Memories of the 20th Century

This article appeared in one of the Scottish newspapers on Hogmanay 1999. It struck a chord with members of the group, and we copied it. All we know is that the author was named Ian Bell. If he reads this, please get in touch so that you can be credited properly.

By now you are a name only, barely that; just moss-grown characters cut on a slab over a hard-earned hole in one of those Victorian plots they forgot to sell off for executive homes. No-one remembers much. Your grandchildren's children have a few bleached photographs, the ones in the old biscuit box, the ones with the people in the funny clothes who seem to whisper wordlessly. Otherwise there is a copperplate sentence or three, worse than amnesia, in the public records office. Otherwise there is the reliable, slantwise, January rain on difficult territory northwards of Europe.

When your mother bore you, one child too many, in a tenement kitchen or a farmtoun boxbed, with a widow woman's guidance or her own mother's coaxing, the future was another country. Much was expected. As January began that year, General Roberts, the new commander-in-chief of Britain's armies in the war with the Boers, was en route for South Africa. The maps were blotted still with a tepid pink but relations with Germany were said to be tense. Few knew much about that.

On the first day of January, on the day you were born, Celtic defeated Rangers by three goals to two. Elsewhere, a quantum theory was being elaborated, uranium was being separated and the Browning revolver, instrument of imperial policy, was being invented. The first year of the last century of Christianity's second millennium was a riot, suddenly, of new things, not least - and this would make you a new kind of human being - man's ability to preserve the sight and sounds of his own image and speech. Deeds were photographed, the ghosts of voices captured. This was to be the century no-one could forget.

So in 1900 one RA Fessenden first discovered how to transmit speech by wireless. He could have said (though he did not) that ancient Minoan culture was being uncovered, that a Doctor Freud had just published The Interpretation of Dreams, that Monet was painting water-lilies, that Mahler's Fourth and Puccini's Tosca were ready to be heard, that Mr Charles Rennie Mackintosh, architect, had done something remarkable with Glasgow's School of Art. For your generation it mattered more, perhaps, that in February the British Labour Party would be founded with Ramsay MacDonald, the illegitimate son of a Lossiemouth servant, as its secretary.

This new century could feel very old. Of almost four and a half million Scots, one in every eight adults in employment worked the land or the seas. A like number were spinning and weaving (J&P Coats was the biggest employer in the country); 3.5 per cent were in domestic service; a working man was old at 50; TB and the diphtheria took children in their nameless thousands and every town of any size stank with slums and smoke. Yet almost a fifth of the planet's shipping tonnage was being raised on the Clyde; 20 per cent of Britain's Siemens steel - the ribs of those ships - was being made in Scotland. The coal that made the steel that made the ships came, as nature intended, from the thrawn faults and fissures of Scottish geology.

In the year you survived the lottery of birth some things were not hard to describe. Smart people were dancing the cake-walk; Joseph Conrad was publishing Lord Jim; Arthur Pearson was founding the Daily Express and a khaki election was granting Joe Chamberlain's Conservatives and Unionists a Commons majority of 134 (Labour two: Irish nationalists 82). In your country it was simple. In a labour force of 1.3 million, 150,000 were hewing coal, 100,000 were making metal, 75,000 were engineers and 50,000 built the great ships. The rest had the farms and the fishing, the life below stairs, or perhaps, for the lucky and the aspirant, the counting house.

North Britain, it could yet be called. In the true north, the herring were still followed by fishwives in their thousands. Edinburgh made print, paper and the occasional decision. Dundee was jute; the Borders cloth; the Lowlands coal. The Highlands, the Crofting Counties, were a remonstrance still, an emptiness literal and spiritual, telling their own story about the century Scotland had just left. The tale was to be echoed as the millennium's last century unfolded. When it began, Scotland had global economic importance; when it ended, Scotland had tourism and heritage culture.

But there was to be more to this life of yours than that, through two great wars in which Scotland gave disproportionately of its manhood, through your journey from the land or the slums to the new towns and the suburbs, through the death of great industries and the spread of mass education, public health and public housing. Not many still remember: when the century began 90 per cent of all Scottish homes, and some of them the worst in Europe, were in the hands of private landlords; 80 years later 70 per cent of dwellings in 50 local authority areas were council-owned. Some of those were the worst in Europe, too.

Eighty years on, after you had seen the first grandchild do the once-unthinkable and matriculate at a university - information technology, whatever that might have been - there was talk of a new country. The argument had been flitting in and out of consciousness for as long as you could remember. Labour had been for it once, then against, and then been converted to the idea all over again. Just after the Second War - '49, was it? - you had put your name, with two million others, to that big petition. Somewhere amid it all the Nationalists stopped being a joke, began to seem like a choice. But 30 years later there was a vote, a referendum, and a Labour idea was decreed to have failed.

