverbank as the historic Lancaster – similar to the one used by the RAF’s 617 Squadron to successfully bomb two German dams in 1943 – flew three times along the Derwent valley.

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Bombs away: The world’s only flying Lancaster makes a low pass over the Derwent Dam

The Derwent dam was used by the Dambusters to train ahead of their mission to destroy three dams in Germany’s Ruhr valley.

Today Squadron Leader Les Munro, the last surviving pilot from the mission codenamed Operation Chastise, was one of the guests of honour attending the service.

As the distinctive roar of the Lancaster’s engines echoed across the lake, Squadron Leader Munro joined enthusiasts to relive memories of the daring raid, which used the celebrated “bouncing bomb” invented by Barnes Wallis.

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Historic: The Lancaster bombers soars over spectators during its flypast yesterday

Also taking part in the fly-past were a Spitfire, a Hurricane, two Tornado fighters from the present 617 Squadron, and a Dakota transport plane.

All the planes flew from RAF Coningsby in Lincolnshire to take part in the anniversary fly-past, which was preceded by a special memorial service on top of the Derwent dam at 10am.

Squadron Leader Munro was accompanied by Michael Gibson, the nephew of Wing Commander Guy Gibson, who led the Dambusters.

During the service 88-year-old Richard Todd, who played the wing commander in the 1955 film The Dam Busters, laid poppies on the water of the reservoir.

On May 16 1943, 19 aircraft set out to destroy three dams in the Ruhr valley – the Mohne, the Eder and the Sorpe – and so damage a vital source of power to the key industrial area of Germany.

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Crowds throng the riverbank as the Lancaster completes its anniversary flyby

Fighter support: A Supermarine Spitfire, top, and a Hawker Hurricane in formation

The mission was hailed a success after the Mohne and Eder were breached. But eight aircraft and 53 crew were lost during the raids.

Richard Todd, who played Wing Commander Guy Gibson in the 1955 film The Dam Busters, scattered poppies on the water of the reservoir during the service.

Two wreaths were also laid in the gatehouse of the Derwent Dam.

He said: “It’s the most wonderful sight, watching the old Lancaster flying over the dam. It’s a wonderful sight and sound.

“It’s very exciting, moving and memorable, I just wish the weather had been a little bit kinder. It’s very cold but luckily it’s good enough for the fly-past to take place.”

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Commemoration: Douglas DC-3 transport aircraft takes part in today’s anniversary

Andrew Wallis, a musician from Huddersfield, 46, is the grandson of Sir Barnes Wallis, the aircraft engineer who devised and planned the raids.

He said: “We’re very humbled in thinking that all these people lost their lives so that we could be here today. “My grandfather was always very upset about what happened, how many of the pilots and air crew died.

“It pained him for the rest of his life, that he felt in some way responsible.

“I’m trying to suppress my emotions in some way otherwise I would end up bursting into tears.

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Wing Commander Guy Gibson of 617 squadron, boarding Lancaster G

Royal approval: Air Vice-Marshall Ralh Cochrane, Wing Commander Guy Gibson, King George VI and Group Captain John Whitworth discuss Operation Chastise

“For me, it’s the humbling side of it and the fact that I feel some small part of it all. It takes great people to keep everything going. Humanity as a whole is so fragile.

“When the Lancaster went over, it was very exhilarating, the sound, the history.”

After the wreaths were laid at exactly 10.30am, the Lancaster bomber came into view at the top of the Derwent Valley and flew low at 100ft in between the two towers of the dam. It then banked away before circling to return over the dam again.

On its third fly-past it was accompanied by two Tornado planes from today’s 617 Squadron. After its final fly-past, a Spitfire and a Hurricane flew over the dam and finally a Dakota transport plane flew past as hundreds of air enthusiasts and servicemen and women watched.

