Ruaraidh Arascain is Mhàirr

by Alasdair MacCaluim

(First Published in Scottish Workers Republic, 1997)

“In the early years of Scottish Nationalism some odd types turned up, but none came odder than Erskine” - Andrew Marr (1992:65).

Modern Scottish nationalism has often been accused both by its supporters and detractors of being over concerned with economics at the expense of culture.  Language in particular has never played the central role in twentieth century Scottish nationalism which it has done in Wales and Ireland.  There has, however, always been a Gaelic nationalist element within the independence movement which has aimed to bring Gaelic to the forefront of the political agenda.  In the early years of the organised nationalist movement one man was notable for calling for a Gaelic national movement in Scotland to mirror Sinn Féin and The Gaelic League of Ireland.  This was the left-wing nationalist Ruaraidh Erskine, or as he preferred to be known, Ruaraidh Arascain is Mhàirr.

That Ruaraidh Erskine was no ordinary nationalist can be seen from his full name: the Hon. Ruaraidh Stuart Joseph Erskine of Marr.  Erskine was born in Brighton in 1869, the second son of the fifth Lord Erskine who was at that time serving in an English regiment.  His childhood was spent in Edinburgh and during his youth he learned Gaelic fluently from his Hebridean nanny.  As a young adult Erskine took to writing and became a minor literary figure in London.  Politics became another major interest of the young Erskine and in 1892 he became a vice president of the Scottish Home Rule Association (SHRA), an association which aimed to achieve a Scottish parliament within the British Empire.

In the SHRA leadership, Erskine found himself in the company of two other notable Gaelic enthusiasts, namely the chairman John Stuart Blackie and vice president Alexander Mackenzie.  Professor Blackie (1809-95) was a classics scholar who championed the cause of the crofters and was a fluent learner of Gaelic.  Mackenzie (1838-98) was the owner and editor of the Celtic Magazine and the Scottish Highlander.  Like Mackenzie, Erskine was to become a prolific producer of periodicals as we will later see.

Erskine’s politics were not in step with those of the SHRA for long and from the turn of the century he became increasingly absorbed in a new and much more radical political programme, namely Scottish independence and the revival of Gaelic throughout Scotland.  Erskine’s nationalism was also pan-Celtic and he believed in a federation comprising of all six Celtic countries.  Another notable part of his political philosophy was the belief that there should be one nationalist political party.  It is almost certain that it was Erskine who was responsible for publishing the Programme for a Scottish Party by “John, Earl of Mar” in 1907 which called for the restoration of a Gaelic speaking community in the Highlands and for a compulsory qualification in Gaelic for all those holding state office in Scotland.

Marr’s views were promoted through a variety of journals which he produced both in English and in Gaelic.  The most notable of these periodicals were the bilingual Guth na Bliadhna (1904-25) and the English language Scottish Review (1914-1920).  These magazines are described in Hanham’s seminal study of Scottish nationalism as being “two of the few major landmarks of early twentieth century nationalism”.  Hanham has also argued that “Nationalism first became a force to be reckoned with intellectually, and as something distinct from the Liberal party with the publication of the Scottish Review” (1969:135).

The Scottish Review was founded in order to make Erskine’s views more accessible to the Lowland public, an aim in which it was largely successful, being widely read amongst the Scottish left.  The Review looked at all questions from a purely Scottish point of view and had an internationalist and left-wing perspective.  The periodical also gave a platform to the anti-war section of the Scottish labour movement and carried articles written by James Maxton and others.  To a large extent the bias of the Review reflects the increasingly leftward drift of Erskine's beliefs.  While he had always been anti-British and anti-militarist, he had not always been a socialist and in 1906 had gone so far as to dismiss socialism as “a predatory creed”.  It seems however that Erskine was becoming increasingly radicalised around the time of the war, a war which he described as “abominable...unjust...wasteful...reactionary” (Guth na Bliadhna 1916:285).

Crucial war-time influences on the development of Marr’s socialism were the Easter Rising and the Russian Revolution, developments which he saw as anti-imperialist and as championing self-determination.  Erskine was one of the few on the Scottish left to champion the 1916 rising and used the Scottish Review to disseminate Sinn Féin news.  He further endeavoured to promote links between Scotland and Ireland by attempting to set up a joint Scottish and Irish Celtic newspaper along with Art O' Brien, the leader of the Irish Self Determination League in Britain.

At the end of the war, Marr led an attempt to have Scotland independently represented at the Paris Peace Conference, an ultimately unsuccessful attempt which gained widespread support from “Red Clydeside” Labour M.Ps like James Maxton, Neil MacLean and Manny Shinwell as well as from the great John MacLean.  In the last few years of MacLean's life, he and Erskine were to become increasingly close allies.  Erskine wrote articles for MacLean’s newspaper Vanguard and co-operated with him in attempting to stop Clydeside workers from shipping Government arms to Ireland.

