Here’s a question for you: where in Scotland is the John Lennon Memorial Garden? We know that Paul McCartney has a farmstead on the Mull of Kintyre, where he and the local bagpipers often convene of an evening round a sack of organic parsnips, and we know also that Lennon is commemorated by the Imagine garden in New York’s Central Park. But where is its Caledonian equivalent? Most Beatle fans would struggle to tell you but it is, in fact, in Durness, Sutherland. The justification for this herbaceous tribute is that Lennon once spent a holiday in the area. He also crashed his car in Golspie in 1969, though this may have been a ploy to stop Yoko Ono talking.
Even so, the whole McLennon deal does seem somewhat rum. Generation upon generation of genuine Sutherlanders have lived and died and invented useful implements for harvesting mangle wurzels and the like yet few of them are commended to posterity by their own memorial garden, while Lennon snaffles one purely on the strength of a weekend mini-break.
It is very curious, this Scottish propensity for laying claim to the least likely of potential citizens, via a kind of enforced ethnic conscription. It reasserted itself this week in several ways; first in the revelation that one of the nation’s most iconic artworks was probably painted by a Frenchman, second by the publication of a list of the greatest Scottish books of all time, a list which stretched the definition of “Scottish” books to include Ukrainians writing about the Belgian Congo, Englishmen writing about Eurasia and, most comically of all, the scribes of the Old and New Testaments, few of whom, so far as we know, ever experienced the sting of summer rain on the Saltcoats seafront.
The first of these creative takes on national membership is what we could describe as an honest mistake. For more than 200 years, The Rev Walker Skating on Duddingston Loch was assumed to be the work of Sir Henry Raeburn, a pupil of Joshua Reynolds. That was until Stephen Lloyd, a senior curator at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, noticed the skating painting was of dimensions in which Raeburn never painted and attributed the work to Henri-Pierre Danloux, a French court artist who scarpered to Edinburgh during the revolution.
Because the painting was of sufficient importance Scottishly to have its central motif incorporated into the design of the windows in the Scottish parliament, and to feature on the presiding officer George Reid’s Christmas cards last year, reaction to the claim was swift and decisive. “I think it’s absolute rubbish,” said Jamie Stone, the Liberal Democrat MSP “Even the background — the famous, wonderful, wintry light — is definitely Sir Henry Raeburn.” Insight like this into the finer points of artistic technique and the ethnic provenance of light settle the matter, we can all agree.
But the 100 Best Scottish Books of All Time are more troublesome, taking in among the nominations Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell and the King James Bible.
“The question of how to define Scottish is always contentious,” writes the list’s chairman, Professor Willie Maley of Glasgow University. “Our Scotland is a big country and we have opted for as inclusive, elastic and open-minded an approach as possible. You don’t need a Scottish passport to enter.”
Conrad appears because his novella was first published in the Edinburgh periodical Blackwood’s. Orwell’s book (or at least some of it) was written on the island of Jura and appears in spite of Orwell’s loathing for all things Scottish (Bernard Crick’s biography notes of his relationship with Scottish acquaintances that Orwell “crossed the street rather than pass the Muirs, so strong was his irrational dislike of the Scots”.) Maley justifies its inclusion because the Scottish west coast would one day house nuclear submarines of the type Big Brother would have used, had they been invented at the time.
These rather pathetic but ingenious stabs at inclusion, however, are in a long, if not noble, tradition, stretching back to Bonnie Prince Charlie, a Hanoverian born in Rome and one-time commander of the French expeditionary forces, adopted as an honorary Scot by the Highland clans in their attempts to depose George II.
But it is in the celebrity age that ethnic conscription has come into its own, catalysed by the need to fill up native media outlets and prop up the project of nationalism. It is a curious fact that mid-20th- century show business was thick with names — Stan Laurel, David Niven, Sandy MacKendrick, Donald Cammell, David McCallum — whose Scottish connections remained unremarked in their heydays while, now, even the most speculatively linked are lauded as true-born sons or daughters of Scotia, as in the case of the singer Miss Dynamite, whose triumph at the Brit Awards several years ago was garlanded with the happy news that her grandmother hailed from the Hebrides.
The process probably began in the early 1970s with Rod Stewart, London-born but bent on honouring his Glaswegian father by turning up at Hampden Park with Britt Ekland whenever he could. Stewart, however, is untypical as a co-opted quasi-Scot in that it was his own idea to publicise his origins. Had he not done so, it would have taken 20 years before some self-appointed mole from the Ministry of Scottishness unearthed the information that would confirm Stewart’s status.
Now we’re in the age of photocopy Scots, with the links growing fainter with each new candidate. If owning half the country was enough to qualify JK Rowling as Scottish eight years ago, even though she was from Bristol, now it takes only a Scottish-born parent, as in the case of Keira Knightley, born in London and no more familiar with the topography of modern Bearsden than Bonnie Prince Charlie.
If a rock group was considered Scottish 30 years ago because it consisted of tattooed brickies from the Gorbals, now it takes only one expat member, as in The Darkness and their bass player Frankie Poullain. Gordon Ramsay, meanwhile, is the Loch Ness monster of ethnic conscription, his Scottishness confirmed only by a grainy snap of him in a Rangers strip.
Perhaps, though, we shouldn’t be too critical of these desperate attempts to swaddle the interesting and the glamorous in plaid, or to be wilfully vague about the provenance of old paintings. Look at who we’re lumped with among the indubitably Scottish: George Galloway, Rosie Kane and the Krankies.
Who, then, could blame us for running into the street, grabbing the first foreigner to pass by and going all genealogical on them? A more charitable explanation, though, is from the philosopher Roger Scruton: “Nations,” he wrote in England: An Elegy, “are, in Benedict Anderson’s illuminating phrase, ‘imagined communities’.” And imaginations don’t come more fertile than those of the Scots.
ARE YOU A SCOT?
1 You have opened a Highland teashop. What do you write on your sandwich board to attract custom?
A) Open All Hours — Please Come In!
B) This is a Teashop — We Have Tea
C) Open 11.38 to 12.59. No Coach Parties!
2 You are head of BBC Scotland news. What’s the top story on the news?
A) Moves to increase funding in the Scottish health service
B) New developments in
the Scottish parliament controversy
C) The skateboarding squirrel in Aberfeldy
3 You chance upon a TV programme hosted by Tam Cowan. What do you make of it?
A) How was such a heap of inarticulate, parochial nonsense ever allowed to be broadcast?
B) This is the dictionary definition of low-brow
C) This guy is so funny!
4 You drink your first glass of a fizzy orange liquid called Irn-Bru. How do your taste buds react?
A) Disgustingly sweet. What do they use this for?
B) Interesting. I wonder what it would taste like with ice cream in it?
C) Gies some more?
Answers: Mostly As — Relax, you don’t appear to be Scottish in the slightest. Mostly Bs — Despite some worrying hints of Scottishness, you generally seem to be a sensible and right-thinking member of the community. Mostly Cs — Congratulations, you’re as Scottish as they come . . .