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Aftermath: The wrecked Mohne Dam with the massive breach caused by the Dambusters 617 Squadron

Deadly: A prototype of the so-called ‘bouncing bomb’ developed by Barnes Wallace

The Big Question: What do Britain’s ‘X Files’ tell us, and why have they been released now?

By Michael Savage

Thursday, 15 May 2008

Independent Graphics

Why are we asking this now?

Do aliens exist? Have we been visited by extra-terrestrials? Has anyone really seen a spaceship? They are questions most of us have asked ourselves at some point, but previously classified reports made public by the Ministry of Defence reveal that a startling number of people in Britain believe they already know the truth. Eight files have been released containing hundreds of alleged sightings of unidentified flying objects (UFOs) between 1978 and 1987. Among the thousands of pages of testimony are close encounters that range from the deranged to the intriguing.

The MoD handed the reports, already dubbed the UK “X Files”, to the National Archives after receiving a barrage of Freedom of Information requests for its documents referring to UFOs.

So, what are the UFO sightings like?

Some of the mysteries are easier to solve than others. It is doubtful that we should be in fear of an alien invasion after punters at a pub in Tunbridge Wells saw a strange flying craft with red and green flashing lights heading towards Gatwick. Nor should we lose any sleep over a craft reported by an observer in Glan Conwy, north Wales, who saw something with a flashing light making a deep throbbing noise “reminiscent of a propeller-driven aircraft” (that would be a propeller-driven plane, then). Another bizarre episode occurred when a driver spotted a craft in the Scottish Highlands. Having presumably travelled at the speed of light or more to reach Earth, an alien craft was clocked doing 30mph above the A839 to Lairg.

But the most outlandish story of all comes from a correspondent in January 1985. Having allegedly been visited by aliens since the age of seven, he later claims to have witnessed a UFO being shot down in the River Mersey. Upon hitting the water, it disappeared. Eventually, his alien friend Algar agreed to meet government representatives, but was unfortunately slain by another alien race at the 11th hour. As the writer says: “That, of course, was that.”

Do the reports prove that aliens exist?

Unfortunately, the MoD does not pursue reports until a positive identification of a UFO is made. The only reason it records them at all is to discover whether or not an “intruding aircraft” has illegally entered British airspace. That means the reports do not reveal any spaceships in hangers, or aliens on operating tables. But, if you are willing to peruse the 450 pages of files, there are some genuinely compelling cases. Many reports come from pilots, air traffic controllers and the police. One report by police officers in Woking, Surrey, describes a white light descending to Earth. There testimony is marked: “Genuine report.” And there are plenty more where that came from. Although eight files have been released now, another 150 are on their way over the next few years, according to the MoD.

Do any recurring details emerge?

Aliens do not seem that fussy about where in Britain they visit. Sightings have come as far and wide as Devon, the Highlands, Wales and London. An interstellar fashion for decorating spacecraft with an array of bright flashing lights does emerge, though. One giant UFO reported in Oxfordshire in 1981 was decked out with red, blue and white lights – seemingly the colours of choice. The crew of another craft spotted three years later in Lanarkshire were a bit more imaginative, opting for orange, white and green. And the spaceships apparently come in variety of shapes and sizes. The classic dome and saucer crops up many times but there are more unusual descriptions, such as one in Plymouth depicted as a “cigar-shaped”, while a Norwich observer described the UFO he saw as a “fat coffin”.

What are the rational explanations?

Many sightings can quickly be put down to pretty normal phenomena. Weather conditions can have a significant effect. Cloudy nights obviously make reports more unreliable but even those made on clear nights can be dubious – in clear conditions, stars, planets or space debris are mistaken for something more sinister. As the MoD said in 1979, “Venus is popular”. Other UFOs can be accounted for as meteorological balloons, optical illusions and even genuine hallucinations.

What is the official MoD view?