Another political ally of Erskine who shared a strong interest in Irish republicanism was his close friend Liam Gillies.  Gillies was a friend of Art O' Brian and provided a safe house for wanted Irishmen as well as giving Erskine contacts in the republican movement.  Gillies shared his friend's passionate interest in Gaelic and Gaelic nationalism.  Liam Gillies (1865-1932) was born in London of Scottish parentage and was involved in practically every Gaelic related activity in London whether political, cultural or literary.  It was together with Gillies that Marr founded the Scottish National League in 1920.

The Scottish National League (SNL) is one of the most significant chapters in the story of early nationalism and the most important of the many groups in which Erskine of Marr was involved.  The SNL mainly consisted of nationalists living in London and was based upon the remnants of the final incarnation of the Highland Land League.  The main difference between the SNL and the much larger Scottish Home Rule Association (SHRA) was that the SNL stood for Scottish independence and consisted of a membership largely made up of Celticists.

The League did not get off to a particularly good start as it was based in London and spent more time its first few years discussing and publicising the Irish situation than the Scottish.  Worse than this, members of the group tended to be highly anti-English and to use the language of race in its publications.  Erskine himself was by no means immune to this tendency as can be seen from his doctrine of “Celtic Communism” which maintained that some form of communism was an intrinsic value of the Celts and could, in many cases be attributed primarily to racial characteristics.  This idea was based on an idealised and romanticised view of the Scottish Clan system.  Another somewhat reactionary view harboured by the otherwise radical Erskine was that of monarchism.  Despite his socialist rhetoric, Marr was not a republican, but in fact a Jacobite.  This was not an element of his politics which he chose to stress however and it seems that it became less important to him as the years went by.

Despite its faults however, the SNL went on in the mid 20s to become a significant force in nationalist politics.  In 1926 the Scots Independent began production as organ of the SNL under the joint editorship of Liam Gillies and his son Iain Gillies.  The SNL also championed the cause of nationalist unity in the form of a nationalist political party, a cause which was to be successful in 1928 when the League was to merge with the SHRA and the Glasgow University Scottish Nationalist Association to form the National Party of Scotland.

By the time of the formation of the NPS, Erskine was becoming a less important figure in nationalist politics.  The League had outgrown its London roots and become stronger in Scotland, particularly due to the influence of Tom Gibson.  Gibson had realised that nationalist politics needed to be connected to everyday issues in order to become popular and used the Scots Independent to argue the economic and social benefits of independence.  As more mainstream nationalists were attracted to the League, the Celticists in group began to be outnumbered and the Gaelic nationalist message watered down.  This was even more the case within the National Party of Scotland where Marr and his followers were in a minority from the start.

As Marr became a more sidelined within the nationalist movement it seems that his mind again drifted on to other political projects.  Along with Hugh MacDiarmid, he launched the short lived nationalist magazine Pictish Review (1927-8).  In 1929 he was a founder of a short lived Celtic League, an organisation which only lasted for around a year and managed to produce just one pamphlet.  In 1930 following the poor NPS performance in the previous year's general election, Hugh MacDiarmid along with Ruaraidh Erskine and Compton MacKenzie formed Clann Albann.  Clann Albann was intended to be an undercover revolutionary nationalist movement whose plans were said to include seizing the Stone of Destiny and occupying Edinburgh Castle or the Isle of Rum.  This organisation never came to anything however and seems to have been largely a figment of MacDiarmid's imagination which served primarily as a publicity device.

Projects such as these show the increasing disillusionment felt by Erskine with the National Party of Scotland.  He could not agree with the NPS’s strategy of standing for election to Westminster.  Believing that Sinn Féin style abstentionism was the only way of achieving Home Rule, Erskine wrote an article accusing the NPS of being “collaborationist” in the Modern Scot in 1930 and moved to the South of France.  Though Erskine lived until 1960 his disillusionment with the nationalist movement was such that he never again took any part in Scottish politics.

