Fiction of the Tartan TerroristsAndrew Murray Scott and Iain MacLeay examine a literary genre
www.scottishrepublicansocialistmovement.orgReal life and fiction often imitate each other. Nowhere is this more true than in a number of novels which take their theme the struggle of Scottish nationalists for an Independent Scotland. Few of these novels have adopted the rather mundane political struggle as a subject, preferring to utilise instead the ambience of what has been dubbed “tartan terrorism”. Scotch on the Rocks, the best known of the genre, co-written by the present Conservative Foreign Secretary, Douglas Hurd, as filmed on prime time television at a time of acute political sensitivity.
Our book, Britain’s Secret War, is the first comprehensive study of the real phenomenon known by some as “tartan terrorism” and others as a “war of liberation”. That this clandestine, sporadic war actually took place between 1968 and the present is proved by events which have occurred, included a large number of bombings, bank raids, arson attacks, and even assassination attempts. These events have been parodied in the novels which can loosely be termed a genre. The styles of the books vary, of course, from comic farce to melodrama and sinister thriller.
The questions which need to be asked are: to what extent are these novels merely imaginative fiction and how closely do they parallel what has actually taken place ? Have they had effects other than as stimulating literature ? What effect have they had on the Scots’ consciousness and particularly upon Scots’ perceptions of the political campaign for Independence ? Do they merely imitate what has already happened or do they actually provoke imitation ?
The genre started during the first surge of modern nationalism, partly inspired by the removal of the Stone of Destiny from Westminster Abbey by Ian Hamilton and others in 1950 and the “Great Pillar Box War” when post boxes with the EIIR insignia were blown to bits. The first two books of the genre, Scotching the Snake, by Charles Henry Dand, and The Stone, by Nigel Tranter, both appeared in 1958 and thus were clearly inspired by these earlier events.
Dand’s novel is satirical farce with a mixture of semi-serious political speculation and comic humour. A conspiracy organised by the Sons of the Hills, a collection of youth hostelling boy scouts headed by a leader calling himself the Boss, is infiltrated by a British spy, Cameron, who is almost converted to Scottish nationalism by a clever presentation of arguments in favour of Home Rule.
The kilted nationalist forces gather at Castle X on the Firth of Forth, arm themselves, and move on to Calton Hill for an assault on the Scottish Office. This is successful and Independence is proclaimed. Then, however, the novel degenerates into farce when the Boss is revealed to be unbalanced megalomaniac who advocates the separation of the Scots from their national drink ! This results in the abandonment of the revolution, the Union is saved, and the hero gets the girl. It is all rather good-humoured, far-fetched, and amusing.
The Stone, by Nigel Tranter, is of a considerably higher literary standard. It follows the adventures of a group of patriotic Scots in their attempts to stop the true Stone of Destiny, the Lia Fail, falling into the hands of Oxford archaeologists who intend to send it down to England to join the fake Stone under the Coronation Chair in Westminster Abbey. The patriots, with the help of a group of Highland tinkers, elude a police dragnet to hide the Stone so that it can remain in Scotland for ever.
The next book on the theme was the adventure thriller, The Douglas Affair, by Alastair Mair, which appeared in 1966 and was reprinted the following year, thanks to the success with critics and the public. The central figure, James Douglas, is one of Scotland’s leading industrial magnates and also a patriot. An incident on holiday in Spain, when a Basque extremist is quite casually shot by the Guardia Civil, sets Douglas off on a single-minded crusade for a Scottish Parliament, outflanking the existing nationalist party.
The crusade gathers momentum and looks as though it will succeed public opinion is galvanised, then sinister forces conspire against it and Douglas is killed in a mysterious road accident. Anticipating his own execution, Douglas had nominated a successor – who dies of a heart attack on hearing the news of his promotion. Douglas’s hand-picked committee elect a new leader and nominate a successor to follow him if required, and “the Douglas affair is not yet ended”. The book is never melodramatic and nicely understated, leaving a great deal to the imagination. The same cannot be said for the next book in the genre: Scotch On The Rocks.
By Douglas Hurd and Andrew Osmond, it appeared in 1971 and was reprinted the following year. It was highly successful, its cover embellished with the close-up of the malevolent face of a red-haired Scot half-hidden behind the barrel of a Sten gun, and it quickly became a part of the popular psyche, attracting even more attention (and considerable anger from the SNP) when it was televised by the BBC if five episodes at peak viewing time in 1973 when the SNP were attracting opinion poll ratings of up to 36%. The novel employed a range of Scottish stereotypes, some rather obviously and unflatteringly based on living nationalist leaders. James Henderson, the canny SNP leader, was a composite of several well-known figures, while the impassioned and cranky Mrs Merrilees is a mocking portrait of Wendy Wood, the leader of the “Scottish Patriots” organisation.
