The best way to understand where Gordon Brown is coming from, is to know where
he comes from.
Tony Blair came from nowhere, or rather everywhere, depending on his audience:
a little London flavoured with Islington, a dash of Durham, a soupçon of
Scottishness when needed. Modern politicians, as chameleons, tend to eschew
specific geographical labels. David Cameron advertises his affection for the
countryside, but his own roots seem shallow.
Brown is different. No British leader of modern times has been associated so
closely with a single place. His every thought, his every action, according
to friends, is filtered through a strong sense of where he comes from:
Kirkcaldy, the long, grey, gritty town hunkered on the edge of the Firth of
Forth where Brown was raised from the age of 3, and where his father was
minister of the kirk. This is the place he represents in Parliament, as MP
for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath, and where he still has a home, to which he
returns with his family whenever he can.
The man who will become prime minister tomorrow often invokes his Scottish
origins in his speeches and writings. And Kirkcaldy, in turn, says much
about Brown, for this is a place with a very specific character: imbued with
great expectations and unrealised hopes, at once buoyed and burdened by its
own history, intensely respectable and highly educated, dour, pious and
tough.
Like Brown himself, Kirkcaldy is a bundle of contradictions. Once one of the
wealthiest towns in Scotland, three years ago it was declared the
third-poorest place in Britain. A mining town with a history of radicalism,
it has also proven a crucible of entrepreneurial capitalism. No town has
produced such a succession of famous self-made Scotsman.
This, then, is the town that made Gordon: hard-working, God-fearing, proud and
aspirant, with the glint of ambition in its eye, and a chip on its shoulder.
Alan Greenspan, former Chairman of the Federal Reserve, gave a speech here in
2005 at Brown’s invitation, on the subject of Adam Smith, author of The
Wealth of Nationsand Kirkcaldy’s most famous native son. Noting that one
small Scottish town had somehow produced both the father of modern economics
and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Greenspan observed that Kirkcaldy must
have some sort of “subliminal, intellect-enhancing emanations . . . there
must be something in the soil”. On a recent visit to Kirkcaldy, the rain
whipped off the Forth, and the lunchtime clientele at the Tuck Inn huddled
over their pints. We could be in any Scottish port that has seen better
days, yet the people who live here maintain that there is something
different about Kirkcaldy.
“This is a town that doesn’t shout about itself, but it works hard and plays
hard,” says Alan Crow, editor of The Fife Free Press.“It’s down to
earth, but here people put great store by improving yourself, getting ahead,
getting a start in life.”
The centre of this little town is littered with memorials to the great and
good that it has spawned. Here is a plaque commemorating the day that Andrew
Carnegie, the great Scottish-born capitalist, opened the Adam Smith Halls.
In the park opposite is a plaque to Sandford Fleming, another Kirkcaldy
native, who built the Canadian Pacific Railway and invented Standard Time. A
few yards away is the museum gifted by John Nairn, Kirkcaldy’s “linoleum
king”, inside which is celebrated yet another scion of the town, Robert
Adam, the great 18th-century architect.
The architecture of the old town itself – solid Victorian bourgeois – speaks
of sober self-importance, while the graveyard of St Bryce Kirk (one of the
town’s 13 churches) gives some measure of the weight of civic and moral
responsibility imbued by this stolid town. “Distinguished not only for his
talents and acquirements but also for his benevolence and piety”; “He lived
the life and died the death of the righteous”.
In its Victorian heyday, Kirkcaldy was seriously rich, trading in jute, flax,
textiles and linoleum, while the fishing and coal-mining industries boomed.
The town once had its own Latvian consulate, reflecting the importance of
the Baltic and Scandinavian trade. The vast linoleum factory, now long
closed, once gave the town its own characteristic odour, which would be
smelt miles down the coast – the raw stench of money.
The future prime minister was growing up when Kirkcaldy’s mining and
manufacturing industries collapsed. When barely out of his teens, the
precocious student was already writing of the problems that he was
witnessing, the “unacceptable levels of unemployment, chronic inequalities
of wealth and power”. Later he reflected: “As a child growing up in a
minister’s family, you get to see all the hardships . . . Lots of people
come knocking on the door.”
It is easy to imagine Brown, the intellectually hothoused son of the minister,
making his way to school from the manse on Fergus Street, a large building
of granite at the top of the town.
He would have passed the tributes to Kirkcaldy’s great capitalists: the proof
of its former wealth, and the evidence of its contemporary decay.
At 16, Brown was already writing of his “commitment to creating a Socialist
society”, yet he showed a certain money-making instinct himself as a
schoolboy by making and selling his own newspaper. The two elements of
leftist radicalism and capitalism (or “enterprise”, as he prefers) continue
to coexist, a little uneasily, within the Brown ideology.
As the “son of the manse”, the young Brown would have carried not only the
burden of high expectations, but a sense of moral responsibility, as he
frankly acknowledges: “I learnt from my mother and father that for every
opportunity there was an obligation, for every demand a duty, for every
chance given, a contribution to be made.”
He was expected to excel at everything: schoolwork, but also sports, the
violin in the school orchestra, and even politics. At 8, he was already
listening on the radio to news of Hugh Gaitskill’s defeat.
In the town of Brown’s childhood there was little room for misbehaviour. Some
contemporaries remember a boy still hard at work on his books on a Friday
night. The family did not obtain a television until 1960. When asked
recently to recall any schoolboy pranks, he said: “Some of my friends, I
don’t know why, but they did send an undertaker to the house of the head
history teacher . . . it caused all sorts of ructions.” These were Gordon’s
“friends”, note, but not Gordon himself. Macavity wasn’t there.
Politicians with a sense of place react in different ways to their origins. As
“The Boy from Hope”, Bill Clinton used his deprived childhood in Hope,
Arkansas, to prove how far he had come. John Major did the same with his
Brixton roots. But Major had left Brixton far behind by the time he became
Prime Minister, and Brixton was already changed beyond recognition.
Kirkcaldy, by contrast, has changed little since Brown’s childhood, and in
some ways he has never left. When Brown recalls his childhood on the Fife
coast, he does so with something close to reverence for the town and its
values. Michael Portillo (whose mother was from Kirkcaldy) once wrote that
Brown’s autobiography should be entitled “Kirkcaldy Made Me”, so much is
this dour, determined man a reflection of his home town.
When Brown enters No 10, he will be taking a small and distinctive corner of
Scotland with him, a place where God made the rules, the able flourished and
the chosen few had greatness thrust upon them.
Local heroes
Adam Smith (1723–1790), author of The Wealth of Nations and
founder of modern economics
Sandford Fleming (1827-1915) engineer and the “Demarcator of Standard
Time”
Robert Adam (1728-1792), Neo-Classical architect, interior designer,
furniture designer
Marjorie Fleming (“Pet Marjorie”) (1803-1811) child author
David Steel (1938- ) Leader of the Liberal Party, 1976–1988, and peer
of the realm
Jocky Wilson (1950- ) former darts champion
Ian Rankin (1960- ) novelist
Guy Berryman (1978- ) Coldplay bassist
Bertha Wilson (1923-2007), the first female judge of the Supreme Court
of Canada and the Court of Appeal for Ontario
