The Cultural Revolution Scotland: The Promised Land

In a small town outside London

a writer is typing the final

chapter of his novel.

This is his seventh.

With a growing family to support,

he's vowed that this will be his last attempt.

Contained in the manuscript is a story of loss,

the memories of a Scottish childhood

and a generation of young men wiped out by the Great War.

This young novelist was part of a small army of writers who

were attempting to change Scotland.

To rescue her from an invasion that had come from south of the border.

Rather than military, these occupying forces were cultural.

By the 1920s, Scotland's identity, her culture and voice were

fast disappearing, eclipsed by her imperial English neighbour.

Scotland had become a figure of fun.

In music halls up and down the country

she had been reduced to a tartan caricature,

a music hall joke.

This is the story of a group of resistance fighters.

Writers and artists who plotted revolution.

A revolution that would revive Scotland's disappearing culture

and let her voice be heard.

They would fight, not with guns and bombs,

but with thoughts and words.

Words that helped shape the modern Scotland that we know today.

1919, and the war was over.

There was a sense of relief.

Things could only get better.

People flocked in their thousands to the country's music halls

and theatres looking for entertainment.

This was the golden age of variety theatre in Scotland.

Music Hall was the entertainment of the Industrial Revolution.

Music Hall, wherever it was, was always

local or regional in character.

It was always a people's theatre,

a people's entertainment.

But in Scotland because there was a

national cultural dimension to it,

it had a distinct character of its own.

It was tartan, it was kitsch, it was escapist.

An invented version of Scotland that found its way into all

sorts of productions.

Scottish pantomimes have a scene called the Highland Glen scene.

It's a scene added into Scottish pantomimes,

something like Cinderella, it doesn't matter what it is,

whereby we're suddenly transported

to a Highland glen and it's an excuse for Scots dancing

and a medley of Scots songs,

so it's a celebration of Scottish identity in costume and song.

One of the most popular performers of the time was Tommy Lorne.

Part clown, part comic,

he was the leading pantomime star of his generation.

-OLD RECORDING:

-'I'm surging o'er with passion,

I'm so angry that,

'I feel as if I could burst a paper bag.'

Lorne wore white make-up and white gloves worn over long

expressive hands, taking Highland fantasy to new heights.

Lorne depicted a surreal, almost grotesque version of Scotland.

But Lorne's portrayal of his country wasn't to everyone's taste.

Christopher Murray Grieve was 27 years old

when he left the Royal Army Medical Corps.

At the front Grieve had witnessed the deaths

and suffering of his fellow Scots.

But at home, his countrymen were reduced to a laughing stock.

After the war, Grieve and his wife, Peggy, settled in Montrose,

a prosperous harbour town on the Angus coast.

In Montrose, Grieve took a job as a reporter on the local paper,

the Montrose Review.

He covered the unveiling of the town's war memorial.

To some, this was a tribute to those who had fallen for King,

country and Empire.

But to Grieve, it was a reminder of wholesale, industrialised

slaughter in the trenches.

Of the friends and comrades needlessly ordered

to their deaths by the British ruling class.

To Grieve, nothing less than a revolution

would prevent this from ever happening again.

And there was inspiration close to home.

Another nation had taken up the fight

against the British ruling elite.

In Ireland, Republican fighters had overthrown British imperial rule.

Violent, bloody and hard-fought, it was a battle for independence,

sparked by the discovery of a new cultural confidence.

An Irish voice.

"Know, that I would accounted be

"True brother of a company

"That sang, to sweeten Ireland's wrong

"Ballad and story, rann and song

"Nor be I any less of them..."

Grieve wanted to follow the Irish example

and emulate what writers like Joyce and Yeats had achieved.

Grieve saw how Ireland

valued its cultural workers,

its writers, its playwrights,

the esteem that the playwrights enjoyed,

but also the political purchase.

So Irish literary figures, cultural figures took some

credit for having pushed Ireland towards the solution which

led eventually to independence and the man who became the first

president of the Republic of Ireland had given a lecture in 1892

called The Necessity Of De-anglicising Ireland.

And I think what Grieve had at the back of his mind was something

quite similar, the de-anglicisation of Scotland

and he saw himself being at the centre,

or certainly being an important drive towards creating this

Renaissance Scotland based on the Irish literary model.

"And Time bade all his candles flare

"To light a measure here and there.

"And may the thoughts of Ireland brood

"Upon a measured gratitude."

This was the inspiration Grieve needed.

Why couldn't Scotland do the same?

After all, there had been a political will for

self-determination before the war.

Just as the war was breaking out a home rule bill had actually been

agreed for Scotland, it had been passed in the British Parliament.

So Scotland actually politically was part

of the way to gaining home rule just before the First World War.

What I find personally quite baffling is all these

voices had died by the time the war ended.

