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Dour Ministers and Men in Skirts
Myths and Stereotypes
of PostWar Scotland
A nation is "a group of people united by a mistaken view
about the past and a hatred of their neighbours."
(Karl Deutsch, "Nationalism and its Alternatives")
Stereotypes and Myths
Culture, Society and Nation
A Nation without a State?
This section deals with the stereotypes and modern “myths” that surround Scottish national identity (both as
selfrepresentation and in the ideas of others) under these circumstances. Scotland is a small country perched on the
edge of Europe and without the wider association with Britain, it would hardly fail to register on a scale of powerful
nations. Beside such large countries as Germany and France, Scotland is roughly the size of historical Brittany or
contemporary Denmark and is not far from the status of the Baltic states of Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania.
It will not be surprising, as a result, that many of things that are discussed in the following pages might seem
familiar to Scots but will seem distant – and even vaguely unappealing, like a rain sodden holiday (“a perpetual Sunday”
was Sartre's verdict following a holiday in Scotland) – for many outside of the country. This being said, Scotland is
remarkable for the extent to which it does have “ brand” in a way that countries such as Latvia or Estonia do not (few, I
think, would actually be able to situate these countries on a map, let alone distinguish one from the other).
Yet, the problem with the powerful image that Scotland had generated of itself – or had generated for it – is tht
it is seen by many Scots as being nothing but a caricature. Stereotypes function in the same manner as caricatures. A
caricature works by exaggerating certain traits that are nevertheless easily recognisable. The exaggeration distorts
something that is nevertheless present, whether it be physical characteristics, a set of mannerisms or affectations. The
goal can be to strengthen a positive sense of the person or object being caricatured (John Bull as an honest English
yeoman in the face of continental totalitarian regimes, for instance), to humiliate, mock and satirise but it can also
involve something more humorous and hence not necessarily insulting.
Against this background, approaches to the question of what it is that constitute national culture often suppose
a state and with it a largely unexamined identification of the state with the nation and the nation with society. Michael
Billig, who will shortly be discussed in more detail, writes: “the 'society' which lies at the heart of sociology's self
definition is created in the image of the nationstate.” (Banal Nationalism, 1995, page 53). This is another remarkable
thing about the Scottish stereotype. Not only is it an internationally recognised stereotype of a small nation, it is a
stereotype of a nation that for much of its history has been absorbed into a larger state. Comparison with Flanders is
instructive in this respect. Flanders – a region of 6 million with its langauge – all but disappears from the radar in terms
of the perception of its existence from an international perspective.
Benedict Anderson, for his part suggests that the nation also suggests that the nation is an “imagined
community” and that it comes into being in relation to print (we imagine the naation in the same way as we might
imagine a community with which we identify in fiction). As a result, to begin with stereotypes is to begin with popular
forms of representation as these are included in and often form the essential content of consideration of national
identity. This involves a sense of a body of written texts that constitute the secular texts of national identity. What if the
nation was less a matter of social contract theory – the political philosophy that emerged as the justification for a new
types of contractual relation between the monarch and the people, the executive and those that they ruled over – but
rather a matter of a taken for granted culture constructed through novels and other myths, including “historical myths”?
As such, what function does the literary construction of the nation – as an effect of print culture – fulfil and
what explains the fact that it is sustained by events in the distant past, in Scotland's case by the Wars of Independence in
the early fourteenth century. Is it not the case that this history – which previously had been used to distinguish the
caricature from the reality – is itself a myth of sorts, as much a construct as the Loch Ness monster and men in kilts?
To the extent that the nation is an “imagined community” formed in relation to the dissemination of mass
culture after printing – in the now much quoted analysis associated with Benedict Anderson – the examination of
ordinary popular culture offers a fertile introduction to what it is that constitutes Scottish national identity.