According to Nick Pope, who was the MoD’s very own version of the X Files agent Fox Mulder in the early 1990s (he says they couldn’t afford a Scully), some of the most interesting information in the declassified reports comes in documents on government policy towards ufology. MoD notes for a speech to be given in the House of Lords in 1979 did not exactly sit on the fence. “It was a real hatchet job,” Mr Pope said. They reveal that the Government was concerned about a growing “UFO industry” which had been aided, it said, by the success of Steven Spielberg’s 1977 film Close Encounters Of The Third Kind. “There is nothing to indicate that ufology is anything but claptrap,” the MoD wrote. “It seems quite proper for the Government to inject some massive common sense into the business.”

There were some in the corridors of power at the time who believed in aliens, though. Lord Clancarty, who called for a Lords debate on the subject, wrote a book called Mysterious Visitors, in which he attributed UFO involvement to the disappearance of a British regiment during the Gallipoli campaign during the First World War. They were spirited away by a cloud. As for the lack of evidence, blame the CIA. They hid it all, the peer argued.

Does anyone care?

Judging by the public interest in the release of the files, plenty of people will have a look at them. Even the fact that the MoD kept such records has interested many. The US stopped investigating UFO reports in 1969, after a study by the University of Colorado found that 90 per cent of sightings could be related to ordinary phenomena. But the MoD still seems curious about the other 10 per cent. The National Archives expects a lot of interest, too. It has set up a dedicated internet server to host its website featuring the reports, to cope with high levels of traffic.

Will this end all the conspiracy theories?

No amount of fresh official UFO documentation will satisfy some conspiracy theorists, who will believe the papers are merely a decoy to throw them off the scent of alien visits. Within hours of the publication of the reports, Mr Pope, who helped the National Archives pick out some interesting highlights, received emails accusing him of being a state-sponsored dis-information agent.

Similar reports released by France last year were dismissed by many as a smokescreen, arguing the government had kept the good stuff. The truth, it seems, is still out there. But it probably isn’t hovering above the A839.

In light of these reports, should we believe that UFOs have visited us?

Yes…

* Although some of the reports are wacky, others are detailed and come from reliable sources

* Some eyewitness reports come from pilots, aviation experts and police officers, who wouldn’t say these things lightly

* The sheer number of reports indicates that there is something in them – and there are 150 more files yet to be released

No…

* Why is it that the aliens and UFOs – little green men with saucer-shaped spacecraft – always sound like the ones in the movies?

* The vast majority of the reports can be attributed easily to far more rational phenomena

* If aliens could build a light-speed ship and hide expertly for most of the time, would they really leave bright, flashing lights on?

The Big Question: What would Scottish independence mean, and how would it work?

By Andy McSmith
Friday, 9 May 2008

Why are we asking this now?

Wendy Alexander, who leads the Labour Party north of the border, has startled a lot of her political colleagues – not least, Gordon Brown – by suddenly announcing that she wants a referendum on Scottish independence, and she wants it now. “I don’t fear the verdict of the Scottish people,” she said. “Bring it on.”

This was a remarkable departure from normal Labour Party policy, which is to preserve the unity of the United Kingdom. Put on the spot, Gordon Brown avoided saying whether he agreed or disagreed, by pretending she had not said what she said.

But this is a disagreement about tactics, not about policy. Wendy Alexander does not want Scotland to leave the UK. On the contrary, she is gambling that if asked now, the Scots would say no. The call for an early referendum was meant to wrongfoot the Scottish Nationalist Party, who run Scotland’s devolved administration. They also say they want a referendum, but not until 2010.

What would happen if there was a yes vote for independence?

The SNP, the only party ever likely to organise a referendum, say that if there was a yes vote, they would open negotiations with London about the details, and pass a bill guaranteeing citizens’ rights in an independent Scotland, which would no doubt be based on European law. The negotiations would be long and complex, because the peaceful splitting in two of a sovereign country is a rare event in history. The nearest precedent would be break up of what used to be Czechoslovakia.