There seemed to be no pressure whatsoever on reviving

home rule, or very little pressure on reviving home rule.

In some senses Scotland had to take a deep breath

and think about what kind of politics it actually wanted,

whether it really wanted to be a part of a United Kingdom or

the extent to which it wanted to become independent.

But Grieve's mind was already made up.

A divorce from the English was required.

He'd start a revolution right here in Montrose.

Just as the Irish had done, Scottish writers would stir the nation

with a new progressive national literature.

But he had a problem.

The bookshelves of Scotland were already filled with

a particular type of Scottish book.

If Grieve was going to be successful,

he'd have to transform the reading habits of the population.

Scottish literature after the First World War

was thriving but it's basically

representations of Scotland which emphasised

the parochial, the sentimental,

the religious devotion of the ordinary people, the kaleyard.

One book in particular, written by a religious Anglo-Scot, had sold

millions of copies throughout the British Empire.

The term kaleyard even

originated in this book.

Although it meant cabbage patch, it came to mean a rose-tinted

and sentimental view of Scottish rural life.

Kaleyard novelists just sold because they were offering

reassurance and comfort to people

whose lives were smoky, industrial and nasty.

There's an idea that this is a kind of couthy Scotland which is all,

it's going back into the kind of the reminiscences of

parents and grandparents.

It's a Scotland which is not real,

which exists quite apart from industrialising Scotland

of the Victorian period so it's therefore entirely bogus.

Once the reader had stepped into this tartan fantasy,

these books offered moral instruction on how to be

a good Christian and know your place.

"He was broken that day,

"and his sobs shook the bed

"for he was his mother's only son and fatherless,

"and his mother, brave and faithful to the last,

"was bidding him farewell.

"Dinna greet like that, John,

"nor break yir hert,

"for it's the will o' God that's aye best."

These novels play a part in establishing

social order of a sort.

You know, within the Empire there are these devoted people who

sometimes go off to war, for example, but they are in fact

the salt of the earth and their conduct is

without doubt meant to be exemplary in every way.

Grieve's gripe was they were travestying Scottishness

and they were creating something which was an exclusive view

of Scotland as a place in which... it was a sentimentalised view,

simply there to entertain using their Scots language,

their Scots language voice as a way of amusing people rather than

actually as a way of forensically studying the world.

But the world of kaleyard wasn't restricted to the page.

One man made it a global sensation,

Harry Lauder.

Sporting a glengarry and kilt,

Lauder promoted this fantasy version of Scotland on the world stage,

a capering caricature of Scottishness.

Grieve hated Lauder, deriding him as an overpaid clown,

an infliction that was foisted on the Scots by the English

but Lauder was an unstoppable force.

He was now the international ambassador of Scottish culture.

"The reason why the Harry Lauder

"type of thing is so

"popular in England is because it corresponds to the average

"Englishman's ignorant notion of what the Scot is.

"It is high time the Scots were becoming alive to the

"ulterior effect of this propaganda by ridicule."

Grieve's solution to the relentless march of Lauder

and kaleyard was to compile a selection of poems.

Northern Numbers contained a mixture of good and bad poetry.

Grieve expected the reader to understand the difference.

-HE RECITES:

-I'm sighing here my lone-self

In a foreign land and fair

Where the sun is ever gleaming

And I can live at ease

For it's me that will be dreaming

Of the dear days that were

On that jewel of an island

In the sweet Hebrides.

You know, it's utter rubbish. It's total guff. It's terrible.

It's sentimental, trite,

but he's also putting it alongside work by a

younger generation of writers

who have returned from the war and who are

looking at cities, Glasgow and Dundee, and saying,

"What's going on?

"What have we gained? What about poverty?

"What about the state of women?

"What about the state of society generally in terms

"of the gulf between the rich and the poor?"

-HE RECITES:

-Around comes tea

Philanthropy must know no bound

And buns weeks old,

But oh, tuppence the lot, how very cheap!

Magnanimous, quite fit for gentle ladies' palates - God!

Monkeys in a cage get nuts and...

..the tea and buns cost the soul of any of these ones

The female things, I mean.

Now, this is poetry of a very different order.

This is much closer to The Waste Land

than McKenzie's sentimental Scotland.

And MacDiarmid is putting this stuff together

and saying, "Well, this is the reality."

And the gulf between the sentimental Scotland

and the reality of the economic oppression of the people who

live here, we need to confront that as writers.

We can't look away from that.

He has an agenda.

He wants to stir things up and he wants people

to read more widely than to be settled

and complacent about what Scotland is and that's how it is.

He wants people to be aware of the reality of the world around them.

He worked long and hard in search of a language worthy of a Scots poet.

He sought out fading regional dialects,

he trawled old dictionaries hunting for words.

Fludder, when a river swells in some degree so as to become discoloured.

