Spinning a Yarn: The Dubious History of Scottish Tartan ArtWorks Scotland

CHANTING AND SINGING

This is Hunting Stewart of Appin,

which was right in the middle of the main charge at Culloden.

They said, "charge",

and unfortunately they all got slaughtered.

They got stuck in the mud.

MUSIC

This is the story of a fabric that tells stories.

MUSIC

Unlike any other material in the world,

tartan tells tales,

tales you can't entirely trust.

The Sobieski Stuarts claimed they had the book

that showed exactly what each clan wore.

The fact it was made up,

the fact it was made up by two lads from Surrey

is just one of these wonderful paradoxes of Scottish culture.

CANNON BLASTS

The story of tartan is a story of Highland clans,

ousted monarchs, military valour, queens with their tartan fetish,

musical performers and outright frauds.

Tartan is so woven into the Scottish national story

that it's quite difficult to distinguish fact from semi fact

from outright fiction.

And in some ways, that's the glorious thing about tartan

because it doesn't really matter!

All countries seek to elaborate a national history

that has one foot in fiction and one foot in fact.

MUSIC

In a side gallery of Edinburgh's National Museum of Scotland,

hidden away, vanishingly small - blink and you'll miss it -

is the earliest surviving physical evidence

that Scots have always been in love with chequered things.

Found in 1934,

popularly known as, 'the Falkirk Tartan',

this piece of fabric has been firmly dated to the late third century AD.

But look closer.

The label says,

" Woollen cloth fragment with check pattern,"

and the reconstruction has a herringbone.

It looks decidedly tweedy.

What we think of as tartan is really very simple indeed.

It's an ordinary woven cloth.

Threads of different coloured wool combined in a pattern that repeats,

known as a "sett" or "thread count",

producing squares and lines of different sizes

and contrasting colours.

The possibilities are literally infinite.

This is Elliot tartan.

This is Lamont tartan.

If you look back in history, tartan is very definitely a Celtic art form.

Very many descriptions, in Roman times, of tartan.

They didn't use the word 'tartan',

but they would explain it in different ways,

'speckled', 'variegated', 'this way and that'.

The difference in those times and until relatively recently,

is that tartan didn't actually mean anything.

Tartan, many, many years ago,

would have been a tartan which was more to do

with the district or the region

that the family perhaps lived.

And that's because

they were only able to get colours from local plants,

And they'd be woven by a local tradesperson, a weaver,

on an old loom of some description.

So, they would just be colours that were really to do with the region,

and you'd probably find that lots of families

might have worn similar colours.

MUSIC

Ancient tartans had nothing to do with clans.

They were loosely associated with Highland regions

and a Highland lifestyle that Lowlanders -

whose choice of fabric was limited

to the simple shepherd check or Lowland drabs -

tended to be rude about.

MUSIC

Highlanders were seen as primitive, lawless,

Gaelic-speaking cattle rustlers.

They wore their tartans as a single piece of cloth - the braecanfaile,

or great kilt - belted at the waist, and pinned over the shoulder.

When tartan finally acquired the power of speech,

the language it spoke was politics.

It expressed your support for a Scottish line of kings -

the Stuarts.

The Stuarts had held the English throne as well

since Elizabeth I died childless in 1603.

But in 1688, the last Stuart king - James II - was deposed

because he was a Catholic, in the Glorious Revolution.

In 1707, the Act of Union turned England and Scotland

into a single kingdom

and one of the first protests was in woven form.

We see it with the creation of the Jacobite set of tartan

in Edinburgh, shortly after 1707.

It's fairly bright.

So it has white, which is the white rose -

the badge of the House of Stuart.

It has red, which is also the battle standard of the Jacobites,

for example in 1745.

So, strongly linked with the Stuarts,

strongly linked with Stuart patriotism.

You can buy them again today.

SINGING

Tartan expressed your belief

that the Stuarts should still be running both countries.

Englishmen wore it too.

In 1744, as another Jacobite rebellion approached,

English MP Sir John Hynde-Cotton visited Edinburgh

and treated himself to a suit of Highland clothes.

This was a political statement on the grandest scale.

Sir John was a salad dodger,

who stood six feet four in his vibrant trews.

Well, this is the only surviving Highland suit of this period,

so it's extremely rare.

And it does have very interesting things to tell us about tartan.

The jacket and the trews are made of the same tartan,

in terms of the legs of the trews,

but the trews also have two other tartans that they're made from.

And the plaid, again, is a different tartan.

So it shows us that the idea of being dressed head to toe in a clan tartan

did not exist at this period,

that it's very much choosing a tartan according to your individual taste.

MILITARY DRUM BEAT

Jacobite supporters wore tartan.

Their candidate for the throne did not.

Charles Edward Stuart was painted

as a permanently bonnie candidate for the British throne,

with no trace of tartan at all.

That kind of image of youth was kept right through

because it was an image of potential.

Effectively, youth is what restoration is about,

and restoration is what youth is about.

So this image, was perpetuated right the way through

for the next 20 years.

He didn't really age in many of his pictures,

particularly the ones that were painted for propaganda purposes.