British citizens would presumably be given time to choose which nationality they wanted to retain. This would be a difficult one for Scots who live and work in England, but have kept up their ties with Scotland – like Gordon Brown, for instance.

Everyone would need a new passport over time, but if the split was amicable, you might not be required to produce it at the Scottish-English border. Scotland would apply and probably be granted membership of the EU, whereupon it would abandon sterling and adopt the euro, so anyone travelling between the two countries would have to change currency.

If the Scots were in sentimental mood, they might retain the monarchy – which after all predates the 1707 Act of Union – but north of the border the Queen would be simply Queen Elizabeth, not Elizabeth II, and her grandson, if crowned, would be William II in Scotland and William V in England.

Would England be better off without Scotland?

The Act of Union in 1707 set off a wave of anti-Scottish sentiment in England, which has threatened to creep back since the creation of the Scottish Parliament and the electoral success of the SNP. An ICM poll for the Sunday Telegraph in November 2006 produced the startling finding that 59 per cent of English voters wish Scotland would leave the UK.

The reason is that Scotland is perceived to be living well off English taxes. New figures throwing light on this issue will be published next month. For now, we can only go on the published figures for the year 2003-04, when public spending in Scotland was £7,346 per head of population, compared with £5,940 in England. Scotland received £3bn more from the Exchequer than it paid in taxes. Scotland is seen as a country that gets Scandinavian levels of public services on US-level taxes.

For Conservatives, another argument in favour of a split is that it would vastly improve the Tories’ chances of winning general elections in England.

Would Scotland be better off without England?

The SNP has two answers to the accusation that Scotland lives off English subsidies. One is that a self-governing Scotland could manage its economy better, attracting EU support and joining an “arc of prosperity” with its near neighbours, Norway, Denmark and Iceland.

The other answer is oil. In the past 30 years, taxes from North Sea oil have amounted to about £200bn, at today’s prices. Last year’s receipts were around £8bn, and this year’s will be higher, possibly up to £12.5 bn. That looks like enough to fill the gap between income and expenditure – but it assumes that an English government would roll over and concede that all tax revenues from oil belong to Scotland. Actually, London would fight for a share. And North Sea oil is a diminishing asset. Production peaked at 2.9m barrels a day in 1999, and by 2010 is expected to be down to a million barrels a day – barely a third of what it used to be. If the Scots want exclusive use of the taxes generated by “their” oil, they have left it too late.

Is independence likely to happen?

It seems very likely that there will be a referendum in Scotland in 2010 or soon afterwards, because the SNP have promised it, and there is no indication yet that they are going to lose their position as the largest party in the Scottish Parliament. But even if it happens, and it produces the result the SNP want, it does not follow that Scotland will get independence. The London government would be morally obliged to abide by a properly run plebiscite that clearly showed a majority for independence – but it might not be that clear cut.

What are the possible scenarios?

The turn-out might be very small, or the majority very narrow, and there is an as yet unresolved dispute about what question to put on the ballot paper. If, as the SNP want, it is a vaguely worded question about the desirability of taking further steps towards independence, the London government might interpret that to mean nothing much. If the Scots tried to declare independence in defiance of the Westminster, they would get no recognition internationally.

What are the polls saying?

The evidence is that the Scots are happy to have an SNP administration in a devolved Edinburgh Parliament, but are not minded to vote for outright independence. The opinion polls do not all agree, but they seem to suggest that enthusiasm for self rule has cooled since the SNP won control of the Scottish administration. The Sunday Telegraph poll in 2006 said that 52 per cent of Scots wanted independence; a YouGov poll conducted in the past week put the figure at only 25 per cent, with 59 per cent saying they prefer things as they are. But in 2010, there could be a Conservative government in London, supported by less than a quarter of Scottish voters, which could stoke up separatist sentiment – and that, no doubt, was what Wendy Alexander was thinking when she said: “Bring it on”.

Should England and Scotland separate?