Fortaivert, much fatigued.

-Hilter-skilter.

-Hilter-skilter.

-Hilch.

Hijinks, a very absurd mood.

Hilliegeleerie.

These old-fashioned Scots words had been

the language of the nation's greatest writers for centuries.

But they had been forgotten as English

began to be spoken more widely.

Scots was consigned to the pages of dusty old dictionaries.

But for Grieve, this material

was a rich vein of the Scots vernacular.

And he hadn't only rediscovered his literary language,

he'd reinvented himself.

Christopher Murray Grieve became Hugh MacDiarmid.

He took his pen name from Scotland's mythological past,

choosing Diarmuid, a Celtic warrior from a group of legendary poets.

And the first poem by this saviour

of the Scots language - The Watergaw.

In Montrose library there's another clue as to where MacDiarmid

found his new poetic voice.

This is the original copy, 1915.

And if you look at page 169,

you find a very interesting thing.

That virtually the first lines of his poem,

The Watergaw, are just there.

So you have "weet nicht", "a weet forenicht",

and you have "yow-trummul",

"I saw yon antrin thing, a watergaw",

so the first lines of his first major poem in Scots

basically is in this book, but

I just find it fascinating that he may well

have picked up this very volume and opened it up, fascinating.

-HUGH MACDIARMID RECITES:

-"Ae weet forenicht i' the yow-trummle

"I saw yon antrin thing

"A watergaw wi' its chitterin' licht

"Ayont the on-ding

"An' I thocht o' the last wild look ye gied

"Afore ye deed!

"There was nae reek i' the laverock's hoose

"That nichtan' nane i' mine

"But I hae thocht o' that foolish licht

"Ever sin' syne..."

He had such a wonderful voice, so evocative.

I remember it very well

and normally he was standing

at the end of a very long table at an 85th birthday party,

or something like that,

when I heard him speaking as Hugh MacDiarmid.

As Christopher Grieve, of course he still had the same voice

but it was rather less oratical and terrifying.

Some years later, MacDiarmid recorded the poem

in Scots and English.

His political agenda was clear.

-HUGH MACDIARMID RECITES:

-"..the last wild look ye gied

"Afore ye deed!

"There was nae reek i' the laverock's hoose that nicht..."

I think he's deliberately over complicating the Scots here.

He quite likes the amount of baffle the Scots provides.

-HUGH MACDIARMID RECITES:

-"One wet early evening

"After the sheepshearing season in July

"When the newly-shorn ewes are trembling..."

He's deliberately robbing it of all poetry in the English

translation that he's giving it, it's...

-HUGH MACDIARMID RECITES:

-"Beyond the downpour of the rain

"And I thought of the last, wild look you gave..."

Even though he goes quite a long way out of his way to make

the English version sound terrible in that,

you have to admit that the Scots really has poetry to it.

It is full of vitality that he had not been finding

perhaps in his English version to that point.

This war of words had a purpose.

MacDiarmid was parading the power of Scots,

its deep emotion, to rally his political cause.

The 12 lines of The Watergaw were a foundation for a new identity

and voice, a foundation to build an independent Scotland.

-RADIO:

-'This is London calling. London calling...'

'Next on BBC Two Scotland,

'David Attenborough calls it one of the wildlife wonders of...'

In 1922, the year The Watergaw was published,

another Scot started to promote the spoken word.

A man who stood squarely in the path of Hugh MacDiarmid.

Far from reviving and celebrating Scots, John Reith's

imperial vision was for everyone to aspire to speak correctly.

-RADIO:

-'..the several, far, scattered units of the family...'

Appointed General Manager of the new British Broadcasting Company,

Reith opened local radio stations all over Britain.

A powerful new medium, a powerful way to reinforce

a sense of Britishness.

And the accent he chose to promote it

was called Received Pronunciation.

RP, Received Pronunciation,

was the accent of the upper class,

the ruling class, the privileged class.

So it was aspirational for the middle classes,

it was certainly something that they desired.

And that's when we saw the rise in elocution lessons.

It was a vocal status symbol.

-RADIO:

-'Good evening, everybody...'

Soon RP voices were heard in households across Scotland.

Scottish accents started to change.

-RADIO:

-'The Director-general of the BBC.'

'Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.'

Reith led by example,

clearly elevating and refining his speech.

-RADIO:

-'..as significant as any

'in the ten years of British broadcasting.'

One of the main differences is in what we call the rhotic R.

We pronounce our R wherever it is in the word.

But RP speakers do not pronounce the R after

a vowel sound so you would get 'butt-ah', 'mutt-ah', 'flutt-ah'.

-And here, Lord Reith says...

-'..in many years since...'

..'yeahs' instead of 'years' and for a Scot,

that's not a natural way to say the word 'years',

so he has adopted a non-rhotic delivery for the word 'years',

he's not pronouncing the R after a vowel sound.