Perhaps the most read book about nationalism. Anderson adheres to the modernization
argument explaining the origin of nations. In other words, nations developed as a necessary
component of industrial society, though neither "economic interest, Liberalism, nor
Enlightenment could, or did, create in themselves the kind, or shape, or imagined
community" (65). Breaking from Gellner (the Nations and Nationalism appeared in the
same year (1983) as the first edition of Imagined Communities), Anderson places greater
emphasis on the constructed nature of culture and on the role of print capitalism to the
development of nations. On the cultural front, Anderson argues that prenational culture
was religious culture. Nations replaced this religious culture with their own uniquely
constructed national cultures. Anderson places print capitalism at the very heart of his
theory, claiming that it was print capitalism which allowed for the development of these
new national cultures and created the specific formations which the new nations would
eventually take. [E. Zuelow]
David Kenley sums up Anderson's conception of nationalism neatly in his History and Nationalism: The Imagined
Community in the Twentieth Century:
In the past twenty years, the most influential individual in the study of nationalism has been Benedict Anderson.
Anderson argues that the nation is a relatively recent historical phenomenon. Owing to the expansion of print
capitalism in the Americas and Europe, he claims, individuals with diverse class, ethnic, and educational
backgrounds began reading common narratives in newspapers and other printed materials. As a result, these
materials helped create a community of linguistically related readers, each member of which imagined him or
herself part of a larger print culture. This imagined community then became the basis of the modern nation. In
other words, the nation is not simply a bordered, contiguous geographic area but is an entity created in the minds
of thousands and millions of reading individuals. Not surprisingly, the “boundaries” of the nation will change
over time as elites and subelites compete to rewrite the dominant narratives in the media.
(http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?
q=cache:e3OM6bYUuhcJ:www.etown.edu/docs/History/Historyand%2520NationalismD.
%2520Kenley.doc+ationalisms:+The+Nation
State+and+Nationalism+in+the+Twentieth+Century&cd=1&hl=fr&ct=clnk&gl=be&client=firefoxa
What “print capitalism” did from the sixteenth century onwards (and, hence, well before the rise of a postHerderian
conception of “nationalism” in the nineteenth century) is today still being undertaken by the mass media: the radio,
cinema and television. Hence the interest in stereotypes and mass culture as the point of departure for this essay.
Billig's conception of “banal nationalism” is to be understood, in this sense, in opposition to what might be
called assertive nationalism, something usually associated with the far right. Banal nationalism is the construction of
ordinary forms of identity that have a national character, something that is often referred to as “patriotism” rather than
chauvinism, for instance. For Billig, there is a relation between the banal and the extreme forms of nationalism; the
emphasis on nationalism as xenophobia obscures the pervasive and potent nature of the “banal” or ordinary or everyday
variety of nationalism.
Indeed, he suggests that the fact that it is not stigmatised but assumed to be the very stuff of community and
social interaction renders it all the more powerful as an ideological reflex:
"... there is something misleading about this accepted use of the word ‘nationalism’. It always seems to locate
nationalism on the periphery. Separatists are often to be found in the outer regions of states; the extremists lurk
on the margins of political life in established democracies, usually shunned by the sensible politicians of the
centre. The guerilla figures, seeking to establish their new homelands, operate in conditions where existing
structures of state have collapsed, typically at a distance from the established centres of the West. (…) All these
factors combine to make nationalism not merely an exotic force, but a peripheral one. In consequence, those in
established nations – at the centre of things – are led to see nationalism as the property of others, not of ‘us’.
This also holds true historically: the emergence of the English and Dutch nationstates (in opposition to the Spanish
Hapsburgs, in particular) precedes by a good two centuries the rise of nineteenth century nationalism elsewhere in
Europe (this time in direct opposition to Napoleon). Scotland followed in the wake of England (the key marker in this
respect being a Protestantism that still holds a central place in Scottish national identity – as sectarian football
allegiances suggest).
For those in settled nations where the national culture has become a simple reflex, banal nationalism is a form
of national solidarity that, like Anderson's “imagined communities” is constructed, giving rise to a spontaneous sense of
identity between people of the same nation (as this influences other groupings around class, gender and ethnicity and
tends, moreover, to subordinate these groupings to this higher sense of identity). As such we are constantly reminded of
our nationality – the flag hanging on the public building – so that it becomes something that is interwoven into our daily
experience in an all but subliminal manner rather than brandished in our faces.