Yes…

* Scotland’s half-way status, partly independent, partly not, is an anomaly that cannot last

* There are smaller and much less wealthy countries than Scotland now in the EU

* Scotland’s economy would benefit from the discipline of self-government

No…

* Most Scots like devolution, but that does not mean they want independence

* Breaking up the United Kingdom would leave each component weakened internationally

* Since 1707, both countries have benefited from the freedom with which people cross the border

What if Scotland DID become independent? A historian looks forward 20 years and imagines the future

By ANDREW ROBERTS – 8th May 2008

The Scottish Labour leader, Wendy Alexander, called this weekend for an early referendum on Scottish independence – even though her party previously opposed the idea. The move is seen as an attempt to wrong-foot Alex Salmond’s Scottish National Party, which is committed to a referendum in 2010.

But many say her challenge could backfire and that the SNP could benefit from any poll result that suggests a move towards independence.

So what would an independent Scotland be like? Here, historian ANDREW ROBERTS looks forward to the year 2025 and imagines …

The new Prime Minister frowned as he stared across the Cabinet table at the embarrassed looking Scottish High Commissioner. Had he heard correctly? Was President Salmond really asking that Scotland be re-admitted into the UK, after only 15 years as an independent state?

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Cry freedom: But would independence work?

They had been tumultuous years, of course, and ‘the Tartan Revolt’ had endured its ups and downs – mostly downs.

But was the Scottish Nationalist Party genuinely proposing to abolish itself, admitting the whole experiment had been a disastrous failure?

“I shall have to confer with the Cabinet, of course,” the Prime Minister said.

Barely able to growl “Thank you, Mr Osborne”, with a twist of his kilt the High Commissioner left.

The Rt Hon George Osborne MP, who had just returned from an audience at Buckingham Palace with Charles III, sat back in his armchair in the middle of the Cabinet room and ruminated on the Scots’ predicament.

Where had it all gone wrong? Of course, the 11-year-long international court case over who owned North Sea oil had been a serious blow to Scottish hopes when the 30 per cent share they were finally awarded turned out to have almost run dry anyhow.

The way that the English coastline jutted out into the North Sea and the Irish Sea just south of the border had persuaded the judges that was a generous settlement under international maritime law, but it seriously undermined Scottish Prime Minister Wendy Alexander’s first term in office at Holyrood.

Then there was the termination of the annual Westminster subsidies to Scotland under the Barnett Formula, which in 2007 had amounted to £11.3 billion.

This ended overnight when the Scots voted – by 54 per cent to 46 per cent – for independence back in January 2010.

The ending of this £2,200-per-person subsidy meant the Holyrood Parliament in Edinburgh had to make severe cuts in public services, which rapidly became deeply unpopular.

Born blue: Mel Gibson as William Wallace in Braveheart

The removal of every Scottish MP in Westminster had also come as a body blow to New Labour, which was trying desperately to hang on until the last minute before calling a General Election in the early summer of 2010.

Gordon Brown was forced to give up the premiership, since his own seat of Kirkcaldy disappeared under the new constitution. Many in his party – possibly including himself – thought his resignation something of a blessing.

Earl Brown of Cowdenbeath, as he subsequently became, turned out to be one of the shortest-serving premiers of modern times.

David Miliband did his best to lead a minority government without the 39 Scottish MPs at Westminster, but the task proved beyond him. Not wishing to spend his life in perpetual opposition, he took up a post in the City.

Any hopes that the more Anglophobic Scots might have had that their defection would harm the UK were dashed when it kept its name – in reference to the English, Welsh and Northern Ireland components – as well as its seats in the UN Security Council, Nato, EU, OECD and other international bodies.

Scotland on its own, however, swiftly found itself with a voice somewhere between that of Serbia and Cyprus in weight, representing only 4.6 million people (after half-a-million English and business people emigrated to avoid the anti-sassenach legislation and high corporation taxes).

