The Arnold Kemp Archives

Christmas in Scotland

THIS year the Herald has, after a period of some years, resumed publication on Boxing Day and January 2. The decision arose not from officiousness but from movements in the market-place which could not be ignored. As we made our preparations, it became clear that New Year is not what it was. Most people would rather have Christmas Day off than January 1.

Christmas is often regarded as the English festival and New Year the Scots. The reality is more complicated but their modern mingling is not surprising because essentially they are the same midwinter festivals that somehow became separated from each other. The English Christmas, Christian but always with its pagan undertones, has merged with Scotland’s Auld Yuill, more frankly irreligious.

Tom Johnston, wartime secretary for Scotland

THE day before the premature closure of Ravenscraig was announced I chanced to be in Caledonia Books, one of the excellent second-hand bookshops in the West End of Glasgow. Among my purchases was Memories, the autobiography of Tom Johnston, Secretary of State for Scotland during the war. He is remembered today mostly for the foundation of the Hydro-Electric Board but there was more to him than that.

When Churchill summoned him to London in 1941 and persuaded him — rather against his will, for he wanted to write books — to join the national Government he made two conditions. One was that he didn’t want to take any money for office during the war. ”My resources are adequate to my needs and I don’t want to make a song and dance about it.”

Drinking with the Scottish Lords

The House of Lords remains an amiably dotty place. We are at dinner with the Scottish peers, an annual affair to which I am from time to time lucky enough to be invited. It is a very enjoyable evening, especially because they don’t allow speeches. Instead civilised conversation is the rule.

Jumping the queue

THE way a nation chooses to queue says much about its culture and economy. A queue represents, the theorists would say, an imbalance between supply and demand and it is at this margin that the tout and the black-marketeer make a living.

Whatever kind of queue it is, whether in Moscow for the bare essentials of life or in Glasgow for tickets to the big game, there are always people who beat the system. They have friends in places high and low; they pull strings; as the French say, they have pistons. I suspect that I always pay more for my air tickets than the chap sitting next to me because beating the system takes more nerve, time and energy than I am prepared to invest in the task.

English and Scottish cultural nationalism

The Herald, Editorial Notebook, 1 August 1992

NATIONALISM, in Britain at least, tends to be discussed in terms of the Scottish and Welsh varieties. Yet English nationalism is the more powerful and a curious aspect of it is that it dissembles, pretending that it does not exist at all.

The fragmentation o the labour market

…Since the war we have, of course, lived through changes which were retarded by various conservative forces, such as managerial inertia and trade union immunities, but not ultimately denied. Our heavy industries have been in decline for a very long time (in Glasgow since before the First World War).

More recently, the drive for profitability in newly competitive arenas which have been privatised or liberalised, together with increased exposure to international competition and the introduction of new technologies, has been squeezing labour out of the system.

This process was masked by the boom in the service industries in the eighties which, as it turned out, was insecurely based on a credit binge. Had the IRA succeeded in blowing up the tower at Canary Wharf, there would have been gratitude in surprising places.

Swiss lies and Nazi gold

 

T

HE GIRL, IN the shoe shop can’t help me, nor can the kindly hotel receptionist who comes out into the street scratching her head in puzzlement.  Somehow, given Switzerland’s obsessive tradition of mercantile discretion, it seems completely appropriate that the that the system to trace money which may belong to Nazi victims should be conducted behind an unobtrusive door in a line of little shops at Number 7 Seestrasse, Zurich.

Gitobu Imanyara

EVERY so often you meet a person whose courage draws you up short and makes you ashamed of your petty grievances. Sometimes the courage is private and personal; sometimes it is in the public domain. In Budapest earlier this month I had the great privilege of meeting an African who has twice come within an inch of death in the cause of freedom.

I would like to be able to claim Gitobu Imanyara as a journalist, for he is the editor of the Nairobi Law Monthly. Indeed, he is a journalist in that his magazine goes far beyond the bounds of normal legal commentary and is detested by the Kenyan regime for its exposes of corruption, brutality and malpractice. But Imanyara is really a lawyer.

A tea party in Hungary

IT is a sunny spring afternoon in Buda. At the British Embassy they are giving a tea party. The guests, the Brits attending a conference in the town, are ushered through the magnificent old mansion, dating from the great days of the Austro-Hungarian empire. They admire the circular marble staircase and the Bluthner grand piano on which recitals are given from time to time.

Hostility to science

The Herald, Editorial Notebook, 18 July 1992.

THIS week I had the pleasure of sitting at table with some distinguished scientists, and the conversation turned to the hostility towards science in Britain. In the past few years this dislike has acquired a new virulence and is exceeded only by the detestation of European bureaucrats, the scapegoats of the age.

It is a persistent theme. My father, a cultivated man, had a contempt for science to the extent that he tacitly encouraged me to slack at it in school. The Edinburgh Academy was at that time dedicated to producing recruits for the law, the civil service, and the ruling classes. Science teachers were in my day a bit of a joke. Our hero was the classics master who, it was said, consumed a bottle of whisky for breakfast and had verses published from time to time in Punch. I gather that life at the academy is much changed.