Sport, flag waving, popular songs, symbols, national currency, patriotic forms of dress all give rise to a sense
of belonging, it would seem, to the same community. This applies also to regionalnational accents within wider
language groupings (the French, the Frenchspeaking Swiss and the Walloons) and clubs dedicated to characteristically
national forms of behaviour supposedly enrooted in ancestral tradition (but, in fact, hopelessly syncretic and artificial in
their identities): the Caledonian Society in Scotland or Burns Supper Nights. Such things even involve the weather
report and the fact that, for instance, this is limited to the national borders (in the Iberian peninsula, some Spanish
television stations actually lop the Portuguese out of the picture as if, somehow, the vagaries of the climate were best
described in line with national history). The Euronews television station, by contrast gives European weather reports.
Our identities, as a result, are seen as being constructed – and more often than not assumed willingly – within a
given national space, within a common language and set of religious affiliations. Indeed, as already suggested, if print
culture is the means of their dissemination, the key markers of nationality tend to be a national epic account of history
(and this is not the only way that history can be written), religion and a single, unified language. Like the rocks and the
lakes of the country's geography – a landscape we are encouraged to venerate – national identity comes to take on an
inevitable or immutable form. It is undoubtedly the case that ordinary culture and the construction of selfidentity – not
least in the continuity that is found between language, religion and nationality – is powerfully influenced by national
forms The nation becomes that space in which marriages are contracted, culture is transmitted and identities are forged.
In this respect, national culture is essentially and almost by definition, popular culture (the coronation of the
Queen in England is an event that generates intense popular interest). Tim Edensor argues:
“ I do not want to suggest that the traditionbound ceremonies and other cultural ingredients which most analysts
of national identity have concentrated on are now irrelevant, but that their power is now largely sustained by their
(re)distribution through popular culture, where they mingle with innumerable other iconic cultural elements
which signify the nation in multiple and contested ways. (Tim Edensor , National Identity, Popular Culture and
Everyday Life, O Berg, 2002, page 2)
A sociologist, Edensor would seem to be influenced by the different currents of symbolic interactionism (and the notion
of the “social construction of reality” dear to Berger) but also by “cultural studies” after Hoggart and Williams (see
separate section for discussion of the “empiricist” basis to this approach). The nation is not, as a result, a simply
abstract form, it is the point at which language, characteristically local belief systems and a sense of a common
historical destiny overlap and interpenetrate. No longer simply dependent on print, this sense of a common national
bond – defining an idealised community – is constantly renewed within diverse forms of the mass media.
The Generation of the Twenties
For me at least, the simple mention of the names Richard Hoggart, born in 1918, and Raymond Williams, born
in 1921, conjures up an image of Britain after the War. It involves a clearly generational perspective one that allies these
figures with a network of other “public intellectuals” – such as as Jonathan Miller– and a certain characteristically
English and generally Oxbridge left liberalism.
This is a world of expanding educational opportunities, of the grammar school boys that were able to accede to
the top universities for the first time; a world that is not quite yet that of decolonisation and flower power but rather of
grimy buildings, clanking buses; austerity and rationing (in which the later differences between the West and East of
Europe were not yet so flagrantly obvious); the escapism of the Hollywood entertainment industry, the first televisions;
postwar reconstruction and a optimistic faith in Keynesian economics and technological modernisation.
In working on the national stereotypes that are most readily associated with Scotland, a distinction imposed
itself between contemporary endeavours that can be classed in the category of typically Scottish culture today and the
older, now more manifestly dated, forms of that representation. In writing about popular dance music in Scotland, there
was a temptation to pursue this description up to the present, for instance. There are high degrees of continuity between
traditionally conceived notions of popular entertainment and those that are current today.