MILITARY DRUMBEATS

Said propaganda required a reboot for Charlie's graphic identity.

He stayed young.

His clothes went north.

# We are hundred pipers an' all, an' all

# We are hundred pipers an' all, an' all

# We'll up an' gie them a blaw, a blaw

# We are hundred pipers and all and all... #

On the 16th of April, 1746,

the real Bonnie Prince Charlie - a man in his mid twenties -

stood with 7,000 Jacobites,

facing 8,000 government troops on Culloden Moor.

# O! Our sodger lads looked braw, looked braw

# Wi' their tartan kilts an' a' an' a'

# Wi' their bonnets feathers an' glitt'rin' gear

# An pibrochs sounding loud and clear. #

At the battlefield museum, the film recreating the battle

is shown in something close to black and white.

The reality will have been too colourful to bear.

Both sides wore tartan.

On Charlie's side, the tartans clashed.

Doublets were unrelated to the plaid.

Hose bore no relation to either.

Highlanders fought on the government side as well.

These Highland regiments wore tartan too -

in a sett that had been designed in 1739 -

the Black Watch tartan.

A tartan loyal to the Union,

a restrained tartan in darker blues and greens.

EXPLOSION

Original Black Watch tartan, it's a regiment of the Scottish army.

It's very respected in the services.

It's well known.

It's a nice tartan.

It's not as colourful as some of the other ones,

but it's known throughout the world. Scotland's a fantastic place.

I was, years ago.

The Black Watch Scots Guards.

It's now the Scots Guards, it's called.

They're all joined together now,

the government's changed them.

CHANTING: Scotland! Scotland! Scotland!

Scotland! Scotland! Scotland!

The Jacobites were defeated in little more than an hour.

Bonnie Prince Charlie's tartan regalia

became the stuff of souvenirs.

There was no longer any hope

of restoring an independent kingdom of Scotland -

and as the most visible sign of Jacobite allegiance,

tartan was banned.

It was seen as such an icon

to the Scottish population at the time

that by banning it, it took away part of their souls.

It was part of their unity, part of their identity

so to ban it was pretty serious.

It was a major part of their lives, just disappeared.

# Come and dance Let's all be merry

# Come and learn Let's all be merry... #

All the opportunities were elsewhere.

London slowly filled with expatriate Scottish aristocrats

who now needed a history

that had nothing to do with Jacobite rebellion.

Take one: In 1778 they formed the Highland Society of London.

A fan club for the recently discovered writings of Ossian -

an ancient Scottish bard.

These texts -

proof that Scotland had an ancient, epic history -

had, it seemed, been discovered and translated

by one James MacPherson.

Only they hadn't!

MacPherson had largely made them up from genuine Irish epics.

Clearly, for people reading it in its first edition,

they thought they were reading,

for the first time,

the publication of this fantastic, er, Gaelic epic,

which describes the early history of Scotland

and it put Scotland on the map in the way that other countries

which had their great verse epics of the early romantic period,

and why shouldn't Scotland have one of its own?

-So, he supplied it?

-Yes, absolutely.

The curious thing about Scotland

is that it's creating a useable national past,

a national past at the point where it ceased to be a nation state.

So, that's what's remarkable about this.

There's this kind of nation building thing going on, almost,

almost the creation of a Scottish nationhood at the point

decades after the state has ceased to exist.

That's unique. But the actual process isn't unique.

And its quite wrong, I think, to think of Scotland

as being... having a particularly invented past or history.

Most nations do this.

With Ossian exposed, the Highland Society tried take two -

tartan.

They called for an end to the tartan ban.

Tartan had never really been political, they said,

it was all about clans.

This cosy notion wasn't entirely new.

Some MacDonalds had taken to wearing a particular tartan

during Jacobite times.

The ban was revoked.

And one or two other clans

began forming links with particular tartans.

The MacGregors.

The Gordons.

That's a Scotland tartan. That's a real Gordon tartan.

Pride!

I'm wearing a kilt, and a MacGregor kilt, yeah.

# Now the fiddler's ready Let us all begin

# So step it out and step it in

# To the merry music of the violin

# We'll dance the hours away... #

For 30 or 40 years, William Wilson's of Bannockburn -

the leading weavers of tartan -

had done very nicely thank you

out of government tartan orders for the Highland regiments.

# So step it out and step it in

# To the merry music... #

By the 1790s, two or three families were forming a habit,

as far as particular tartans were concerned.

But for everyone else, tartan was simply nice to look at.

# We'll dance the hours away... #

These were being ordered to be sent to the Duke of Beaufort in London

which instantly takes you into fashionable London society

and gives a real context to it.

This one's being ordered from Fort William.

This swatch has been sent. They're asking to change some of the colours.

It shows the sort of dialogue between the client and Wilson's,

in terms of designing the tartans,

that things were being constantly, not just invented,

but it was part of a design process, basically,

giving the client what they want, but also contributing Wilson's expertise

in terms of colour and pattern.

# Cope sent a challenge frae Dunbar

# 'Charlie, meet me an' ye daur,

# An' I'll learn you the art o' war

# If you'll meet me i' the morning... #

What Wilson's customers wanted wasn't tradition.