The decision of the Royal Bank of Scotland in 2018 to relocate its head office for tax purposes to the Square Mile was a stark indication of how bad things had got.

After the failure of the Tartan Pound, and the Scots refusal to peg their currency to sterling, their decision to join the euro had also been damaging – not least because it meant they no longer had any significant input into decisions over interests rates and liquidity.

On the Queen’s death, aged 95, in 2021, the Scots compounded their error by joining Australia in becoming a republic.

It was not simply Charles III’s sale to Sir Billy Connolly of Balmoral and Birkhall, but also the sense that – as with Ireland in 1949 – the act to become a republic had been primarily anti-British in intent.

The phrases that the British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson had directed towards ‘North Britain’ had only inflamed opinion further.

In retrospect, the decision to move the naval base from Rosyth to a port south of the border was a natural one for a Westminster government determined to safeguard the interests of national security.

So, too, was the abolition of the remaining Scots regiments, despite their ancient and glorious history as part of the British Army.

The unemployment that resulted north of the Border may have been soaked up had the Scottish economy been growing, but the SNP-Labour coalition that ran the country under President Salmond and Prime Minister Wendy Alexander made an error in choosing that moment to push through radical land policies.

When tenants were given the right to buy their own homes, it was hoped by the Left that the landed estates of the Scottish aristocracy would be dispossessed in a generation or two, and there would be more fairness and opportunity in the glens.

What, in fact, happened was that the aristocratic estates did, indeed, disappear, but with them went the enterprises that allowed sports such as shooting, stalking and fishing to flourish.

The great sporting estates that had attracted tourist revenue to the Scottish Exchequer in George Square, Edinburgh, were no longer productive.

Expertise built up over the decades was lost, and farms were broken up into smaller and smaller units, many of which could no longer operate.

Tourists stopped bringing their euros, dollars, yen and Chinese yuan because, paradoxically, independence had robbed the country not only of its ancient rural traditions but of its confidence and grandeur.

To visitors, Scotland no longer felt genuinely Scottish. It had turned into just another small, unremarkable European country.

It all got progressively worse with the loss of whisky revenues after the declaration of independence from the Orkney and Shetland Islands.

By the time Alex Salmond became president, his country was unravelling, and the English border towns such as Berwick-upon-Tweed that had voted to join Scotland – in order to take advantage of social benefits in the good old Barnett Formula days – were soon begging for re-admittance into the UK.

The Time magazine cover story – ‘Tartan Nightmare’ – was a turning point in the Scots’ self-esteem, especially when it equated the chances of a successful independent Scotland with those of seeing the Loch Ness Monster.

It was with no sense of schadenfreude that Prime Minister Osborne took the decision that was plain to him as soon as the High Commissioner had left.

Of course, he would consult with the King, his own predecessor as premier Lord Cameron of Whitney and Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, but he was pretty certain that they would agree with his conclusion.

The answer must be ‘No’. The Scots had chosen their destiny, and now they must live with it.

Philipp von Boeselager, Who Attempted an Assassination of Hitler, Dies at 90

By WILLIAM GRIMES

Published: May 3, 2008

Philipp Freiherr von Boeselager, believed to be the last surviving member of the inner circle of German Army officers who attempted to assassinate Adolf Hitler with a briefcase bomb on July 20, 1944, died on Thursday. He was 90 and lived in Altenahr, in the Rhineland-Palatinate.

Jan Bauer/Associated Press, 2004

Philipp von Boeselager

His death was announced by the German Defense Ministry, which gave no other details.

Mr. von Boeselager, disturbed by the Nazi campaign of extermination against the Jews and by German atrocities that he witnessed as a lieutenant on the Eastern Front, joined an anti-Hitler conspiracy in 1942 and later took part in the plot being organized by Col. Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, who, as chief of staff to Gen. Friedrich Fromm of Reserve Army Headquarters, routinely attended meetings at which Hitler was present.