However, it is the sense of the way in which certain forms of representation fall away, come to appear as being
that of another generation, another time that is most interesting in the description of myths and stereotypes. In this
respect, the following introduction is an exercise in history – one that begins with the short duration of generational
change– as this supposes a simple passage from one period of twentyfive to thirty years to another (from 1945 to 1975).
It is one in which the overarching dominance of American postWar culture casts a very long shadow. For the British at
least and not least the Scottish, this influence is a matter of ambivalence, of an attempt to define a separate existence in
relation to the successes of the Americans but also, quite clearly, it also entails a high degree of mimitism and
admiration.
In this context, a number of emblematic figures – both fictional and real – have tended to emerge with real
people rubbing shoulders with fictional creations in the pantheon of notable Scots. If this “synthetic” perspective deals
with the present, the emblematic figures that it describes are a generation born, for the most part, between 1920 and
1950 (although some of the influences that they experienced as the productions of an earlier generation coming to
maturity at about the end of the Second World War have also been included).
Some of these figures (such as Sean Connery) are known internationally, many of them are known across
Britain (for example, such figures such as Bill Shanklyn) and many others are more obscure, being a part of a more local
and purely Scottish environment. Jimmy Boyle, for instance, is a part of Scottish folklore and most people in Scotland
will have heard his name whilst few in England, let alone Europe, will know who he is or care.
If this generation has a particular relation to Scotland, Britain and Europe (and beyond to the world of the Cold
War) – as this enables us to examine the extent to which Scottish national culture has changed – their sense of
Scottishness is clearly deeply informed by the polarising effect of the war itself as this tended to reinforce ideas of
Britishness in the common struggle against Nazizm.
For the postWar generation that is the main object of this discussion, this nationalism is largely irrelevant (as
the derisory electoral scores of the nationalists until the seventies reveal). However, there is clearly a strong sense of
there being a distinctive Scottish identity, something stronger than a merely regional identity. In discussing the images,
clichés, mythemes or stereotypes that go towards the postWar conception of the Scottish national identity, the method
that has been adopted here is to concentrate not on the experience of Scots – an inchoate mass of sense impressions –
but rather on the manner in which an image of Scotland is created by the culture industry.
Topographical and Historical Approaches
The Artificially Epic Nature of Scottish Clichés
In discussing these mass produced images – the original sense of stereotype is that of an image that can be
reproduced or reiterated in exactly the same form an indefinite amount of times – a simple methodological procedure of
binary division has been adopted. This involves dividing the country into two axes of north and south, east and west,
urban and rural, working class and middle class. This allows for a relatively complete description of the main myths
that inform outsider's visions of Scotland (but also Scots images of themselves).
David McCrone attributes the central image that others hold of Scotland as arising as a result of the union of
1707 after which point, McCrone suggests Scotland surrendered its political sovereignty and was left with an excess of
extraeous “culture” in its place. This leads to a feeling of Scotland's having taken refuge in the “”emotional trappings of
the Scottish past,” he suggests, quoting Marinell Ash, in The Strange Death of Scottish History. This, however, is as
much a cliché – in sociological analysts speaking of Scotland – as the stereotypes that they seek to dissipate. It is
impossible to read a student dissertation that does not begin with the ritual evocation of this artificial history to which a
real politics capable of forging another history is opposed as a constantly frustrated possibility. The “epic” history of a
glorious past is opposed to a less than glorious present.
In this respect, “epic” involves a particular view of time: it refers to events that have been abstracted from the
movement of generations and historical change to produce a rigid, unchanging or immemorial point of reference around
which origins are constructed. It is actually a highly generalised feature, paradoxically enough, of modernity. It is a
technique that is found, for instance, in Freud. In Freud we are what we are in relation to the Greek myth of Oedipus.
This invariable structure based in the family – as it is validated by anthropological research concerned with the
transition from the animal to the human world – is given outside of time and incessantly repeated from one generation to
the next.