They wanted novelty and vibrant colour.

Imported dyes, indigo blue,

red cochineal from squashed Mexican beetles.

This colour here's very close to the colour

that was being produced back in the mid 18th century

on the tartans that was analysed at the museum.

We were able to look at records from the Wilson of Bannockburn

and in them we found some remarkable evidence,

where it was saying

the price they were paying for the cochineal,

how they wanted it at any expense,

they wanted it for its bright red scarlet colour.

Being able to take that evidence we're finding materially,

matching it up with this historical documentation

that we have from some of the makers,

we get this better view of tartan as being

a much better quality, fashionable, very brightly coloured, textile.

# White waves on the water

# Gold leaves on the tree... #

Tartan was fashionable.

By definition, it was for the rich.

But people weren't sure how to wear it.

A tartan Gok Wan was required.

People like Alastair Ranaldson MacDonnell of Glengarry

began to make up the rules

according to which it should be worn.

The most essential accessory of all was impeccable breeding.

The Gaels, Glengarry declared, were a romantic race.

But not romantic enough to be worth keeping on his Highland estates.

Glengarry reduced his tenantry from 1,500 people to 35

and replaced them with sheep,

whose contribution to Glengarry's favourite fabric was anonymous

but fundamental.

In 1815, Glengarry formed

the Society of True Highlanders in Edinburgh.

He had competition - the Celtic Society,

who Glengarry saw as a bunch of self-deluding Lowlanders

with no right to wear tartan at all.

# She came at your crying... #

Sir Walter Scott - a founding member of the Celtic Society -

was indeed a Lowlander

and the author of historical novels such as Waverley and Rob Roy.

# Sighing

# Made music... #

His fictional heroes flirted with the tartan-clad romance

of Scotland's Jacobite past.

But ultimately, Scott was a tourist

who always returned to a sensible Unionist present.

Scott is a man whose deeply embedded in the Scottish ruling class -

he knows most of the people in it -

He was majorly in support of the Union.

What he did want to do within the Union

was maintain the notion of Scottish separateness,

of a Scottish cultural identity.

He had a very strong Scottish national consciousness,

but that didn't mean that he was opposed to the Union.

He saw that as absolutely essential and there was no alternative to it.

# She came at your keening... #

In the summer of 1822,

the citizens of Edinburgh received word

that they were about to be visited by King George IV.

# And your sleep had new dreaming... #

As kings go, George was unusually ludicrous.

# And splendour and bloom... #

But he was the only king they had,

and Scotland hadn't seen a ruling monarch for 172 years.

A special welcome was required,

and Edinburgh's great and good knew that only one man could run the show.

He was a consummate showman, Scott,

but he was also a marvellous PR man.

He knew what his audience wanted,

and clearly they wanted romantic history.

They wanted it wrapped in tartan,

and they wanted it, somehow,

in a non-threatening way to establish their Scottishness.

And, yet again, what Scott was doing was taking fact

and wrapping it in, you know, in spin.

I suppose, if you put a modern, erm, spin on it -

he was a wonderful 19th century spin doctor.

Spin was certainly required.

From a present in which the king was a comedy figure,

in which working class protesters increasingly demanded the vote,

Scott wanted to weave a new Britain out of materials from its past.

He saw that tartan was the answer.

After all, it showed that Scots were good at loyalty.

Loyalty was the national dress.

# Wi' a hundred pipers, an' a', an' a'

# Wi' a hundred pipers, an' a', an' a',

# We'll up an' gie them a blaw, a blaw

# Wi' a hundred pipers, an' a', an' a'... #

Thanks to Sir Walter Scott, George IV's visit to Edinburgh

turned into a sort of tartan farce.

MUSIC: The Hundred Pipers

Scottish aristocrats attended, with retinues of servants,

all wearing tartans which - in most cases -

had been official clan tartans for about 48 hours.

The king wore tartan too -

a suit of Royal Stewart, specially made.

But he didn't look this good.

The artist had to leave out about five stone of king

to achieve this image.

DRUMBEATS

But wrapped, as he was, in the fabric of those

who had once been his dynasty's greatest enemies,

George IV had indeed somehow become both a Jacobite monarch

and the ruler of a unified England and Scotland.

DRUMBEATS AND BAGPIPES

I mean, yes, a lot of people viewed it as completely ridiculous,

but like a lot of things that people view as completely ridiculous,

the propaganda stuck.

I think if he'd thought about it with his, you might say,

serious historical head on, he might have realised

what an appalling thing he had done.

In a sense, Scott was a man of two minds, you know,

there's the historical novelist who, actually,

was quite a serious attempt to interpret Scottish history

and then there's this fantasy,

and the two things cannot be reconciled.

They are quite separate bits of his head.

MUSIC

Almost certainly, Sir Walter Scott expected the effects of 1822

to last no longer than the royal visit itself.

But they lasted rather longer.

All Scott had really done

was lift the lid on 50 years of cultural change.

But now several more clans had particular tartans

and tartan stood for all of Scotland,

even though Lowland Scots had no real connection with tartan at all.