The terrorist group, the “Scottish Liberation Army” which links up with the Glasgow razor gangs (miraculously resurrected after 40 years of lingering on the pages of No Mean City) is eventually proved to have communist links and to be funded by “Moscow gold”. The SLA activities include the burning down of St Andrew’s House, the blowing up of the Forth Bridge tolls, and an attack on the Conservative Conference at Blackpool, culminating in the assassination of the Secretary of State for Scotland and the occupying of the Fort William area in a doomed latter-day Jacobite rising – which is snuffed out by some stiff upper-lipped characters such as McNair, the Special Branch agent, straight from the pages of a John Buchan novel.
These activities went far beyond what had yet been attempted by any “tartan terrorist” group, and the narrative thrust was conveyed in such a way that most Scots reader would have identified with the extremists as portrayed.
The Dollar Covenant, by Michael Sinclair, appeared in 1980. Unlike Scotch On The Rocks, it was written by a Scot, albeit a fairly anglicised one – Sinclair being the nom-de-plume for Michael Shea – no less a person than press secretary to the Queen ! This astonishing coincidence went almost unnoticed by the public.
The book featured the nightmarish scenario of an Independent Scotland sliding into bankruptcy and chaos. He had cleared the book with the Queen before publication and reported to the press that she had had no qualms about its rather blatant political message. The book did not achieve the enormous sales of its predecessor but was a helpful piece of propaganda masquerading as fiction. 
The Lion Is Rampant, by Ross Laidlaw, appeared in 1979, although it is clearly a post-referendum political thriller. The central character, Nicholas Wainwright, is an Englishman recently returned from fighting the Mau-Mau in Kenya; the sort of man who prefers a round of golf to politics, drinks gin and tonics or English beer and only malt whisky when forced to by mad terrorist leaders. In fact, for Wainwright, who stumbles ridiculously easily onto a plot between the leaders of the Scottish Freedom Party – who have just won a General Election – and the USSR, all Scots are either lunatics, fanatics, rogues, or bully-boys; and all speak in hamespun and couthy Scots.
The democratic majority of voters is thus reduced by Wainwright to mob-law, to “dark pent-up forces”, and related to both Nazism and Stalinism. Elements of the Scottish Freedom Party are likened to the brownshirts with their predilection for torture. There are no redeeming features in the new Scotland, Wainwright escapes to alert Whitehall of the plot, is captured, escapes again, and ends up a candidate for “some sort of gong”. With the assistance of NATO and the EEC, Scotland is conquered militarily and ceded to England, while her political leaders go on trial for treason.
It is the sort of novel guaranteed to make most Scottish readers wince with irritation. There is not a single Scottish character who is not portrayed as an ignorant dupe, an insensitive bore, or a sadistic thug. The Lion Is Rampant is certainly the most offensive book of the genre.
The most recent but probably not the last book in the genre is Frederick Lindsay’s Brond, which appeared in 1984. Like Scotch On The Rocks it was televised, on Channel 4, featuring Stratford Johns as the central character Brond, who is a British Intelligence agent. The narrator is a naive young student at Glasgow University and the Glasgow underworld is portrayed quite naturalistically in an otherwise rather elliptical and somewhat complex plot.
Brond was written by Lindsay as an “antidote” to Scotch On The Rocks. Lindsay was a committed SNP activist and wanted to counter the “Anglocentric and Unionist interpretation of Scottish political development where nationalists were depicted as violent thugs or duped individuals”. In this he was clearly successful, depicting a paludal world of suspect loyalties and interrogation which he had gleaned from actual reminiscences of nationalists and republicans in the city who had been suspected or interrogated about the actual events of “tartan terrorism”.
While Lindsay’s motives are clear, what of the motives of Hurd and Osmond ?
At the time their book was published, Hurd was Private Secretary to Edward Heath, leader of the opposition, and soon became Home Secretary (and now Foreign Secretary) in Government. While on one level it was simply an exciting political yarn, it was also a sharp attack on the SNP – which is not disguised or fictionalised at all in the novel. Indeed, reviewers of the book sought explicity to relate the novel to the real SNP and to find evidence of SNP links with mystical terrorists armies such as appear in the novel.
Conservative politicians – in, for example, the Dundee East By-Election in 1973 – used the novel as ammunition against the SNP – and quite soon journalists, politicians and other agencies had produced “evidence” of mythical “tartan terrorist” armies to back up their allegations.(This article first appeared in the Glasgow Herald, Weekender, Saturday 24 November 1990)