Highlandism and tartanty represents a somewhat equivalent return to an epic history albeit one that takes a sort
of popular, degraded form. For sociologists, it is one that, whilst significant in the construction of identity, is also
understood, by and large, as an artificial system of references constructed, many Scots will no doubt be dismayed to
learn, from within a remarkably conservative tradition. It is a defence of the pastoral against the urban, of traditional,
organic relations between farm owner and farm hand (and behind this of aristocrat and serf) and it supposes a deep
sense of continuity between the land and social forms as this invests social relations with an all but organic form. In the
generation that interests us, the films of Michael Powell or the novels of Compton MacKenzie play a particularly
revealing role in this respect.
Something of the problem for Scottish national identity is also to be found here. It is at that point at which
cultural traditions are superseded – often as a result of the growing influence of English or, more recently, American
mass culture – that chips or splinters of what had been more dynamic and socially relevant, indigenous culture are
broken off and preserved, much as if they were museum pieces or treasured shards of an ancestral past. The effect is a
little like the curse in the mythical village of Brigadoon (see below). The village is condemned it to remain forever the
same as a fossilised remain of what once had been.
McCrone writes (employing, as does Tim Edensor mentioned above, a central reference to Williams) :
“The purpose of this chapter is to set out the ways in which dominant discourses about Scotland have handled it,
not to establish what Scottish culture ‘is’. The cultural sociologist Raymond Williams spoke of ‘cultural
formations’ as ‘effective movements and tendencies, in intellectual and artistic life, which have significant and
sometimes decisive influence on the active development of a culture, and which have a variable and often oblique
relation to formal institutions’ (1977, page 117). Such cultural formations help to set the framework within which
matters are discussed. We might group discussion about Scottish culture into the following broad formations:
tartanry and the ‘Kailyard’. (McCrone, page 131)
This sense of fragments being knocked off a more dynamic culture and preserved as emblematic is a picture that
emerges time and time again. As will be argued, the main difficulty here – a sign of laziness rather than anything else
– is to assume that there are only two myths that govern national existence, those of tartanry and kailyard. Given that
these two mythemes belong to the rural world, the implication this time would seem to be that the nation is best defined
in relation to the urban world (and hence to the dominant forces of a bourgeoisie and their correlate, the proletariat).
Nevertheless, even at this restricted level, mythologising of the past would seem also to have a real function.
The final defeat – in what was a slow and no doubt inevitable demise – of the Jacobites at Cullodon (as this involved the
London government's banning of the wearing of tartan) brought with it the parallel revival of tartan in the British army,
now a symbol of a Highland warrior fighting for a Hanoverian King and a Whig country across a far flung empire.
Highlanders – in the national dress that was now designed for them by the military bureaucracy – now had a role to play
in the Empire.
The kitsch, kailyard sentimentality of the late nineteenth century supposes a close association between tartanry
and the values of the backwards looking close knit rural community in which whisky oiled celebrations confirm, in the
end, the values of provincial solidarity. Yet, the sentimentalised representation of this culture in the mass media arises
at a time when the local, village entertainment that it represented – and as this was already preserved as a
commercialised stereotype in music hall – came under assault from more American forms of dance culture and
electronic music.
Once rock and roll became the music of the young, the accordion and the violin at the centre of traditional
dance music could only ever be the music of the old (today preserved, like kilt wearing, for marriages). Scots became
hopelessly nostalgic, tied to an old world and not to the new. Even the image of the drink besotted Glaswegian Scot, a
course unemployed waster – Rab C. Nesbit – would seem to emerge at the point at which Glasgow as refashioned an
identity for itself as a modern, dynamic city of culture. The image this time is of a backward Scotland, one that survives
only to the extent that the state subsides its indolence.
“Brand Scotland” would thus seem to be the result of the display of a number of fossilised remains, a museum
in which aspects of national culture that no longer have much relevance to anyone in particular in the present are
preserved in aspic and displayed on high days and holidays. Once these museum pieces have been created – not unlike
the English royal family – they become convenient shorthand for summing up a culture and they can be extremely
difficult to shake off. Such clichés represent the indigenous culture to the external world and hopelessly artificial
though the whole process might be, the Queen, red telephone boxes and the Beefeaters represent brand England to the
external world as surely as Highland warriors and tartan represent Scotland.