MUSIC

Scott himself was woven in as well.

On Edinburgh's Princes Street,

at the foot of the largest monument to a writer on the entire planet,

there he sits,

wrapped in plaid.

He looks slightly depressed.

In 1829, Walter Scott heard news of two brothers

who claimed to have an original manuscript,

called the Vestiarium Scoticum or Wardrobe of the Scots.

This manuscript, they claimed,

listed 75 tartans traditionally connected with certain clans

and could be traced all the way back to the 1580s,

which would mean that the association

between clans and tartans was at least hundreds of years old,

instead of about 50.

When Scott sees the Vestiarium Scoticum,

he's well aware that this cannot be a 15th century manuscript.

He, when he reads it says that he thinks

it may have been put together by a tartan weaver,

trying to drum up trade and, in effect,

trying to sort of swath the whole country in tartan.

MUSIC

The Vestiarium Scoticum was not the work of a weaver.

It had been written by two brothers, the sons of a Welsh naval officer.

They had been born in Surrey and christened John and Charles Allen.

But by the time Scott got a glimpse of their work,

they'd already changed their names several times.

In the 1830s, they changed their name once more

to John and Charles Sobieski Stuart.

I'm sure, when they started off, they didn't think they were really

Bonnie Prince Charlie's legitimate grandchildren.

But the more they pretended, the realer it became.

The Scottish gentry took to the Sobieski Stuarts

with surprising alacrity.

Lord Lovat offered them the use of a house on Eilean Aigas,

a private island in the River Beauly,

somewhere to the West of Inverness.

The house is rather hard to find.

There's something wonderfully and ironically appropriate

about how well hidden Eilean Aigas is

because the Sobieski Stuarts, who lived here,

in some way are the hidden history of how two lads from Surrey

invented what the world thinks of as Scottishness.

Can we actually see the hunting lodge from here?

No.

Can we actually see any of it from here?

Gosh that water is so black down there.

You know, it looks like the archetypal Scottishness,

this deep gorge, these Scots pines.

You couldn't have a more perfect image

of what the world thinks Scotland is like,

than this river, this forest and yet,

it's the...it's the centrepiece

of how fake Scottish identity can be.

This is Vestiarium Scoticum,

which was a brilliant work by the Sobieski Stuarts.

Most of it is false.

But we don't know which bits are false.

They produced tartan, beautiful tartan designs,

and even allocated tartans to families,

particularly down in the Scottish borders,

who'd never had a tartan before,

and, of course, they were delighted,

because they were no longer disadvantaged

compared to their Highland cousins.

So I think what happens with the Sobieski Stuarts is, you know,

they look, and they forget a lot of families too,

and they've got a systematic view of who should be included

and there are a lot of gaps, so they fill them in

with what they should look like!

Here we have the Dress Stuart.

Even though, erm, Walter Scott cast serious doubt

on the veracity of this,

people accepted them.

It was just, came along at the right time,

and most of these tartans are the ones that we have today,

for clan tartans.

MacDonald of the Isles.

There's MacLeod, the loud MacLeod.

Clan Ross.

Rosses are very lucky, they've got a lot of options.

You've got this bright option.

Muted Ross, which is stunning.

Then you've got Red Rosses.

But then you've also got the weathered range as well.

So this here is absolutely gorgeous in the weathered.

That's, that's...That is the same tartan as that.

But then you also get dress tartans as well.

So there's Red Ross again.

That's another version of Red Ross, and then,

that's another version of Red Ross.

The more of these lines you have,

the more segmented the market is,

the more potential there is to stratify the market

and to reach the widest market possible.

I mean, after all, some people might be entitled

to three different family setts.

They might want them all, depending on the social function they're at!

I would try and push people to Muted Hunting Ross,

as opposed to that, because it is pretty garish.

But then again if you stick it with a jacket like that,

it's going to look absolutely stunning.

Fraser and that's exactly the same as it is today.

This top one here is modern Red Fraser.

Quite vibrant in its colours.

Now, some people call these tartans the dress tartans as well.

You know, in some cases,

they're taking hints from contiguous or related families,

or hunting tartan,

or they're interpreting a dress tartan from a hunting tartan.

And here we have it here, this is modern Hunting Fraser, much darker.

Or they're inventing the fact

that there were different hunting and dress and so on, tartans.

Still follows the same sett,

same pattern as the red and the orange one,

but it's darker in colour because obviously it's a hunting tartan.

But, often, they're just making it up?!

Wallace.

Nothing to do with William.

MacQueen, and, of course, that's been used to a huge degree

by Alexander MacQueen in very many of his modern fashion.

And Bruce.

We'd hate anyone to think that Robert the Bruce wore that tartan

because that would be chronologically impossible.

They just got a bee in their bonnet about tartans,

and they followed it through quite brilliantly,

they took some existing tartans and modified the design.

In some cases, the whole tartan was pure invention.

They're making history.

It's the creation of a charismatic textile

by a process of fictionalisation.

They talked about ancient manuscripts in France

and manuscripts in other places,

but they were never able to actually produce the manuscripts,

which really just confirmed what Walter Scott

and many other serious historians thought at the time.