Two decades after that, you watched the television - that mixed blessing on the world of another Scotsman - in the day room at the nursing home. They were still talking about a new Scotland. Edinburgh was flags and crowds and sunshine. Your century was ending with a parliament - what had the woman said? - reconvened. The Tories, scunnered, were putting on a brave face. Everyone else looked pleased enough. The feeling that been stealing stolen slowly over you for most of your days was suddenly public knowledge: the Britain you had been born into, the fact once beyond argument, was changed. Ended?

It had been a big thing, once, even when the fields of Flanders and France were making the lists of names for monuments in every town and village in the country, even through the Irish Rising, the General Strike, even when the Highland Division, your youngest brother with it, was being broken defending Britannia's humiliated retreat to Dunkirk. Scotland had been British and Britain had been empire, for all that Singapore fell and India took down the flags. Scotland was British and Britain was empire even when the shipyards had begun to fail and you heard of one cousin in Vancouver, another in Adelaide. Scotland was British even in the years when Scots were taking flight to every corner of the globe.

Now, at the last, there in the picture-book colours of the big TV, was the Queen you first saw in '53, when half the street had crowded into one front room to watch her crowned. At the century's end, grave and gray, she was giving Scotland a parliament, in her fashion. It seemed she had no choice in the matter.

Choice had been one of the new things. Your mother had been allowed little of it when she died giving you life, when the doctor had exhausted his science and there had been no money to buy more. Your eldest sister had been given none when the great 'flu came in 1918. Your middle sister's sweetheart, the dark-haired boy, the great reader, had demanded his choice and found his reward at a place in Spain they called Jarama. There had been no choice about quitting the school at 14 - more than old enough, your father had said - nor about taking whatever work was going in the bad years of your thirties.

Look at the choices now, you would say. The grandchildren's children could choose to learn, choose to travel where they pleased, choose to live to twice the age and more your mother managed. In any corner shop they could choose foods from half a world away. They could choose things - cars, telephones, those video machines - that had seemed the stuff of fantasy only yesterday. The people arguing on the TV in the day room said they could even choose a new country.

It was a funny way to put the thing. You knew how some had made that decision. First the Jews, the Russians, the Italians, the Germans and Poles and Lithuanians. Then the people from the east, from China and India and Pakistan. All Scots now. Once the choice had been made, even when so many born in the country were packing up and moving on, it could not be revoked. It was not like picking your favourite colour. Scotland inhabited you, whatever decisions were being made in Edinburgh or London.

It was a thread, somehow. Who were the Scots in your century? Like most people, you only knew a few of the names, and only cared about a few of those, but books told the story. Dugald Baird, John Boyd Orr and Nora Wattie: people who made it harder for poverty to kill pregnant women or their malnourished children. John Logie Baird, who built the first TV station in the world. JM Barrie, with Peter Pan and the rest. John Buchan, the adventurer of empire, fictional and actual. William Burrell, shipowner, who gave the magnificence of the world's art to Glasgow. Matt Busby, who taught the English how to play football, and the Celtic team of 1967 who passed on the lesson to Europe.

The alphabet goes too slowly for the years. James Connolly, a Scotsman dying for Ireland in 1916 who left an idea about socialism, nationalism and internationalism. Jim Clark, who drove like the wind and beat the world. Sean Connery, the self-image of the hopeful Scottish male. Billy Connolly, who found the comedy in commonplace life and gave it a kind of defiant dignity. AJ Cronin: Doctor Finlay, or so we presumed. Perhaps even RB Cunninghame Graham, the great magnifico of nationalism.

If it mattered, the lists would tell you that not all the conceits of the nation in the 20th century were excuses in the face of adversity. Some of the clichés were true. The Scots did have a certain restless, practical knack for creation. By the time James Dewar died in 1923 everyone knew about the vacuum flask he invented, just as they knew about John Dunlop's (d. 1921) pneumatic tyre, Alexander Fleming's penicillin, John Grierson's documentaries, JJR. Macleod's insulin, Robert Watson-Watt's radar or John Reith's BBC.

There remained, beyond that, the things of passion, politics: football and art. In the 20th century Scottish literature re-invented itself, first in poetry, then in fiction. In Hugh MacDiarmid, Sorley Maclean and Edwin Muir the strands of language that made Scotland a nation found a new articulacy. The Glasgow Boys and the Glasgow Girls gave notice that the country wanted to paint again. In James Maxton, John Wheatley and John Maclean the socialist passion that would see the century end with Labour governing Scotland and the Tories - who had amassed over half the vote in the Fifties - a mere shadow.

Through it all a Scottish, not a British, football team persisted, as though in small, trivial token of something more. Often indifferent, sometimes inspiring, the sport made the connection between the working class and the larger nation. Busby, Shankly and Stein from the mining towns. The Wembley Wizards, Baxter and Law, the extraordinary spectacle and the running sore of the Old Firm. By the last decades it no longer mattered that people said football mattered too much. England were defeated in the last game of your century: your smile was wry.