As will be seen, however, Scottish stereotypes or caricatures extend well beyond this limited horizon. The
tartan and Braveheart image of Scotland is not the only stereotype that artists, intellectuals and commentators have
available to them any more than the kailyard school is relevant to intellectuals working in the highly urbanised central
belt of Scotland. Other pictures contribute to the nature of the Scottish identity, including images of urban decay,
political struggle (usually on the left) and the Glasgow hard man.
The Braveheart model of nationality might thus be contrasted with that other image of urban decay and
unemployment (perhaps as an all but delirious compensatory mechanism). Frankie Boyle is a contemporary Glasgow
comic whose success depends to some considerable extent on on his jaundiced vision of a Scotland made up of
stereotypical drunken, deprived, urban Scots (tartanry and Highlandism being quite foreign to him as a Glaswegian).
Boyle suggests that Braveheart as quintessentially Scottish, might at first have seemed implausible, given that it was the
creation of the Australian Mel Gibson. However, if we look at the way Gibson has now developed an image as a
“drunken racist”, perhaps he was better suited to set himself up as an ambassador for authentic Scottish values than was
at first thought.
Topographically and Synchronically,
This initial section seeks to supply a relatively comprehensive description of the myths and stereotypes around
which Scottish national identity has been constructed – from within and outside of Scotland – and to consider to what
extent Scottish national identity is, in the end, the result of such mythmaking. As such, stereotypes have been
considered topographically and historically. Against this background, Scottish culture can be broken down into such
variables as lower and upper class, regional and urban sections of the population (there is often a distinct national
stereotype of the educated and urban population, on the one hand, and the more uneducated, working class or regional
population, on the other hand).
If it is true that these divisions give rise to different “mythologies,” the divisions between north and south and
east and west are not merely abstract categories but reflect real geographical and cultural differences between the
Highlands and the Lowlands, on the one hand, and division within the “central belt” (the two fertile valleys of the Firth
and the Clyde as this represents, by far and away, the largest population density in the country), on the other hand. The
northsouth divide, represents a division between urban and rural populations, the east and west division is a division
within the urban environment. A little artificially, admittedly, the class division has been considered in terms of the
difference between Edinburgh and Glasgow, something that reflects stereotype to the effect that Edinburgh is more
middle class and Glasgow more typically working class .
a) the north and the south, the Highlands and the Lowlands
~ the north, between the Lowlands and the Highlands as this entails a particular attitude to the Highlands, one
that has had a significant role to play in the construction of Scottish identity and which can be shown to have undergone
a dramatic shift in the terms of representation from the end of the eighteenth century onwards. The main movement has
been towards greater assimilation of a once hostile Highlands into the general category of the Scottish nation. Indeed, it
might be argued that this assimilation – as it gives rise to” tartanry” – has been one fundamental element in defining the
cultural distinctness of the Scottish as opposed to, say, the urban and industrial culture of northern England
This is surely one of the most interesting aspects of the Scottish identity: the way in which the Scots came to
identify themselves with what was formerly perceived as a section of the population beyond the pale of civilisation, the
way in which a culture formed in isolation from Latinate influence comes to be seen as representing the core nation in
the construction of a distinct cultural identity. It involves a shift, within the late eighteenth century and the early
nineteenth century, away from the identification of Scottish culture with the Enlightenment – to which Scottish
scientists, doctors, engineers and intellectuals made a really quite significant contribution – towards an “epic”
construction rooted in an ancestral past.
~ the south In so far as the Lowlands are concerned, Scotland might also be seen in terms of a further
distinction between the rural environment, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the respective cultures associated
with Edinburgh and Glasgow. The Lowlands, as opposed to the Highlands, includes a wider distinction between the
rural and the urban and cannot be reduced to the specific cultures of the urban environments of the central belt. It is in
this context, that “kailyard” arises as the expression of the characteristic values of the small, rural town or village
outside of the Gaelic speaking highlands (whose clichéd representation is termed “Brigadoon”).