Which was?

Which was that they were fakes.

But God bless them!

# Peaceful flows the winding river

# By the weeping willow tree... #

The Sobieski Stuarts quite cleverly go to ground for a decade

before they actually reveal the whole book, once Scott is dead.

Once the person who really knows

that this must be a fake is out the way,

that's when they bring it back.

Well, we've come round to the other side of the island

and just beyond the pylon, you can see Eilean Aigas,

the house where the Sobieski Stuarts lived.

Some of the tartans they invented

would have been invented on that island.

Not quite sure which ones,

but there's a good chance at least one of them was there.

Scott.

I think one that they probably definitely did there

was the Scott tartan.

When they spoke to Walter Scott and showed him this book,

he was well aware that it was phoney,

and in a kind of revenge they invented a Scott tartan

and maybe that whole fantasy

of them being the heirs to the British throne

began with Scott's rather pursed-lipped critique

of their behaviour.

Elizabeth Grant of Rothiemurchus, the great 19th century diarist,

claims that the Sobieski Stuarts

actually reigned in the north country.

She describes how they built

an artificial waterfall on this island,

where the wife of the elder of the Sobieski Stuarts

would sit playing a harp.

It's a kind of Disneyfied version of Scotland.

If you're looking for where the Brigadoon idea of Scotland starts,

it's on that island.

MUSIC

Two years after the publication of Vestiarium Scoticum,

the Sobieski Stuarts produced the equally lavish

Costumes of the Clans.

MUSIC

In it, they claimed that the Vestiarium had now been firmly dated

to the 16th century,

and produced images of how tartans, trews and kilts

would have been worn by Scots in times gone by.

It's quite convincing.

There's a splendid set of hose tops on this character's...

Lovely trews cut on the cross.

Tremendous.

Imagine being allowed to dress like that for parties.

Every single tartan shop on the Royal Mile

still uses their patterns.

What's really remarkable isn't just they invented it,

but that we swallowed it so wholeheartedly.

I think people like to have rules and regulations

and believe things are authentic, don't they,

and how it's done, people don't really like change

and they like to think it was always done like that

and they're doing the right thing.

It's convention, isn't it!

So you can see why people bought into it. They're rather good.

But also terribly good for the textile industry, don't you think?

There's a lot of cloth in some of these, so, you know,

if you can persuade somebody that that's what they need to be wearing,

it's got to be good for business.

But weren't they just a bit naughty?

And what was wrong with that? What was wrong with being naughty?

Surely the, you know... Tartan is essentially romantic, isn't it?

And romance goes with naughtiness, at least it does in my book.

And, I think, if we had been very Presbyterian about it,

which we could easily have been, because that again

is another part of Scotland's history,

then it would have been very dull.

MUSIC

So here we have the grave

of John Sobieski Stuart and Charles Edward Stuart.

The one thing we can say with certainty

is that the two men buried here

were not John Sobieski Stuart and not Charles Edward Stuart.

Their real names were John Carter Allen

and Charles Manning Allen, born in Godalming in Surrey.

MUSIC

What's exciting about the Sobieski Stuarts

is getting away from this idea that our national myths must be true.

If you can re-write the myth,

you stand a good chance of being able to change your history

to change your future,

to have a more inclusive, a more open-minded approach to nationalism,

rather than these tired, old,

sometimes rather dangerous attachments to myth.

MUSIC

A few tens of miles to the south-east of Eilean Aigas,

in Speyside,

the re-branded Hanoverians, the Windsors,

were embarking on an equally fictional project.

Both Victoria and Albert loved Scotland

and everything it now stood for.

They had a lot more money to spend than the Sobieski Stuarts

and tartan was the answer to almost every question

as far as design was concerned.

Curtains and carpets were tartan.

Seats and servants wore similar costumes.

Like a cheery virus,

tartan spread outwards from Balmoral,

and to the Queen's enormous satisfaction,

infected the local aristocracy.

Naturally enough,

the Queen wanted some sort of visual record of it all.

But photography was in its infancy,

and besides, tartan's charms lay in a world of colour

that early photographs couldn't capture.

Well, these volumes were published by command of Queen Victoria.

They're called, The Highlanders of Scotland.

They're in two volumes and, er, the marvellous illustrations

were by Kenneth MacLeay, who was a Victorian miniaturist,

and they cost 18 guineas!

And they contain some of the most accurate

and beautiful portraits of highlanders.

All the individuals here were either local worthies around Balmoral

or were members of staff

and they all dressed up specially for the sittings.

But the detail is excellent.

Because McLeay was a miniaturist,

the tartans are painted very accurately here,

whereas, conventionally, portrait painters

would just do the face and the body and they would go back to the studio

and pull out a bit of old tartan, some of them,

and then paint the tartan on.

But here, the tartans are extremely accurate

and it's also very interesting to see the bits and pieces, the sporrans,

the style of the sporrans, the swords, the belts,

and just generally how they were, how they were dressed.

There's another lovely one here with four of them in it.

Ah, there we are look at that one.