-RADIO:

-'In almost every sphere of human activity...'

Lord Reith has a real hybrid in his delivery.

He does sound upper-class, but there

are certainly Scots aspects to his delivery.

-RADIO:

-'The governors of the BBC send

'our warm greeting to listeners everywhere.'

While MacDiarmid was writing his Scots poetry, read by a few,

Reith had a direct line into millions of Scottish homes.

RP became THE accent to climb the social ladder.

You'll find us all one big, happy family here.

Perhaps just a teeny-weeny bit unorthodox

but that's better than being old-fashioned, isn't it?

Actor Alastair Sim had grown up in Edinburgh.

For the son of a Gaelic speaker surrounded by Scots voices,

a career as an actor proved tough.

Sim soon realised that success could only come

if he hid his Scottish accent.

After teaching elocution for several years,

RP became his ticket to success.

The whole form are really quite amazingly advanced

in their chemistry.

Shall we see what they're up to?

..as seen here in The Belles Of St Trinian's.

Come along now, Miss Crawley, you must tear yourself away.

We've lots more to see, you know.

Scotland was sounding more and more English.

If MacDiarmid's Scots revival was going to succeed, he'd need help.

The House of Dun, just a few miles along the road from Montrose,

and an unlikely place for MacDiarmid to find an ally.

Violet Jacob, although the daughter of a long established aristocratic

family, wrote in a rich Scots voice,

rooted in the earth of the Angus countryside.

And like MacDiarmid, she'd also been deeply affected by the war.

Wounded in the carnage of the Somme, her only son, Harry,

died in a hospital in Calais.

He was just 20 years old.

Violet's haunting collection of poems, More Songs Of Angus,

was published in 1918.

This is the one that contains the poems that she wrote after

the death of Harry, her son.

And there's a poem called

The Field Of The Lirk O' The Hill

where there's a widow

who has obviously lost her husband,

her son has gone to war and she's lost him

and she's just wondering how the farm's going to be run.

"Aye, bairn, nae mair, nae mair

"I' the field by the lirk o' the hill!"

Violet Jacob also wrote poems in English.

But MacDiarmid instantly recognised the emotive power of her

work in Scots.

It was exactly what he was looking for.

MacDiarmid continued to write and publish poetry.

In November, 1922, he was elected as a Montrose town councillor.

As an independent socialist, he loved to stir things up.

His new position brought him

into contact with other like-minded revolutionaries

and one of those was William Lamb.

Lamb wasn't a writer,

but he expressed himself just as powerfully with his hands.

Lamb had been a sculptor before the war but when he returned from

the trenches of France he wanted to create distinctly Scottish art.

Just as MacDiarmid was a Scots poet, he'd be a Scots sculptor.

What you get is a sense of the impact that

war had on Lamb and the impact of

being introduced to

new Continental styles because

this sculpture of David Collie is very smooth in his features.

It's almost like a Roman centurion, in a way,

it has that classical element to it.

Yet Head Of Boy, which is done after the war, you can see the same

subject in a more expressive style.

His hair becomes more ruffled, it's more energised.

It's much more about capturing the personality of the person

rather than just their appearance.

The war not only changed Lamb's style,

it left him badly injured.

With a piece of shrapnel embedded in his right hand,

he painstakingly retrained his left as his working hand.

Lamb's subjects were the people around him,

the fisherfolk, the dock workers,

the ordinary men and women of Montrose.

He wanted to give them a voice,

those who'd rarely been heard in Scotland before.

All in keeping with the spirit of MacDiarmid's new

National Art and Political Movement.

They used to have meetings and I think you get that sense of that

relationship between the two in this work.

That very forceful presence of Hugh MacDiarmid comes across

with the wild radiating hair emanating from his head.

There is a running joke with Lamb and Violet Jacob.

When Lamb was working up to doing this sculpture

he said to Violet, "I'm going to be very cruel

"when I do this, I'm going to make it horribly like him."

Behind the respectable shop fronts and houses,

Montrose was now home to a new community of writers and artists.

Far from its tradition of fishing and golf,

Montrose had become an unlikely hotbed of cultural revolutionaries,

fuelled by MacDiarmid's vision and energy.

He certainly was trying to kick off something.

You can't just start a revolution on your own so you need to create

a scene and I think he was producing literary magazines aplenty and

he seemed to have joined just about every political group in Montrose.

The list of names is like a roll call

of Scottish cultural life in the 1920s.

There was artist Edward Baird, writer and translator Willa Muir,

novelist Compton Mackenzie, composer Francis George Scott,

poet Helen Cruickshank...

Montrose in the 1920s was

the cultural capital of Scotland, there's no question.

It was the writers, artists and sculptors and composers.