Mr. von Boeselager, assigned to an explosives research team, was able to acquire top-grade English explosives. On July 20, Colonel von Stauffenberg carried a briefcase stuffed with plastic explosives and a timed detonator into a conference being held in the Wolf’s Lair, Hitler’s headquarters in East Prussia, and placed it under a table being used by Hitler and more than 20 officers.

After making an excuse, Colonel von Stauffenberg left the room. In his absence, Col. Heinz Brandt, trying to get a better look at a map on the table, moved the briefcase, blunting the impact of the explosion. It demolished the conference room and mortally wounded three officers (Colonel Brandt among them) and a stenographer, but Hitler escaped with minor injuries.

Had the assassination succeeded, Mr. von Boeselager was supposed to lead 1,200 men back to Berlin and take part in a general uprising against the Nazi regime, code-named Operation Valkyrie. The bomb plot is the subject of the unreleased film “Valkyrie,” in which Tom Cruise plays Colonel von Stauffenberg. Mr. von Boeselager described his role in the wartime resistance in a recent interview with The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

Most of the approximately 200 conspirators, including Colonel von Stauffenberg, were rounded up and executed, while others committed suicide. No one revealed Mr. von Boeselager’s role in the plot, which is described in detail by the historian Peter Hoffmann in “The History of the German Resistance, 1933-1945.” As a result, he did not need to use the cyanide capsule he kept on hand. Fearing exposure, he kept the cyanide for the rest of the war.

Mr. von Boeselager was born into a Roman Catholic family in Burg Heimerzheim, near Bonn. After graduating from Aloysius College, a Jesuit secondary school in Bad Godesberg, he intended to study law and enter the foreign service, but not wishing to join the Nazi Party he instead enlisted in the army, as did his brother Georg, who also took part in the July 20 plot.

Mr. von Boeselager was first approached in 1942 to shoot both Hitler and Heinrich Himmler at close range. “It was no longer about saving the country, but about stopping the crimes,” he told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in a recent interview.

On March 13, 1943, with a Walther PP pistol in hand, Mr. von Boeselager prepared to assassinate both men, who were scheduled to hold a strategy session with Field Marshal Günther von Kluge, Mr. von Boeselager’s commanding officer and also a conspirator. When Himmler decided not to attend, Mr. von Kluge called off the mission.

In 1944, it was Mr. von Boeselager’s brother Georg who gave him the signal to move forward. “One day, my brother called and said, ‘They want explosives,’ ” he told Reuters in a 2004 interview. “I knew exactly what for.”

When he stepped off an airplane to deliver the explosives to Gen. Hellmuth Stieff at Army High Command, however, the plan nearly came unraveled.

“Getting out of the plane, I was limping, because I had been injured in the leg.” he said in the interview. “Several young soldiers came up to me, offering to carry my suitcase. But I refused. I thought they would notice at once that the suitcase was far too heavy.” As for the failure of the assassination attempt, Mr. von Boeselager said, “Stauffenberg was the wrong man for this, but no one else had the guts.”

After the war, Mr. von Boeselager studied law and economics and served as an adviser in creating the Bundeswehr, the armed forces of West Germany. He founded several charities and welfare organizations, and often spoke at schools about German resistance to the Third Reich and the importance of taking an active part in politics. In 1948 he married Rosa Maria Gräfin von Westphalen zu Fürstenberg. The couple had four children, Albrecht, Georg, Maria-Felicitas Schenk von Stauffenberg and Monica Adelmann von Adelmannsfelden.

Two weeks before his death, Mr. von Boeselager took part in a documentary, “The Valkyrie Legacy,” to be shown on the History Channel in spring 2009.

Mr. von Boeselager said that the decision to call off the 1943 plot had continued to haunt him. “I always see Hitler from here to the fireplace in front of me and think, ‘What would have happened if you had shot him?’ ” he told a reporter, indicating with his hands a distance of about two feet.