Beautiful array of tartans.

That's, from the left, that's er John McCoughlan, Hugh Graham,

James MacFarlane and Angus Colquhoun.

MUSIC

Tartan Army uniform, there's no kind of rules.

That's the one thing with the Tartan Army, it's all very fluid.

But you'll often find us wearing the Glengarry.

You have to have the current Scotland strip.

That's a requirement.

Then, obviously, as a girl, I wear the mini-kilt.

This is my family tartan, which is Anderson,

and it means I can easily spot fellow Andersons in the crowd.

DRUMBEATS AND BAGPIPES

The association between tartan and the Army

grew stronger throughout Victoria's reign.

As the Empire reached its fullest extent,

the kilted soldiers of the Highland regiments

were always in the vanguard...

MUSIC

..wherever the action was hottest

and lives were expended in proper imperial style.

This is one of the most important pieces

of Scottish military iconography

and it features an incident

during the battle of Balaclava in the Crimean War, 1854.

And what we see here is the famous Thin Red Line.

The 93rd Highlanders,

who'd been tasked by their commanding general,

General Colin Campbell,

to defend this piece of land against the attacking Russian cavalry.

Campbell said to them in no uncertain terms before the battle began,

"There is no retreat from here men. You must die where you stand."

And when the painting was produced and shown to the wider public,

it seals for ever the great notion of the Highland soldier.

I mean, look at them here, wearing their government kilts,

ostrich-feathered bonnets, spats, diced hose.

They are the epitome of the courage of the Victorian soldier

and they're Highlanders.

MUSIC

It's largely hokum, I'm afraid to say.

This rifle they're using, the Minie rifle, killed over a long distance.

So, the Russian cavalry would have been nowhere near them.

They would have been well back down the battlefield.

So firm did the association become

between glamorous military action and the Highland regiments,

that the Scottish Lowland regiments sought to emulate them.

They stopped short of wearing the kilt,

but they took to tartan wherever else they could.

Scottish Lowland regiments started wearing tartan trews,

feathered bonnets, Highland doublets.

Their officers carried claymores.

In fact, they were dressed in a pastiche of the Highland soldier

which was totally and utterly ridiculous.

Because a lot of these Highland regiments were the descendants

of people who had fought under Prince Charles at Culloden

and the Lowland regiments were amongst those who had to put it down.

And lo and behold, what we have are the Lowland regiments

aping their Highland brothers,

whereas 150 years earlier, they would have dismissed these people

as bare-arsed banditti wearing kilts and nothing under them.

MUSIC

By the second half of the 19th century,

tartan was telling tales of British military supremacy.

MUSIC

The first war photographers captured them too.

Blunt instruments of imperial policy

in ceremonial Highland dress.

At home, tartan spoke of your aristocratic background,

or your role as a servant to the aristocracy.

It was the very fabric of the establishment.

In the Highlands themselves, people reacted quite strongly

against the elevation of the kilt and the tartans,

because they saw it as being associated with the regiments,

who would be marched off to war, for young men to go off and die.

They also saw it as being something which was a plaything

of the lairds and the kind of ruling classes.

Most of them didn't wear kilts or tartan,

they wore trousers, quite sensibly.

Those who wore Highland dress were very privileged.

They were the gentry of the country,

the vast majority of them.

Only they could afford the hugely expensive outfits.

They obviously wanted to guard that jealously and zealously

and a whole series of fashion rules grew up over the decades,

particularly during Victoria's time.

That you must do this and you mustn't do that,

and you could only wear a tartan if your surname was that of the clan

whose tartan you were wearing.

But just looking at it historically,

there is no reason why such rules and regulations should exist.

I've had to kind of create my own rules and etiquette

to what I'm doing and how the kilt should sit.

So, a traditional kilt, and this is more the Victorian era kilt,

the military version, being eight yards, very, very tight and high,

was all about military clothing and very, very smart and formal.

So, what I did, and this happened up a mountain in Israel,

I just got a bit sick because the kilt was so high and tight,

but I lowered it and wore it on my hip.

But then the kilt was too long at the other end,

so, I dropped about an inch and a half

off my own personal kilt length.

So, I go from the hip bone to the top of the knee.

So, that's the formal height is onto the kneecap,

well, Queen Victoria's formal height,

before that it was actually worn longer.

She was a bit pervy and wanted to see more leg and that stuck.

MUSIC

With every year that passed,

Scotland's aristocracy made up more and more elaborate,

unbreakable rules controlling the wearing of tartan.

And Scottish soldiers in kilts and tartan trews

continued to lose their lives in foreign parts and places.

Somehow, the image was part of the arsenal.

The kilted soldier was as bizarre and unsettling to the enemy

as the skirl of the pipes.

But in the trenches of the First World War,

the kilt was a beloved liability.

It caught on barbed wire,

became muddy and waterlogged,

provided little or no protection from corrosive mustard gas.

One of the many casualties

was the son of music hall star, Harry Lauder.

# Roamin' in the gloamin'

# On the bonnie banks o' Clyde

# Roamin' in the gloamin'

# Wi' ma lassie by ma side

# When the sun has gone to rest

# That's the time that I like best

# O, it's lovely roamin'. #

Now the chorus, everybody, hey!