There was a centrality,

and MacDiarmid was at the core of that,

exploding in all directions.

There's obviously something tremendously kind of energising

in having a group of like-minded people

close together and, you know, speaking to one another,

reading each other's work,

creating this idea of a kind of movement.

And the command centre was a newly built council house -

the home Grieve shared with his wife, Peggy, and their two children.

This is 16 Links Avenue, where the Grieves lived.

There were many visitors to the house.

There's a famous occasion when

MacDiarmid got himself a bit drunk

and ended up asleep in the bath...

naked.

And in order to get him out of the bath,

Edwin Muir had to crawl in the bathroom window, pull him out...

..laid him down in the living room in front of the fire

and had to leave him there.

It's...not very dignified for such a distinguished poet,

but there we are.

Edwin Muir wasn't always on bath duty.

He was married to the feminist writer Willa Muir.

Willa had been brought up in Montrose,

living over her parent's draper's shop on the high street.

She wrote two novels.

Her first was called Imagined Corners

and set in the fictional town of Calderwick.

"The town of Calderwick turned its back on the sea and the links,

"clinging with that instinct for the highest

"which distinguishes so many ancient boroughs

"to a ridge well above sea level

"along the back of which the high street lay like a spine

"with ribs running down on either side..."

Not only is it a thinly disguised description of Montrose,

it's also a comment on what it's like to be an educated woman

in a provincial Scottish town.

Dismissing the conventions of kaleyard,

she explores the stifling social and intellectual straitjacket

of small-town life in Scotland.

Willa was a radical new female addition to MacDiarmid's circle.

Also in attendance at gatherings and parties

was one of MacDiarmid's close neighbours.

Number 12.

And in number 12, there lived a young man,

about 16 years old at that time,

called Tom MacDonald

who was a regular visitor to the Grieve household.

He was much taken with MacDiarmid

and the intellectual conversation that he inspired,

and later he adopted the pen name of Fionn MacColla

and became one of Scotland's finest novelists.

"There is a mystery about language

"which is the mystery of life itself.

"When as long as Gaelic,

"and for that matter, its near descendant Scots, were spoken,

"a beauty and sensitivity, a light and tenderness,

"a wit and wisdom clothed not only the Scottish mind

"but Scotland itself."

MacDiarmid had now amassed a small army.

A group of revolutionary, bold, creative people

reading each other's work and sparking new ideas

forging a future for Scottish culture.

And by the mid-1920s, they were gaining an international reputation.

One leading French literary critic, Denis Saurat,

wrote of, "Le Groupe de la Renaissance Ecossaise".

The new movement now had a name - The Scottish Renaissance.

The Scottish press took notice, too.

"It cannot be said that

"this present group of Scottish writers lack confidence.

"They have Mr Hugh MacDiarmid. He is the new poet.

"His followers will have it that he is the new Burns."

MacDiarmid had seized attention,

now it was time to grasp the thistle.

He wanted to write a revolutionary poem.

A poem that would force the Scots

to take a long, hard look at themselves.

He'd been planning it for years...

..collecting fragments and scraps of ideas.

But it was an all-consuming project.

He'd need a quiet place to escape to piece it all together.

Well away from the pressures of Montrose.

So in August 1926,

he went on holiday carrying his suitcase of ideas.

Where he'd gone was a mystery until very recently.

when local teacher Andy Shanks

made the connection to the small village of St Cyrus,

just seven miles north of Montrose.

I've always been fascinated about

the story of its inception.

I mean, it took him years to put together.

And, of course, he writes a letter to the publisher

saying, "I'm trying to get it finished,"

and he always put the addresses of the place he'd stay.

And I was walking past here,

and in my head is all this stuff about MacDiarmid -

I always think about it when I'm walking here -

and I walked past there, and there, on the wall, Avondale.

It's the cottage where MacDiarmid wrote

probably the most important poem in the last century in Scots,

there, in the cottage.

"..what gin it's your ain vomit that you swill,

"and frae Life's gantin..."

"Move dimly like a dream wi'in while endless faith..."

A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle is about Scotland,

and that sense of take stock of what's around us,

stop and let's look, pause.

And a lot of it is very tragic

and very full of sorrow

at the loss of the preceding decades.

"Its deidly coils aboot my buik are thrawn

"A shaggy poulp, embracin' me and stingin',

"And as a serpent cauld agen' my hert,

"Its scales are poisoned..."

A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle is such

a...kind of cornucopia of different things.

There are translations from Russian poetry,

there are snippets of broad Scots,

there are little rhymes, bits of songs,

and all of these things he had done at different times.

I mean, you look at the size of this poem

and the breadth and scope of it,

this was an enormous thing he was doing.

He changed Scottish literary history.

"O that its prickles were a knife indeed,

"But it is thowless, flabby, dowf and numb.