Sometimes it had seemed, though, that everything mattered too much. In your lifetime men walked on the Moon; men also gassed millions or incinerated them with a nuclear process. Men in revolt brought Communism to Russia and China, fascism to Germany, Italy and Spain. Men invented artificial hearts and broke millions more in a thousand little wars.

Men found the secrets of DNA, flight, motor cars, hormones, the pituitary gland, sound and vision, the photo-electric cell, the transistor, the safety razor, relativity, neon signs, the conditioned reflex, genetic modification, the laser beam, X-rays, vitamins, chlorophyll, helicopters, jet propulsion, the sub-machine gun and the self-winding wrist watch. In the 20th century men were ceaseless in their labours, good or bad.

Most of the historians say that yours was not the best of times. One records that 23 per cent of those born in Scotland since 1911 have emigrated. Others draw the long, falling graph of industrial decline, despite the huge reservoirs of oil discovered off Scotland's shores in 1969, a decline mitigated only lately by new kinds of work in services or electronics. In the cities there are slums you would recognise still and a poverty real enough, if sometimes unfamiliar. The young still quit the countryside to find work. The pits, meanwhile, are gone; the last shipment of jute reached Dundee in 1998; and the Clyde is quiet.

When the century began 5 per cent of Scots could speak Gaelic. Today, despite the efforts of schools and media, less than 1.5 per cent have the language. The issue of land ownership is unresolved still, even if most of the old lairds have gone. The fishing fleet is sorely diminished; farmers struggle; the decline has been real and actual. For much of the century unemployment has been the familiar condition for a mass of Scots for decades at a time. Otherwise there was the experience of war and a ceaseless pondering, a kind of self-absorption amid the search for panaceas.

The churches withered; a planned economy failed; slum clearances created more slums; a National Health Service, transforming life expectancy, still left huge inequalities. From the 1920s onwards Scotland began to be a Labour country yet as the century ended Labour had ceased to be a labour party. The first Scottish National Development Council was formed as far back as 1930 yet 70 years later it was still a source of puzzlement that Scotland gave birth to fewer new companies than other countries. In 1927 the National Party of Scotland was founded yet by the century's end the nation was still not Nationalist.

The phases can be mapped: an industrial age ending in war, peace sliding towards economic depression; a second war ending amid emigration and an industrial base eroding with, by 1958, another slump; a welter of national plans, centralised schemes and development boards in the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies as, one by one, the old industries died. In the Eighties and beyond a constitutional conundrum: a government Scotland did not elect with policies Scotland did not want. The Scottish banks and insurance houses prospered but elsewhere growth was slow and faltering. Some native genius meanwhile lighted upon a poll tax.

You remember some of this dimly. Once upon a time a general strike; trains and mines nationalised; the Highlands and Islands Development Board; UCS and the right to work; the coming of oil; and that place you could never find on the map, Silicon Glen. A dour, difficult century in which the light glimmered fitfully.

Yet something happened in the culture, high and low, that began to change the politics. Neither you nor anyone else could say precisely what happened or when: perhaps a book here, a speech there, a rediscovery of the art and craft of historiography, an old Scottish awareness of the wider world amplified by all the new means of communication, perhaps political failure beyond our borders. In your century Britain lost its power bit by bit. Perhaps with each falling away from greatness the ties began to loosen a little more. Who knows? Things just seemed to happen.

This lifetime of yours also saw things preserved. Bigotry still sat beneath Scotland's skin like a livid bruise. The country retained its psychological divisions, north and south, east and west, island and mainland. The need to find a culprit for failure was still a habit ingrained. Education, that saving grace, was still valued. The football team still lost more often than not. Each year Hogmanay changed; each year Hogmanay stayed the same.

You had few enough of those left on 11 September, 1997. They gave you a postal vote, what with the eyes and the bad leg. You had seen simple questions made complicated before, had lived long enough in this Scotland to see how things tended. The Scots who had not been able to say Yes once were expected to step from one century to the next by saying Yes twice. In the nature of things, it was none of your business; the grandchildren's children, if they did not end up in London, Boston or Rome, would have to deal with what a new century brought.

That, it occurred to you, might have been the idea. Some things you could not bargain for: wars came; the weather was beyond your control; sometimes there was no luck to be found. But within every question asked of Scotland in your 20th century, on the journey from a lucky birth to an improbable old age, were the questions Scotland had never asked of itself. Perhaps that had been the secret story. When the questions came even the imagined Scot, the fictitious article in a country forever hunting identities, could say Yes, and twice for luck.

A poem you never heard said once that it was "a long road back to this undeclared republic". One hundred years long, indeed, and with a distance yet to go.

© Ian Bell, 1999

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