# Roamin' in the gloamin... #

Never in the history of human tailoring

has so much cloth been used to so little purposeful effect.

You've got nine yards of material which doesn't keep your legs warm.

It has no useful function.

We see a Scotch comedian sucking up to the Prime Minister.

There's a sense in which Winston Churchill looks slightly bemused

by the attention he's getting.

But that's not to get away from the fact

that Lauder made a massive contribution in the Second World War,

but especially in the First World War.

He was knighted for his services primarily for troop morale

and a large of that was because of his kilted persona.

He appears in shows in the West End of London.

There's one called The Laddies Who Fought and Won,

which the finale was the kilted Highlanders

all marching up onto the stage.

In some senses it was very kitschy,

but in the other senses, it was actually very moving.

# There's a dear old lady

# Mother Britain is her name

# And she's all the world to me... #

This small, sort of wizened man in a kilt

did speak for the British soldier more generally

as well as, specifically, the Scottish soldier.

# The lasses were beloving of their laddies

# The laddies who fought our war. #

CHEERING

Lauder was marmite. The Unionist faithful enjoyed him at face value.

But to those who sought home rule for Scotland,

Lauder was an embarrassing grotesque,

a kilted jackass,

a Lowlander whose stage persona made mock of Scotland and its people.

Lauder was loathed with particular intensity

by one of the founders in 1928 of the Scottish National Party,

the poet Hugh MacDiarmid,

real name, Christopher Murray Grieve, a Lowlander himself,

born in Langholm,

a little less than 15 miles inside the Scottish border.

And he, at the beginning of 1922,

is even writing diatribes against the use of dialect Scots.

To some extent you might describe him,

if slightly unfairly, as a minor English poet.

And somehow he got converted to the idea of dialect Scots.

The only way he could effect a Scottish national literary renaissance

was to adopt a Highland persona, take on the name of Hugh MacDiarmid

and develop a form of poetry which uses a synthetic Scots,

a Scots which no-one had ever spoke before,

but which he thought epitomised the essence of Scottish culture,

and in some senses the kind of the language,

the synthetic Scots that MacDiarmid develops

is not unlike a form of linguistic tartan in itself.

MUSIC

No' her, wha in the how-dumb-deid o' nicht

Kyths like Eternity in Time's despite.

No' her, withooten shape, wha's name is Daith,

No' Him, unkennable abies to faith

God whom, gin e'er He saw a man, 'ud be

E'en mair dumfooner'd at the sicht than he.

MacDiarmid felt that the performance of the persona

that he had developed in 1922

was an important strategy in creating a more serious idea of Scotland,

and he actually said in his letters

that he was deliberately being humourless,

because this is something, that he felt his purpose was so strong,

that it couldn't be deflected by humour.

So Hugh MacDiarmid is a fiction?

Yes, again, this is a very contentious issue in Scottish culture,

the extent to which Scottish culture

is always being re-invented by persona who are not in fact real.

MUSIC: The Campbells are Coming

Innes of Learney was real enough.

Between 1945 and 1969 he was Lord Lyon King of Arms.

It was his job to faithfully register coats of arms,

the heraldic identities of Scotland's aristocracy,

tartan included.

MUSIC

Unlike MacDiarmid, he approved of both Union and Empire.

MUSIC

In a robust footnote in his book, 'The Tartans of the Clans and Families of Scotland',

he asserted that the British Empire was,

"really the creation of the Scots,

"for prior to the Union, England could not even retain

"the territories which it from time to time inherited."

And there's a lovely section here which I could read for you

"For formal wear,

"the Highland dress naturally lends itself to glittering ornaments,

"cairngorms, braiding, and velvet or tartan doublets,

"which combine with the tartans

"that enhance the rich variety of costume which accords

"with the history and instincts of the highlander."

And then you really get a sense of the man,

"Attempts by self-conscious Lowlanders

"to convert the picturesque dress of the Gael into a 'quiet style'

"and to deprive the garb of its ornament

"or reduce it to the drab monotony

"of Anglo Saxon evening clothes are un-Scottish and contemptible."

MUSIC

It's entirely appropriate that the tartan of Learney's own clan

was a slap in the eye.

For Innes of Learney, tartan was a sign of Scottish superiority,

a costume proudly worn by the natural aristocrats

of an essentially Scottish empire.

For MacDiarmid, tartan was a sign of independent Scottish nationhood.

And for Walter Scott, it was the fabric through which Scots

declared themselves loyal and subject to the Union.

All three of these Scotlands can't be true at the same time

but there's a tartan for them all.

Tartan sticks to all our stories.

And it just can't help telling them back to us.

MUSIC

In 2009, the Scottish Parliament

created the Scottish Register of Tartans,

an attempt to bring some order to the chaos.

In the main we get a lot of people registering tartans

for their own personal use

so things like if they've got a forthcoming wedding coming up.

We have the Miss Emma Halford MacLeod tartan

and actually this one is for a marriage.

You can imagine they wore this at their wedding.