"Sae sluggishly it drains my benmaist life..."

This poem was what MacDiarmid had been working towards for years.

"In mum obscurity it twines its obstinate rings

"And hings caressin'ly, its purpose whole.

"And this deid thing..."

What he's doing is taking an overview of Scotland

and the aftermath of the war and so on,

but also of the general strike in the 1920s.

So there's an immediate, almost journalistic commentary

in that respect.

And I think the two things that he comes to at the end,

or through...rather through the process,

is a total confidence that an independent Scotland

can structure this world politically

for its own...for the advantage of the people who live here

and that that's nothing unless you have a socialist revolution as well

that has to be egalitarian.

So the politics of that are there in the language of the poetry,

the...the escalation or rediscovery or reclamation of Scots

as a vital valid literary language,

and it's there in the structure of the poems

as he develops throughout his career, through his life.

Here, at last, was a fully modern poem in Scots,

as one critic noted, "..with all the force of a childbirth in church".

MacDiarmid had written a great national poem,

a blueprint for a modern Scotland.

In 1928, he proudly stood in a line-up of nationalist politicians

at the National Party of Scotland's first rally.

MacDiarmid's vision for an independent Scotland

appeared to be well on course.

But had anyone actually noticed?

In Glasgow in 1928, people turned out in their thousands,

queuing for hours in the cold.

So, who were they here to see?

It certainly wasn't MacDiarmid,

it wasn't an exciting new writer reading their latest work...

It was, in fact, Harry Lauder.

They'd come to see him as he made the transition

from star of the stage to star of the screen,

making a personal appearance

at the premier of his first film, Huntingtower.

The man - or woman - in the street

paid little attention to the new poetry.

They were far too busy going to the flicks.

It's often said that when people came to the cinema

they were walking on carpet

for the first time,

they were experiencing electric light.

There's a lovely story of a little old lady in Brechin.

The trade press reports in 1919

that she went to the cinema on a regular basis

because it only cost her tuppence,

and for that, she would have an evening in,

she wouldn't have to heat her house,

she wouldn't have to light her house.

She came in, she wrapped herself in a shawl and she fell asleep.

So, you were trying to appeal to

as wide an audience as you possibly could.

It really is an attempt at a mass audience.

Scotland's very own tartan national treasure

was then catapulted to Hollywood

and was seen larking about alongside Chaplin.

Lauder was a natural for film

and the arrival of sound provided the perfect medium for his act.

When sound comes, again, we go back to Lauder

as the variety artist

where he's performing his familiar songs,

songs that the audience if they so wished could join in with

and knew very well.

And that really becomes his hallmark, as it were,

in the early sound era.

# Roamin' in the gloamin' with my lassie by my side

# When the sun has gone to rest

# That's the time that we love best... #

Lauder's films depicted a Scotland that audiences were familiar with...

..but didn't actually inhabit.

It's tartanry, it's the kaleyard, it's rural Scotland,

and in some respects, that was often because dramatists felt

that this was when Scotland was at its most distinctive.

It's often said that if you wanted to make a Scottish subject,

you to set it in the 19th century or earlier

because that was what was distinctively Scottish.

The 20th-century was not distinctively Scottish.

Now, for some Scottish cultural critics,

that's a source of concern

because it means increasingly that the Scottish population

is subject to another culture, as it were,

a culture that is not distinctively Scottish.

But audiences weren't particularly bothered,

and going to the cinema quickly became part of everyday life.

MacDiarmid's radical writings couldn't compete.

His masterpiece poem, A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle,

had only sold 99 copies in its first year.

There was no appetite for political revolution either.

In the 1929 general election,

the Nationalists failed to make an impact,

limping home with just over 3,000 votes in total.

MacDiarmid was disappointed,

but he had more pressing problems to deal with.

His outspoken views were getting him into trouble.

He's very uncompromising,

but uncompromising people don't often find themselves greatly loved,

and this was MacDiarmid's problem.

He had also been so provocative and so outrageous

in some of the things he'd said and so antiestablishment

that he was becoming more and more unemployable.

So MacDiarmid himself was in despair at really getting anything done,

of really making the changes that he could see needed to be made.

At home, his marriage was disintegrating,

and his long-suffering wife, Peggy, left with their two children.

He was heartbroken.

In 1929, MacDiarmid left Montrose and his job.

He left under a cloud,

deemed too left-wing, too nationalist,

too revolutionary.

He drifted to England

and from one disastrous writing job to another.

Not the ideal place for a self-confessed Anglophobe.

The problem was MacDiarmid was eccentric,

and he...but he knew the power of eccentricity,

and being eccentric means being on the fringe.

He was able to look at things in a different way from other people,

he refused to accept a lot of the commonplaces

about British culture

and the values that British culture placed on itself.

But then he would always just go just a little too...too far.