In terms of the clichés and stereotypes that are generated from against this background, the main distinction on which
commentators universally agree is between kailyard and Brigadoon (as this represents a continuity within the rural as
opposed to the urban environments.
b) the west and east, Glasgow and Edinburgh. There is second a distinction to be made between west and east,
Glasgow and Edinburgh. Edinburgh is the political and administrative centre whilst Glasgow is the largest town, a port
and an industrial centre (as this spreads out in an urban sprawl along the “central belt”). It is within this distinction that
differences in class and the various representations of the upper and middle classes, on the one hand, and the working
classes will be considered.
The representation of gender with regard to Scottish culture will be considered in a separate section.
Ten Main Stereotypes
Most descriptions of Scotland describe only three of the main stereotypes detailed below. However,as
portrayed in the media, there are at least ten overlapping elements that go towards making up the Scottish national
identity. This section deals with the persistence of the ten stereotypes in Scotland today as this can be understood
“synchronically”. In so far as this first section is concerned, this has also been further divided into two main sections.
The first deals with the division between the north and the south of the country (and involves four elements).
The second deals with the west and the east of the country (and the distinctive cultures of Glasgow and Edinburgh, as
this entails five main elements). Geographical factors overlap with considerations of social class. The question of the
manner in which gender is represented in relation to the dominant mythologising will also be considered as the tenth
myth or stereotype. Because this does not have a particular geographical specificity it is considered separately as a
general trait (although the stereotype, it might be argued, is specifically Scottish. (Can you think of any notable Scottish
homosexuals? How about the English?)
~ The North and South Divide
a) Rob Roy and Balmoral. As already suggested, the first of the main stereotypes is “tartanry” as this involves
a highly romanticised vision of Highland culture (but one that has been generalised to signify “Scottishness” as such).
The films Braveheart and Rob Roy both produced in the middle of the nineties are representative, in this respect,
although Rob Roy is the better expression of Scott's original conception of Scottishness. Braveheart produced from an
Australian/ American background is actually an exception rather than the rule.
~ Central to this mythology, it will be argued, is Balmoral. Balmoral is the result of Scott's making
over of Scottishness to a sense of traditional, undying and unthinking loyalty to the British Crown, something that
involves a transfer of ancestral loyalty to the clan chief (as this formed a backbone of Jacobite resistance to the
conversion of Scotland's identity to imperatives dictated from a Whiggish London) to the figure of the Hanoverian
monarch.
b) From Harry Lauder to Billy Connoly. The second is the folk tradition as it descends via music hall before
ending up as a form of “tartanry” in the White Heather Club. Representative figures in this respect are a list of
performers ranging from Harry Lauder to Jimmy Shand, Andy Stewart and Jimmy Logan.
c) Dr. Finaly's Casebook and kailyard. Thirdly, the kailyard – or the so called “cabbage patch” vision of
Scottish identity – involves a sentimentalised vision of rural, village life (with a strong colouring of Calvinism). It is
the result of small, predominantly rural communities in which Presbyterian values continue to remain active. The
example that will be singled out as most representative is that of the television series Dr Finlay's Casebook although, in
literature, the leading figure in this movement was perhaps J.M. Barrie.
d) John Laurie and Private Frazer. The fourth is a stereotype that is easily recognised by both the English and
the Scottish and is that of the Calvinist miser and conveyor of doom laden predictions. Closely related to a certain
Gothic aspect to Scottish culture, this is a vision that derives from a superstitious rural hinterland with an over
investment in the apocalyptic and millennial aspects to Calvinism. John Laurie, an actor who plays a particularly
important role across the whole period as the “token Scot”, has made a speciality of this stereotype.
~ The East and West Divide
The last four “geographical” stereotypes are more urban and involve the difference between Glasgow and
Edinburgh.
~ The Broons.
