Scottish history on the margins

Curious Scotland: Tales from a Hidden History. George Rosie. Granta Books. [pounds sterling]14.99. xi +244 pages. ISBN 1-86207-533-6.

Not all George Rosie's 'tales' have been all that well hidden up till now. Some, like the good qualities of John Knox and the bad character of Bonnie Prince Charlie, are from the mainstream and not the margins of Scottish history. But Mr Rosie is a journalist, playwright, and author of TV documentaries, not an academic historian, and has an eye for such historical curiosities as the possible survival in Indonesia of direct descendants of Robert Burns. Yet most of his judgments, usually rather forcefully delivered, are soundly based and sometimes invoke such outstanding professional historians as the late Gordon Donaldson. They challenge prejudices, some in the populace and some in the media, rather than scholarship.

Mr Rosie enjoys playing the iconoclast. He is also sensible enough to know that a few well-argued assertions of old-fashioned orthodoxy help to bind into a reasonable book some of his explorations of the unusual, the unfairly overlooked, the bizarre, the opinionated, and the inconsequential. For the tale of 'the Glasgow Frankenstein'--an affair of galvanic-shock experiments on a murderer's corpse--is merely bizarre and the American essays on the Cherokee-Scot John Ross and on alleged Scottish links with the Ku Klux Klan are rather inconsequential. The best American piece is on how Scotch whisky still poured into the USA during Prohibition.

There are also some good essays, including an unsympathetic account of Daniel Defoe's activities in Scotland before the Union of 1707 which still recognises the versatile abilities of the author of Robinson Crusoe. The Anglo-Scot Allan Octavian Hume, a reforming Indian official who was the only European at the first meeting of the Indian National Congress, certainly deserves to be better known. So probably does the Government-sponsored research in 1951-52 into what an atomic bomb could have done to Glasgow, then perhaps the most densely-populated city in Europe. There is also a relatively dispassionate and objective account of the furore half a century ago over what may still be seen as either the theft or the informal return to Scotland by Glasgow students of the Stone of Destiny, then detained in Westminster Abbey. Finally there is an excellent account of the planners' folly-that-failed, despite initial support from some leaders of a right-wing city council, in trying to force a six-lane inner-ring road through Edinburgh. The account of the attempted environmental outrage is only slightly spoiled by suggestions that the after-taste of this scheme, the quintessence of 1960's brutalism, caused a major shift in Edinburgh's political loyalties. The Tory decline there was more delayed and less complete than elsewhere in Scotland.

Mr Rosie has also had the generosity to include some of the best (and mainly English) epigrams at the Scots' expense, including Sydney Smith's claim that it takes a surgical operation to get a joke into a Scotsman's understanding. But the better bits of the book cast some doubt on the validity of P.G. Wodehouses's claim that 'it is never difficult to distinguish between a Scot with a grievance and a ray of sunshine'. This is a book with both some hints of grievance and some rays of sunlight.

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