For years to come they'll be hoping

their children and things wear the tartan.

And this one, we have the UPS, one tartan which is a corporate tartan.

Companies do register for their branding and marketing purposes.

There's lots of different things in here.

And Canine All Dogs tartan.

MUSIC

There's a searchable online database.

It tells you, where it can, where the tartan first appeared.

There's even a Scottish Register of Tartans tartan.

A tartan that declares our loyalty to tartan itself.

MUSIC

# Wi' a hundred pipers, an' a', an' a'... #

We've arrived, at last,

in a world where tartan's history doesn't matter.

# Wi' a hundred pipers, an' a', an' a'. #

I am not really playing with history at all.

I think of it entirely as another way of painting.

Because I trained as a painter, I wanted to use my own colours,

so I broke with the tradition and just started weaving

in colours that I thought worked well together.

MUSIC

Because of where we live, it sounds a bit corny,

but, I suppose, because of the landscape and the light

it's a sort of distilled view of what's outside.

My son is very rude and tells me

I've been trotting out the same thing for years.

He's absolutely right, but there's endless possibilities. I never get bored with it

# Wi' a hundred pipers, an' a', an' a'

# We'll up an' gie them a blaw, a blaw

# Wi' a hundred pipers, an' a', an' a'. #

With tartan, I like to imagine it as a painter's palette.

It's all about it being elegant and subtle

and a lot more weathered and muted and washed out,

so the whole thing of say bright tartans, erm,

like these oranges and reds,

I tend to go more to what we call muted colours

which is a deeper darker red.

There's some very bright tartans. There is indeed.

Let me just see if I can find one for you.

Let's say the kilt was in that check, with the red.

The jacket in that and the waistcoat and tartan, cut on the angle.

So that you get,

oh, it's not here,

so, you're getting a...oh, I do have one.

This is a MacLeod of Lewis,

or we call this Loud MacLeod.

And again, it's a lovely, lovely tartan.

I would certainly wear this as a tartan suit

because I think this is a fabulous tartan.

It's that whole thing of just being completely timeless,

I want my grooms, this is if time travel existed, obviously,

to be able to go back to 1908 in their kilt outfit

and stand and have a whisky with this guy.

Because I know this guy from 1908

could easily be walking about the streets today.

This here is the 21st century tartan.

It's a tartan suit, similar to what I'm wearing,

slightly longer, being a three-quarter length jacket.

The groom should be, I often use the term, Bondesque.

You know, you want to kind of look like Bond on your wedding day,

as much as possible.

Just, really, everything sharp.

This is, you know, a bit more outrageous than a kilt would be.

This is about, you know, being a bit of a show stopper,

getting yourself noticed for the right or the wrong reasons.

But, that's what this is kind of about,

it's putting yourself out there and being noticed.

So, yeah, there's ways that you can use tartan

but have a plain kilt.

Tweed kilts have always existed.

Maybe denim kilts haven't, leather kilts have

and those are my babies.

Even transparent PVC, but that was a definite experiment.

What if I came in and said I wanted a tartan onesie?

Well, never says never.

Anything is possible at Geoffrey Tailor's.

And there's all this debate at the moment about independence

and I'm always happy to say

I don't mind England being part of Scotland.

Because we have all the kind of cultural identity here anyway.

You know, the beautiful landscape, and, you know, the national drink

and the national dress.

I always feel sorry for English people

because although you look a bit daft in a kilt,

you look a lot more silly dressed as a Morris dancer.

MUSIC: Shang-a-lang by the Bay City Rollers

# Well we sang shang-a-lang and we ran with the gang

# Doin' doo wop be dooby do ay... #

And remember next year,

we have the whole nation faces the question of independence.

so that is the change of Scotland,

whether they choose independence or not

the Scottish psyche has changed

and part of it is reflected in the football fan.

# With the jukebox playing and every body saying that

# "Music like ours couldn't die." #

Let's hear you!

It's become so much the emblem of Scotland

in a way that no other country has this colourful image.

You can look at tartan and go, "That's Scotland" immediately.

Does it matter that its past is slightly murky?

No, I don't think so.

I think it adds to the gaiety of the nation

and to the importance of tartan as a cultural symbol.

# Aye! The children of Scotia

# May roam the world o'er

# But their thoughts aye return... #

Tonight, it's a symbol of defeat.

Scotland lose 2-1 to Wales,

but it doesn't matter.

Tartan will always have more tales to tell.

"This piece of McBean tartan was flown to the moon

"in our Apollo 12 command module Yankee Clipper.

"It was then transferred to our lunar module Intrepid

"and was landed on the moon, November 19th, 1969.

"I am entrusting this valuable piece of tartan history to your care,

"Alan Bean, lunar module pilot."

# And the Cameron men have a right to be proud

# With the Campbells and Stewarts

# MacLeod of MacLeod

# Then it's hey for the tartan

# And ho for the tartan

# The stamp O' the hielands

# From Skye to Dundee

# And it's proud I am bearing

# The tartan I'm wearing

# The pride O' my clan

# And the tartan for me

# The pride O' my clan

# And the tartan for me. #

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