Scottish Clans and Tartans, published in 1973 by the Hamlyn Group in UK and in the USA by Harmony Books, is printed in four colors on coated paper by Mondadori in Italy. It’s still a tight little book, Smyth sewn as a book printed on coated paper really needs to be — the coating on the paper will affect the adhesion of the glue, thus making perfect binding a risky option. We inherited our copy from an aunt. It is one of the thousands of books which show you pictures of the tartans of Scotland and tell you a bit about the clans which from time immemorial are said to have sported these colors. Our author, Ian Grimble, who patently has a dog in this fight, starts off “The origins of Scotland’s clans and their distinctive dress are wrapped in controversy. Yet their story can be traced back with certainty to the middle of the 5th century, and to Ireland where the Scots then lived.” The controversy in which they might be said to be wrapped arises merely if you wish to deny reality.
Prior to the eighteenth century the Scottish Highlands and Islands, separated by high mountains from the more fertile southern and eastern parts of the country, were populated by Gaelic-speaking peoples regarded as ruffians and potential criminals by the rest of the country. At that time the Highlands were essentially part of Ireland whence they had been settled. Better to say that the Highlanders and their culture were Irish — until recently when roads were built communication by sea was the royal road to neighbourliness — and indeed the language the Highlanders spoke was referred to by outsiders as Irish or Erse. Their “distinctive dress” was, surprise, surprise, exactly what the Irish wore, a long plain nightshirt-like thing called a “liéne” belted at the waist. In the seventeenth century there evolved a garment called “breacan” — a plaid wrapped around you and cast over your shoulder, secured by a belt at the waist. In Scotland plaid just means a long piece of cloth thrown over one shoulder, with no reference to any kind of patterning. American usage takes plaid to be a synonym for tartan. In Scotland it’s not. (Nor is plaid pronounced in Scotland to rhyme with “sad” but rather with “suede”. See Plaid Friday for a picture of a modern-day plaid.)
The kilt was in fact invented in the 1730s by an Englishman called Thomas Rawlinson, a Lancashire businessman who had established a foundry in Invergarry in order to be closer to the wood he needed as fuel. He noticed that the “breacan” was an inconvenient form of dress for his wood-cutting and furnace-stoking workers, and had a local tailor make a garment which we’d all recognize as a plain old kilt. They called it “philibeg”. This garb became quite popular and caught on sufficiently for it to be worn extensively at the nearby Battle of Culloden in 1745. Determined to destroy once and for all a Highland society which they saw as distinctly non-cooperative and dangerously different, the victorious London government acted decisively in 1747 with the Disarming Act. Chiefs were deprived of hereditary jurisdictions, everyone was disarmed, the bagpipes were proscribed, and “plaid, philibeg, trews, shoulder-belts . . . tartans or parti-coloured plaid or stuff” were banned throughout Scotland under penalty of six months in jail, or for a second offense transportation for seven years. Philibegs were at that time made in variegated patterns. Plain men had plain brown pattered “tartans”, a word which originally designated a kind of cloth rather than any patterning, and the chiefs would sport more colorful patterns, which no doubt cost more. There was however no association of this or that pattern or sett with this or that clan or location. The ban worked very effectively, but there was one loophole in the legislation: army regiments were exempted, and from 1745 onwards there began to be many Highland regiments. The Black Watch, formed in 1725, were the first, and they all clung to their own, just made-up, tartan setts. Soldiers eventually changed from the “breacan” to the philibeg kilt, and this helped eventually to popularize the garb as typically Scottish.
An important contributor to the myth of the ancient kilt was, untypically, Sir Walter Scott, who usually got his facts right. He asserted the kilt’s ancient origins in the course of his debunking review of James Macpherson’s Ossian poems in an 1805 Edinburgh Review. Macpherson, and a colleague also called Macpherson, this one a John, had set out to “prove” that the Irish of Ireland were descended from the “Irish” of Scotland — the exact opposite of the truth — and as a part of this initiative had “discovered” ancient bardic writings by a Scottish poet named Ossian whose work could thus be seen to be ancestral to all of Irish literature. All of Ossian’s oeuvre, published in Macpherson’s translation from 1760 to 1765, was however written by James Macpherson himself, not translated. Subsequently he had to publish the “original” Gaelic versions which he’d cobbled together from bits and pieces of original material. Caught on the rising tide of romanticism Ossian became a European sensation. In 1854 Mrs Wilde described her naming of her son Oscar Fingal O’Fflahertie Wills Wilde as positively Ossianic.
Strangely enough Sir Walter Scott it was who finally put the lock on the tartan kilt “tradition”. In 1822 King George IV visited Edinburgh and Sir Walter was the master of ceremonies. He got everyone to dress up in tartan kilts and thus cemented the idea that kilts were what Scots wore. The kilt had historically been held in pretty low regard, and everyone now scrambled to get decked out in their own tartan. The heir to the chief of clan Macpherson got a tartan off the peg: what is now known as Macpherson tartan had previously been No.155, before its name evolved to “Kidd” after a Mr Kidd had bought it in bulk to clothe his West Indian slaves. Purists were enraged at the tartanification of the country. Lord Macaulay, a Highlander by birth, snorted that King George “could give no more striking proof of his respect for the usages which had prevailed in Scotland before the Union, than by disguising himself in what, before the Union, was considered by nine Scotchmen out of ten as the dress of a thief”. Odd in a way for Sir Walter Scott to go whole hog like this; he was a Borderer, and it’s not like he filled the Waverly Novels with Highlanders in kilts. The running was finally taken up by the weavers, notably Wilsons of Bannockburn, and it is due to the commercial interest that every family name with even the remotest connection to Scotland now glories in the possession of its own unique tartan sett.
When I was a youth, working vacation jobs at Lochcarron Handloom Weavers in Galashiels, (one of the contributors of samples of tartans to Ian Grimble’s book) I learned to recognize and distinguish say Ancient MacKenzie from Modern MacKenzie. One was alleged to be the tartan before it was buried after Culloden, and the other the result of color changes consequent upon being buried in the peat for many years. This nonsense (double nonsense since the MacKenzie clan had had no specific tartan before Culloden, nor of course had any other clan) was accepted by all — after all, who’s around to dispute the assertion? Its real meaning was that Bill McKenzie from Ohio needed to buy two ties, not just one. Marketing is not something only book publishers get up to.
So the kilt is only 290 years old, and clan tartans about 200. This is of course not nothing, but it is pretty insignificant when compared with the claims made by the enthusiasts, and the assumptions of the man/woman in the street. It wasn’t until Highland society had been obliterated by law, by emigration, and by clearances of people in favor of deer, that the Scots began to feel the need for a tradition celebrating the imaginary world they had lost.
Most of this has been cribbed from Hugh Trevor-Roper’s piece in The Invention of Tradition edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Trevor Ranger (CUP, 1983).
Making Book 