The Goschen Proportion/Barnett

The Herald 25 July 1992. This is an interesting piece from Arnold Kemp on the history of the Barnett formula. Jackie Kemp

WE start with a confession. The Herald has, these past few weeks, been mis-spelling the name of the formula by which Scotland’s share of UK public expenditure is decided.

In our error we have at least been consistent, referring throughout to the Goshen/Barnett formula. This must have set up an irritation somewhere in my subconscious. No-one had complained or questioned us. But for no particular reason beyond a vague conviction that something was amiss, I looked it up.

A museum in Cromarty.

The Herald, Editorial Notebook, 29 Jan 1993.

The museum of my youth was a dead fish on a plate. The visitor was invited to stare at inanimate objects behind glass. Fustian prose described them. Cromarty Courthouse is as much state of the art as its resources permit: it is animated and animating. But it is not trivialised a la Disneyland: it imparts a great deal of information elegantly and painlessly.

The first surprise, after you have negotiated the narrow steps, is an animatronic figure of Sir Thomas Urquhart (1611-1660). He was a bigwig who lived in Cromarty Tower. He was a royalist, a soldier, a scholar and, above all, an eccentric.

On the eve of the devolution referendum 1997

The Herald, September 10, 1997.

Those of us who remember the fiasco of 1979 approach tomorrow with nervousness.  In the last days of that referendum campaign the Yes majority dissolved and Scotland lost its nerve.  A generation that had worked for change felt disillusioned and betrayed.  The Thatcher years began and a political winter fell upon Scotland.

A flyte on the neglect of Hugh MacDiarmid

By Arnold Kemp, the Herald, August 15, 1992

THIS week has seen the hundredth anniversary of the birth of C. M Grieve (Hugh MacDiarmid). The highlight was a BBC Radio Scotland broadcast on Tuesday evening, mostly from the Queen Street studio in Edinburgh before an invited audience but partly from the snug in Milne’s Bar.

There was original music, from Ronald Stevenson, Michael Marra and Hue and Cry. Some Day, a short play by MacDiarmid, was performed, together with a new work, Root to a Tree, by Donald Campbell, which explored some of the contradictions in the MacDiarmid tradition. Norman MacCaig and Adam McNaughtan read poetry, MacCaig including his famous recommendation that MacDiarmid’s centenary should be marked by a minute’s pandemonium.

On inflation

THE barber paused in mid-snip when the radio interrupted its nonstop pop to announce that interest rates had gone to 15%. That’s a pound on the price of the haircut, he said. By the following lunchtime the proprietor of a local restaurant was expressing great relief at the news that the 10% rate had been restored. We’re all working for the banks now; and many people are running to stand still.

That evening I was sitting at dinner with a leading member of the financial and business community, a pillar of the London Stock Exchange. He startled me by saying that what this country needed was a little inflation.

A search for Haddock Mornay in Cape Cod

A CHILLY wind blows across the grasses and dunes of the Cape, a narrow arm of land which juts out into the ocean south of Boston, but bright sunshine is pouring through the window as I write.

Geoffrey Palmer, Scotland’s first black professor

ON the way back from Kelso races on Thursday the bus stopped at the little village of Oxton and our hosts got up an impromptu dominoes tournament in the pleasant little pub there. I was swiftly wiped out in the first round by one Godfrey (”Geoff”) Palmer. He went on to contest the final, in which he was narrowly beaten by a senior Labour local government politician.

Bad waiters

THE head waiter’s beard bristles as he takes our order in a slightly sinister manner. ”Would it be possible,” I ask politely, ”to turn the heating up a little?” One of our party has just arrived from Los Angeles and is feeling the cold.

”No,” he barks. ”It’s at maximum power.” Not for the first time I wonder how on earth people get into jobs for which they are manifestly not suited. An experienced head waiter would deal with the problem more gracefully. He would beam his co-operation, say ”certainly, sir”, twiddle with the control and allow our imaginations to do the rest.

Such subtlety is beyond our friend. Nor can he let matters rest. By now he has the look of a villainous walrus. His small powerful body is hunched in an attitude of pure hatred. ”Too many people,” he says with a bluntness that could be described as offensive, ”sit on top of their coal fires.”

A Scot’s dislike of broccoli

The Herald, Editorial Notebook, 20 Feb 1993.

THEY are serving broccoli again at the White House, as a side dish to taxation stew. Mrs Clinton has restored them to the menu from which they had been hounded by Mr Bush. He also banned them from the presidential jet, Air Force One.

A fishermen’s watering hole in Kelso

KELSO. Two fishermen are having a mournful conversation. ”There’s no water,” says one. I look up from my book, for in the bar where we are all sitting it is impossible not to eavesdrop, and stare out of the window. There, where the Tweed and the Teviot meet, there seems plenty of water to me.