May 5, 1992: Wolfenstein 3-D Shoots the First-Person Shooter Into Stardom

By Noah Shachtman 05.05.08 | 12:00 AM

1992: Id Software releases Wolfenstein 3-D, and it launches a huge computer-game category.

Wolfenstein 3-D may not have been the very first “first-person shooter,” as the genre came to be known, but it was by far the most successful. Technically the genre goes back to the ’70s, but no one really paid any attention to it. Even id released an earlier FPS called Catacombs 3D, but again, it wasn’t nearly as good as Wolfenstein.

But through massive online dissemination of the game’s shareware version, Wolfenstein 3D (the hyphen was later dropped from the name) introduced millions to an immersive world in which the action seemed to be happening from the player’s perspective.

“It was an incredible sensation, really unlike anything gamers had seen before,” said Jamie Madigan, who helps operate the GameSpy Network’s 3D Action website. “You could move smoothly in 360 degrees. You felt like you were there.”

“Everything that’s followed in [its] footsteps has just been a modification of that basic style,” id Software CEO Todd Hollenshead said in 2001.

Players in the game assume the role of an American commando battling Nazis and their supernatural servants. It was banned in Germany because of its use of Nazi symbols, like the swastika, and music, like the “Horst Wessel Lied.”

Wolfenstein 3D did more than define a genre. It also launched a company, id Software of Mesquite, Texas, which leveraged Wolfenstein 3D’s success into a franchise of wildly successful first-person shooters, including the seminal Doom and Quake series.

These games, in turn, begat a slew of sequels, imitators and adaptations, from Half-Life to Max Payne.

Wired.com Game|Life blogger Earnest Cavalli added, “The key to the whole Wolfenstein thing is that its success — which was massive — paved the way for … thousands of games that mimicked them, transforming the PC into a gaming system best known for FPS titles. Plus, who doesn’t like killing Nazis?”

(Source: Various)

Pirates can claim UK asylum

Marie Woolf, Whitehall Editor

THE Royal Navy, once the scourge of brigands on the high seas, has been told by the Foreign Office not to detain pirates because doing so may breach their human rights.

Warships patrolling pirate-infested waters, such as those off Somalia, have been warned that there is also a risk that captured pirates could claim asylum in Britain.

The Foreign Office has advised that pirates sent back to Somalia could have their human rights breached because, under Islamic law, they face beheading for murder or having a hand chopped off for theft.

In 2005 there were almost 40 attacks by pirates and 16 vessels were hijacked and held for ransom. Employing high-tech weaponry, they kill, steal and hold ships’ crews to ransom. This year alone pirates killed three people near the Philippines.

Last week French commandos seized a Somali pirate gang that had held a luxury yacht with 22 French citizens on board. The hijackers were paid off by the boat’s owner and then a French helicopter carrier dispatched 50 commandos to seize the hijackers and the ransom money on dry land.

Britain is part of a coalition force that patrols piracy stricken areas and the guidance has troubled navy officers who believe they should have more freedom to intervene.

The guidance was sharply criticised by Julian Brazier MP, the Conservative shipping spokesman, who said: “These people commit horrendous offences. The solution is not to turn a blind eye but to turn them over to the local authorities. The convention on human rights quite rightly doesn’t cover the high seas. It’s a pathetic indictment of what our legal system has come to.”

A Foreign Office spokesman said: “There are issues about human rights and what might happen in these circumstances. The main thing is to ensure any incident is resolved peacefully.”

The guidance is the latest blow to the robust image of the navy. Last year 15 of its sailors were taken prisoner by the Iranians and publicly humiliated.

In the 19th century, British warships largely eradicated piracy when they policed the oceans. The death penalty for piracy on the high seas remained on the statute books until 1998. Modern piracy ranges from maritime mugging to stealing from merchant ships with the crew held at gunpoint.