MacDiarmid met his second wife, Valda, in a bar in London.

He was vulnerable.

He was drinking heavily, destitute and in poor health.

To help him recover,

the couple retreated to the remote island of Whalsay in Shetland.

It was a new start,

but MacDiarmid was now living at the extreme edge of poverty

at the extreme edge of Scotland.

He was a man at war with his own country and at war with himself.

The heady days of Montrose seemed a distant memory.

So, what of MacDiarmid's vision for Scotland?

What would happen to the hungry new talent,

the green shoots of his cultural renaissance?

In fact, MacDiarmid's ideas had spread beyond Montrose.

In the Edinburgh suburb of Corstorphine,

a couple have discovered that their house

became the new literary hub of the Scottish Renaissance.

-We bought the house in 1975.

-It was our house in 1975, yes.

We bought it directly from Helen Cruickshank.

We bought her book. That told us a tremendous amount...

Yes, that was the main...

..about the house and about the people who had been here

and what the house was used for.

It was used as a meeting place, really.

It was for everybody that was anybody

in literature or art during her lifetime.

Made it very interesting.

Helen Cruickshank had grown up in Hillside just outside Montrose

and had spent most of her working life as a civil servant in London.

In 1924, she moved back to Scotland to care for her elderly mother.

And they bought a house called Dinnieduff.

This photograph was taken here in this window.

I can't understand how they got all those people in, it's not that big.

-That's Helen's mother.

-Yes.

-Edwin Muir.

There's Willa Muir as well.

And that's Helen at the back here.

I'm very fond of dialect and Scottish dialect

and Scottish poetry,

so it just...it meant a lot when I discovered that all this

had been going on in this... And we'd bought it.

It was super.

Helen rekindled the renaissance atmosphere of 16 Links Avenue,

opening her home to writers and artists.

Dinnieduff became the new headquarters

of the Scottish cultural scene.

MacDiarmid made occasional visits.

Helen was all too aware of his misfortunes.

She would often send food parcels and blankets to him in Shetland.

Helen was always very generous with her time and with her hospitality.

People stayed here often, but in a tiny little bedroom,

and she called the bedroom the prophet's chamber.

It was very, very sparse.

But at least it was a bed for the night.

Some of the artists stayed here, the writers stayed here

for days, weeks at a time if they were down on their luck.

But she had...the Muirs,

erm...Hamish Henderson slept here,

the great Hugh MacDiarmid slept here,

Dr Nan Shepherd stayed in this room and many more.

I mean, it was a proper prophet's chamber.

In 1932, a new novel by an unknown writer dropped through the letterbox.

And from the moment they started reading,

neither Helen Cruikshank nor her mother could put it down.

The pair immediately recognised

the hills and fields of Angus and the Mearns,

the place where they'd come from, the place they both called home.

Sunset Song follows the story of a young girl, Chris Guthrie,

growing up at the turn of the century

in a crofting community in Northeast Scotland.

As people and places are torn apart

by the carnage of the First World War,

their traditional way of life disappears forever.

The author, Lewis Grassic Gibbon,

had grown up less than 20 miles from Montrose.

Many years later, Gibbon wrote the novel

from his home in Welwyn Garden City.

He wrote it in six weeks,

often late into the night with practically no revisions.

"So, that was Chris and her reading and schooling,

"two Chrisses there were that fought for her heart..."

After it was published, it immediately caused a sensation.

"..and learning was brave and fine one day,

"and the next, you'd waken..."

There's a fantastic passage where she talks about

the Scots Chris and the English Chris - very famous.

Perhaps a cliche nowadays it's become so famous,

but it's deeply important.

"So, that was Chris and her reading and schooling,

"two Chrisses there were

"that fought for her heart and tormented her.

"You hated the land and the coarse speak of the folk

"and learning was brave and fine one day

"and the next, you'd waken

"with the peewits crying across the hills

"deep and deep,

"crying in the heart of you..."

It ties into the society.

The English Chris is her aspiration to learn, education.

The education system at the time is English, Anglo-centric,

the language is English.

The society that she's in

and her language that she's grown up with is Scots.

So there's a conflict there that shouldn't really be there.

What set the book apart was the way

Gibbon blended English and Scots together.

The characters spoke English, but using the natural rhythm of Scots.

Sunset Song was the breakthrough novel of the Scottish Renaissance.

What he is definitely doing is he is creating a voice of modern Scotland

because that is the voice

that most people in modern Scotland actually use.

It's a voice which is English

but which is inflected with strong elements of Scots.

So you can show your identity in the language of another,

if you want to put it that way,

but you can do it in a way that also makes it your own.

But who exactly was this new mystery author, Lewis Grassic Gibbon?

Helen Cruickshank was desperate to find out

and sent a letter to the book's publisher.