While some of Erskine's politics such as his Jacobitism, his love of highland dress and his talk of racial characteristics now seem very outdated, his beliefs regarding Gaelic were very forward looking indeed and closely mirror the views of today’s language activists.  Erskine was of no doubt that Gaelic, having once been spoken throughout Scotland, was important to the whole of Scotland and not just to the “Highlands”.  In the Autumn 1912 issue of Guth na Bliadhna for example, he wrote that: “To confine the Gaelic movement to the “Highlands” would be, even if it were practicable - which it is not - a truly suicidal policy”.  Erskine also believed that the Gaelic movement should be a political one and was highly critical of An Comunn Gàidhealach and other bodies which largely promoted music and other aspects of Gaelic culture through the medium of English rather than concentrating on promoting the language.  In 1904 he had criticised the common tendency to

“...regard the language movement as something that may be played with - as a hobby suitable for dull winter evenings, or as an excuse for “social gatherings” at which tea and gossip (for the most part in English) may be indulged in to the weak heart's unbounded content. [...] It is now full time that we ceased junketing - that we put an end for ever to all our sentimental do-nothing twaddle about clans and “Bonnie Prince Charlie” and seriously addressed ourselves to business.” 
(Guth na Bliadhna 1904:202,206)

The support of our Catholic Jacobite aristocrat for Gaelic was not confined to words as can be seen from his Gaelic related endeavours in the first three decades of the century.  Erskine was involved in the funding, publishing and editing of several Gaelic periodicals: Am Bàrd (Bilingual monthly 1901-2), Guth na Bliadhna (Bilingual, latterly all Gaelic quarterly 1904-25), Alba (Gaelic weekly newspaper 1908-9), An Sgeulaiche (a monthly story magazine 1909-11) and An Ròsarnach (Gaelic, irregularly appearing 1917-30).  Through these magazines, Erskine hoped to raise Gaelic literature and journalism to the same level as that of English.  One commentator has stated that Guth na Bliadhna, the most notable of these journals “marks the true beginnings of journalism in Gaelic” (MacLeod 1976:211).  As well as articles on history, literature and economics, this quarterly contained regular Gaelic articles by Angus Henderson, a professional journalist who wrote articles on a wide range of serious subjects from the Russian Revolution to Free Trade.  Erskine also promoted Gaelic fiction in his magazines and provided a platform to writers such as John MacCormick who was later to publish Dùn Àluinn (1912) the first ever Gaelic novel.  Erskine himself was a keen writer and amongst other things wrote a series of Gaelic Sherlock Holmes style stories as well as translating stories by R.B Cunninghame Graham and Neil Munro.

In the years immediately preceding World War I, Erskine of Marr was a founder of two promising and forward looking Gaelic bodies.  These were Àrd-Chomhairle na Gàidhlig (The Scottish Gaelic Academy) and Comann Litreachas na h-Albann (The Society of Scottish Letters) both of which were unfortunately to fall by the wayside due to the First World War.  The Academy aimed to settle debatable points regarding Gaelic grammar and idiom and to retrieve and preserve the purity of the language. Its membership was limited to 21 and met half-yearly from 1912 until the outbreak of war.  The literary society aimed to encourage Gaelic letters by editing and printing selections from Gaelic MSS and by publishing modern Gaelic works.

In conclusion, it must be said that Erskine and his achievements have had a very mixed press in the history books.  The Historian H.M Hanham calls him “one of the most consistent and able nationalists that Scotland has so far produced” (1969:145) whereas the journalist Andrew Marr says that “he was, in colloquial terms, something of a nutter” (1992:66).  There can be no doubt that Erskine was an eccentric figure with an unusual mixture of beliefs which managed to include Jacobitism and Leninism simultaneously.  More sinister is Erskine’s talk of race and racial differences, concepts which are now totally discredited.  It must be remembered however that the Scottish National League was not alone in its use of racial notions as these ideas were common currency amongst all shades of political opinion in inter-war European politics.

For these reasons, it is best to look at Ruaraidh Arascain is Mhàirr as a man who was simultaneously forward and backward looking.  Talk of race and Jacobitism for example are more in tone with nineteenth than twentieth century nationalism.  More innovative was his championing of independence, a policy which was not consolidated in the SNP manifesto until after the Second World War.  It must not be forgotten either that he was one of the first to call for the formation of a united nationalist party in the first place.  The idea of a political Celtic League too was also before its time as it was not until 1961 that the Celtic League as we know it today was established.

While Erskine may have been something of a small fish in the big nationalist pool, he was undeniably a huge fish within the small Gaelic pool.  His contributions to Gaelic journalism and prose were huge and his ideas for a Gaelic Academy and literary society showed great foresight.  He was one of the first people to argue that Gaelic was relevant for Scotland as a whole and that the Gaelic movement should be both political and revivalist.  His phrase “No Language, No Nation!” may have seemed strange to nationalists at the turn of the century, but no longer does either to Gaelic activists or mainstream nationalists as the language comes increasingly to be seen as an important part of Scottish national identity.  Perhaps Hugh MacDiarmid was not too far off the mark when in characteristically flamboyant style he said that:

“I account him one of the most remarkable personalities of modern Scottish history, the very core and crux of the Gaeltacht”.