The Highlands and Islands of Scotland

by A. R. Hope Moncrieff

That the tartans thickest lie.

The Highland regiments grew used to getting more than their fair share of foreign service; but for long their fiery spirits were apt to flare up into mutiny against real or imaginary injustice. After such risings, when it was thought necessary to make an example, men would come forward to offer themselves for trial and punishment as scapegoats. Stewart tells a story of one private, marched to Edinburgh to be tried for his life, who got leave of his officer to turn aside alone to Glasgow for the settlement of important business, and, true to his word, made a dramatic appearance at the last moment among his fellow-prisoners, having struggled with accidental delays like the hero of Schiller’s Bürgschaft.

It was vulgar crime that appears to have been almost unknown among these touchy braves, whose virtues and failings remind us of honourable schoolboys. By tens of thousands such men laid their bones all over the world to pave the British Empire. Till the end of the century fresh regiments could be raised from the Highlands, as well as corps of Fencible militia and volunteers. The drain of the long French war first made the supply run short. The ranks of the Highland regiments began to be recruited from outside, from the scum of London and Dublin, as Stewart bitterly complains; and this alloy went far to debase their early character. There are too few real Highlanders in the ranks since the glens from which they were recruited have been stocked with sheep and deer in place of men. The Celt seems to have much lost his martial ardour, now that other careers are open to him. In our day recruits have actually been rejected from the Black Watch because they could speak nothing but Gaelic, or perhaps as showing too much of the ancestral grudge against discipline.

Of late years more care has been taken to give Scotsmen only the privilege of serving in regiments for which recruits would willingly come forward from all parts of the kingdom. The majority of “Highland” soldiers are at least Lowland Scots, and some battalions have a considerable percentage of real Highlanders, which will be much larger in the militia contingent. But, as General Stewart noticed, Sassenachs, Irishmen, Cockneys, and other aliens soon catch the infection of enthusiasm for tartans, bagpipes, and the proud traditions of regiments that are the Zouaves or Bersaglieri of our service. They have lost, indeed, the old bonds of caste and custom that held them closely together, for good and evil, like the Brahmin sepoys who stirred mutiny in our Indian army. But still esprit de corps is strong enough in regiments to make them jealously loyal to their own special uniform. In the South African war they needed more than one order to make them hide their showy tartan by a khaki apron worn in front: the other side an enemy is not expected to see. And when prosaic War Office authorities talked of smudging all the bright stripes and checks into some such plain dull tint as a less striking mark for Boer rifles, the veldt “heather was on fire” with wrath of Seaforth and Gordon Highlanders who could not tell you where Seaforth is, or how the Gay Gordons came to have to do with the Highlands. To reconcile this sentiment with practical exigencies, a Scottish artist has lately been at work designing tartans that will preserve the distinctive check in a low-toned scheme of colour. This would be but a development of the old practice, which in several cases distinguished a showy design for full dress from the less voyant effect of the clan’s hunting tartan.

It must be remembered that only in recent days has the Highlander, like the Red Indian, become an abstract personage. The sentiment of Highland soldiery was originally a more concrete one. They had faint idea of general patriotism, and their loyalty was not so much to their race as to their own chiefs and kin. The first bodies raised in the reign of King William were largely Campbells and other loyal clans; but after the rising of 1715 they were disbanded as of doubtful trustworthiness. On the representation of General Wade and other officers, however, the experiment was again tried of keeping the peace of the Highlands by independent companies, on the principle of setting a thief to catch a thief. Contemporary scandal-mongers even hinted that these watchmen took turns of stealing and retrieving, so as to earn the old suspicion against custodes ipsos. Each company would wear the tartan of its captain, and be largely made up of his clansmen or dependants, who conceived a new respect for law when it set them in arms against their hereditary enemies. One captain was charged with stripping his tenants of their best plaids for the soldiers to cut a gallant figure in on parade occasions.

LOCH LINNHE

When these companies came to be embodied as a regular regiment, the question of uniform made a sore point among men of different clans. To meet this difficulty the dark neutral Black Watch tartan is said to have been devised, which forms the groundwork of several others; but it is also claimed as one of the Campbell patterns, and half the original captains belonged to that clan, foremost in furnishing soldiers to guard Whig thrones. There were Highlanders of that day who would as soon have worn a shirt of Nessus as Argyll’s trappings. Later corps, raised by noblemen in their own country, naturally took the tartan of their chiefs, whose names and colours are preserved in our modern regiments, when Gordon and Cameron Highlanders are as like to be Smiths and Robertsons. The grey kilting of the London Scottish corps seems related to the fact that no clan tartan would be generally acceptable to Highlanders of Hampstead, Highgate, and Hammersmith, few of whom could pass a searching examination in tartanology.

Even ardent Celtic eyes, military or civilian, of our generation might well be dazzled into confusing the brilliant array of Macdougalls and Macdonalds, of Macleods and Macmillans; and it is not only the Sassenach who needs the help of an illustrated dictionary for distinguishing between some hundred recognised patterns, many of them differing only by a shade, or a thin stripe of colour. Some clans, as the Campbells and the Macdonalds, split into several branches, have as many tartans, for the most part bearing a general resemblance, yet to be recognised by an expert. Some give themselves the luxury of different sets, one for full dress, another worn only by the chief and his family. There is reason to understand that in old days a greater variety of colours was displayed by the rich, while the poor had to be content with simpler designs. Some patterns seem to be of no small antiquity, handed down like the wampum records of a Red Indian tribe; others may have been modified by circumstances or designed in rivalry to those of neighbouring clans. Certain of the best-known clans, the Gordons and the Grahams, for instance, came from the Lowlands, and would have to equip themselves with a becoming tartan, as has been done for Douglases and Dundases in quite modern times. Certain tartans displayed in shop windows are undoubtedly of recent sartorial origin. That now worn by the Cameron Highlanders was a blend designed for the sake of harmony with King George’s red coat. The older patterns perhaps depended on knowledge of or access to the natural dyes used in them, got from heather, broom, roots, barks, seaweeds, or what not. Perhaps they were coloured to some extent by defiance to hereditary enemies, as in the case of the Campbell greens and the Cameron reds, contrasting like the tints of Rembrandt and of Botticelli. The hue would often be suggested by the need of slinking unseen upon sly game, over braes of turf and heather; old writers indeed describe the general effect of tartan as brown or heathery; and more glaring patterns could not have been for everyday wear.