"We would be delighted to welcome Lewis Grassic Gibbon at Dinnieduff

"if he or she were visiting Edinburgh."

An immediate reply came from Welwyn Garden City,

signed in the author's real name, James Leslie Mitchell.

Just as MacDiarmid had done,

Mitchell gave himself a Scottish pen-name.

He came and stayed in the prophet's chamber many times

and made friends with Helen Cruikshank, MacDiarmid

and the circle of Scottish writers.

As MacDiarmid later acknowledged, Mitchell had cracked it.

He has succeeded in finding...

"..a Scottish literary voice.

"It was the first major Scottish work of fiction

"in which any kind of Scots was used throughout

"for narrative as well as dialogue.

"This volcanic emergence of the Scots genius

"at its most veridical

"at the very time when the general view was that Scots was dead

"and incapable of becoming the medium of modern literature."

The Scottish writers who were the ones in the know,

the people like MacDiarmid, Neil Gunn, Compton Mackenzie,

James Barke, Helen Cruickshank,

they all saw instantly that this is a landmark in Scottish literature.

And it was republished, I think, five times within a matter of weeks.

And I think he was as surprised as his publisher was, actually,

at the...you know, the rip-roaring success that the book was.

He, all of a sudden, was catapulted

to the forefront of the Scottish literary renaissance.

And it wasn't just a book that spoke to Scots -

it had universal appeal.

The New York Times voted it Book of the Week,

and a Hollywood film company showed interest.

Mitchell had succeeded where MacDiarmid had failed.

His Scots voice would find its way into the homes of millions of people.

They became great friends.

MacDiarmid came to visit Mitchell at his home.

The two pioneers of Scottish letters collaborated

and published an anthology together.

Well, this one is called Scottish Scene,

or The Intelligent Man's Guide to Albyn.

And, of course, whenever they're using words like this,

you have to be slightly ironic and realise that what they're doing

is playing with the conventions of the time.

So, you've got the map of Scotland,

and you've got Lewis Grassic Gibbon, or James Leslie Mitchell,

being run out of town by the minister,

and you've got MacDiarmid up in Shetland looking down.

So it's a sense of looking at the whole of the scene of Scotland

from different perspectives and in different ways.

They dedicated the book to their friend Helen Cruickshank,

acknowledgement of her unstinting support.

Scottish Scene would be their only collaboration.

On 7 February, just one week before his 34th birthday,

Mitchell died suddenly.

Of the many letters of sympathy received by his wife,

one came from MacDiarmid in Shetland.

"Leslie's untimely death is a serious blow.

"He had achieved a very remarkable tale of work

"and won a definite place in the history of Scottish literature."

A simple ceremony was held at Arbuthnott Kirk

to lay his ashes in the Mearns earth.

Many of Scotland's writers were there,

including Helen Cruikshank.

"This man set the flame of his native genius

"under the cumbering whin of the untilled field.

"Lit a fire in the Mearns to illuminate Scotland,

"clearing the sullen soil for a richer yield."

So, what had this group of artists, of resistance fighters,

left behind for future generations?

MacDiarmid found recognition for his writing in his later years,

but his political vision for Scotland has not been realised.

He did witness the rise of the Scottish National Party,

falling in and out with them in true MacDiarmid style.

"It was Ewan Tavendale, him she hadn't seen since the day of the..."

Perhaps his biggest achievement was having the conviction

to step forward and fight at the right time.

The time when Scotland's culture was fast disappearing.

I feel most proud of him

for reacting against the worst of Scotland,

even though he probably is

some of the aspects of the worst of Scotland himself.

But he doesn't want to, you know, be top of the class,

he wants to shake things up a little,

and I think that's something that Scotland can always use.

What did the Scottish Renaissance reawaken or lead to?

What did it regenerate or what did it rejuvenate or bring about?

Well, you would not have a political awareness in Scotland

that you have now.

You wouldn't have the self-confidence

in the writing of Irvine Welsh or James Kelman

or Alasdair Grey or AL Kennedy or Janice Galloway.

All of that comes as a legacy

from the revolutionary aspirations of MacDiarmid

and his fellow writers and artists in the 1920s in Montrose.

"So, that was Chris and her reading and schooling,

"two Chrisses there were that fought for her heart..."

In the wake of Scotland's renaissance,

Scots began to recapture a sense of who they were.

They saw Scotland transformed.

MacDiarmid's band of revolutionaries is owed a great debt.

Today, at Montrose Academy,

the significance of their legacy is clear.

Once, children were disciplined for speaking Scots in class.

Now, they're reading it aloud from modern Scottish novels.

"..the beauty of it in the sweetness of the Scottish land and skies..."

21st-century Scotland is a country sure in its own voice,

and it stands on the shoulders of those 1920s cultural fighters

who fought for Scotland's voice

and won.