~ Groundkeeper Willie in The Simpsons is now the most wellknown Scot in the world (even better
known, it would appear, than the “national treasure” Sean Connery. Groundkeeper Willie is not so much the
representative of one clichéd representative of Scotland as he is a composite of the different traditions with a high dose
of the cantankerous, Glasgow drunk. The caricature varies between this stereotype, on the one hand, and a more
Highland aspect to the character, inherited this time, it would seem, from an original caricature found on Canadian
television of a drunken, kilt wearing chef.
f) Urban decay and the Glasgow Drunk. Glasgow is often associated with urban decay, poverty, drunkenness
and unemployment. Attitudes to this aspect of Scottish culture range from distaste to a certain celebration of working
class, drink sodden bravura. Rab C. Nesbit will be taken as representative of this stereotype.
g) Clydesideism and Jimmy Boyle: an image of working class culture in Glasgow based in the violence of
gangland existence. Although undoubtedly common to all urban conglomerations, the combination of sectarian divides
and urban poverty in the middle of the twentieth century contributed to making this aspect to Scottish culture assuming
a particular prominance. The representative figure, in this respect, will be Jimmy Boyle.
i) Enlightenment Edinburgh: Hume and Adam Smith. The last of these three urban stereotypes covers the more
genteel culture of Edinburgh with its lawyers and urban professionals. Because the cultural pull of Edinburgh – and the
urbanised upper and upper middle classes as they move easily between Edinburgh, London and the Empire – is so great
and so central to the description of the national identity, a separate section has been devoted to Edinburgh from David
Hume to Sean Connery. Historically this extends to cover the Scottish Enlightenment – at a far remove from “tartanry”
– and a remarkable flourishing of scientists, doctors and engineers.
Another aspect to Scottish culture – that of the militant, bigoted and blinkered union militant (or “working class hero”
depending on perspective) – has been discussed in more detail in the section devoted to the historical rise and fall of
different myths.
~ Scotland as a land of rugged masculinity
j) Sean Connery as National Treasure. Finally, the last stereotype, one that does not have specific
geographical character but is found across the geographical divisions mentioned above is that of a powerful expression
of traditional masculine values as these are reflected in the epic of the Highland warrior – from Braveheart to Rob Roy
– but also in a certain image of the Scots middle class and the myth embodied, this time, by Sean Connnery as James
Bond (a myth that is supported by secondary, less internationally successful literature, such as the adventure novels of
John Buchan).
The main goal here, it would seem, is to set up an image of “authentic” masculinity as this involves the
founding of a family based in heather surrounded blooms of romantic love or in the willingness to risk life for the
British state in the face of an evil, global plan to introduce sinister cat stroking homosexuality at best to the rest of the
world by sophisticated military means. This suggests a clear alignment of the nation with ideals of family life to be
contrasted with the descent into sexual perversion that surrounds and menaces authentic Scottish existence passed on
through unequivocally patriarchal family values.
Summary of Main Stereotypes
In the light of the eight stereotypes mentioned above, a short overview of the main stereotypes gives a table of
the following sort:
Positive Negative
North and South Element of rural superstition alongside
the Calvinist apocalyptic (Private
Fraser in Dad's Army)
East Edinburgh: cultivated, enlightened, Generally wellperceived but
elegant, classical eighteenth century understood, from the point of view of
(Hume). (emerges with the the provinces, as being snobbish: same
construction of the New Town) stereotype as is applied to lawyers, for
instance
Pragmatic, socially useful professions,
(Alexander Fleming, Dunlop). Runs
into the Scottish “gentleman” (Bond
and Connery)
West Friendly, hospitable, helpful, salt of Glasgow: poverty stricken, violent,
the earth, lack of pretension (by dirty and illkept, nineteenth century
comparison with perceived English slums (Rab C. Nesbit). Uncouth, ill
snobbishness) educated (similar to the English chav
but with red hair), unhealthy
Similar tables could, undoubtedly, be established for other countries, yielding, it is to be expected, similar effects.