david goldie
Hearken to yer country’s priggin’!
Areye deaf, or are ye thrawn?
······
Men are wintet fae the Northlan’,
Men wi’ shanks to weer the kilt,
Men wi’ Bannockburn’s memory,
Men ’at winna warp nor wilt.^40In the hands of a writer like Abel, dialect verse is not so much the means of
adding a distinctive regional voice to a diverse and complex Britishness. It is instead
the articulation of a more or less common and straightforward British attitude
translated into the language of its regions. This is not to cast blame on Abel, but
is rather to illustrate the powerful centripetal forces exerted during wartime: the
threat of a common enemy was plainly a powerful force for the expression of unified
rather than dissident opinion.
Such a centripetal tendency does, however, hold other benefits for the poetry
of the British regions or subaltern nations. Once such literatures are accepted as
assenting rather than dissentient literatures, once they are accepted as literatures
that augment rather than threaten the dominant literature, then they become
available as a stylistic or rhetorical resource to those who have been formed outside
or at the margins of their traditions. The best way in which this might be illustrated
is to look at the poetry of Alan Mackintosh. A popular and brave officer in the
Seaforth Highlanders, and a bagpipe-player and Gaelic speaker, Mackintosh was
clearly a more self-conscious Scot than Sorley, Sterling, or Brown, although, like
them, he was a distinctive product of the British public school system and of Oxford.
Part of Mackintosh’s lineage was Highland Scottish, deriving on his father’s side
from Inverness and Ross-shire. Mackintosh, though, was born in Brighton, and
had strong roots in English Nonconformist liberalism on his mother’s side. After
attending Brighton College, he went to St Paul’s School and then to Christ Church,
Oxford, on a Classical Scholarship. The Scottish attributes for which he would be
remembered—the concerns with Scottish music and literature and with the Gaelic
language—appear to have developed fully (as was the case with Buchan) only
during his time at Oxford. It was there that this otherwise ostensibly English public
schoolboy first manifested his highland identity in consistent way: cultivating, as his
tutor John Murray put it, ‘above all, the sentiments and the arts of the Highlands’.^41
In other words, Mackintosh’s ‘Scottishness’ was less the product of an informing
national culture, absorbed in the long process of formation, than a consciously
acquired allegiance to a land of which he had only partial direct knowledge. His
national identity was, in this sense, elective rather than involuntary—the result of
an act of choosing rather than of cultural submersion or interpellation.
(^40) Abel, ‘Mair Men!’, ibid. 75–6.
(^41) John Murray, ‘Memoir’, in E. A. Mackintosh,War, the Liberator and Other Pieces(London: John
Lane, 1918), 4.