Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations (9 page)

The Firth of Clyde is tidal. Like all the inlets and estuaries on Britain’s western coasts, it is subjected to four tides in every twenty-six hours – two flood tides and two ebb tides, whose perpetual motions have not stopped since the ocean first invaded this part of Europe. An Iron Age fort once stood atop the Rock; over the millennia, sentinels have watched the processions of coracles, boats and battleships that have sailed in on the rising tide or sailed out on the ebb. In late Roman times, they would have warned of the approach of the Hibernian pirates, whom the Romans called
Scotti
.
*
In the ninth century they would have gasped in awe at the fearsome fleets of Viking longships. In more recent times, they would have seen the troopships and merchantmen that formed the sinews of the British Empire, and the stately Cunard liners steaming out to the Atlantic.

Not surprisingly, the town under the shadow of the Rock lived for much of its career from ship-building. The shipyard at Dumbarton was itself too small to accommodate the great ocean liners that were built at nearby Clydebank; instead, it specialized in the smaller steamships and paddleboats that have plied their trade on the Clyde for the last 200 years. Indeed, steaming ‘doon the watter’ from Glasgow has long been one of the most characteristic activities of the area.
²
Europe’s very first commercial steamship service started up here in 1812, when the
Comet
sailed from Glasgow to Greenock. In the following decades the service was extended not only to every harbour on the Firth, but to ports as far as Oban and Stornoway. The red, white and black-tipped funnels of the steamers, mailboats and ferries of David MacBrayne’s company later established a ubiquitous presence that attracted millions of trippers and travellers. The successor company of Caledonian-MacBrayne, or ‘Cal-Mac’, still forms an essential element of the local scene.
³
The saying persists: ‘The Earth is the Lord’s and all that therein is, but the Highlands and Islands belong to MacBrayne.’

Industrial development also spread up the Vale of Leven along the five riverside miles separating Dumbarton from Balloch on Loch Lomond. Dye-works, print shops and foundries were concentrated in the factories of Alexandria, Jamestown and Bonhill. Workers from the Vale of Leven were known in Dumbarton as ‘jeelies’, because they ate their jeelies or ‘jam sandwiches’ in the yard while the locals went home for lunch.

There is no better way of finding one’s historical and geographical bearings than by taking a steamer trip across the Firth. Even a short crossing from Wemyss Bay to Rothesay on the Isle of Bute, or from Ardrossan to Brodick on Arran, proves immensely stimulating, for in little more than half an hour it takes passengers across Scotland’s most important divide, between the Lowlands and the Highlands. Wemyss Bay, in Ayrshire, 30 miles west of Glasgow, belongs to the Lallans
*
homeland of Robbie Burns. Rothesay and the Isle of Bute belong to the Gaeltacht – the land of the clans, the tartans and the Gaelic tongue. The journey should be undertaken on one of the ‘bracing’ days for which the Firth is famous. A stiff breeze chops the water, blowing spray off the tips of the waves. The sturdy ferryboat bucks and rolls confidently amid the raucous cries of the seagulls and the pungent smell of seaweed. Charcoal-grey clouds scud overhead, moving too fast to drop their charge of rain; patches of blue sky release narrow torrents of sunlight that play here and there on the seawater and on the luminous green of the opposite shore. The white bow waves dance with the white sails of the yachts as they speed along. Holding fast to the rail, cheeks chafed and lungs filled to overflowing, one watches transfixed at the display of colour and movement. A rainbow glistens over the Kyles of Bute. Then a sudden calm descends as the ferry enters the lee of the harbour, and one steps ashore, duly braced, in a different country.

This is the landscape for ever associated with the name of the Harry Lauder (1870–1950), one of the most famous entertainers of the early twentieth century, and reputedly the first star singer to sell a million records. Lauder sang popular sentimental songs in a broad Scots brogue, shattering all class barriers by his unique mixture of stoicism and tenderness. Numbers like ‘I love a lassie, a bonnie Hielan’ lassie’ or ‘Keep right on to the end of the road’ brought him a fortune from which he built his mansion at Laudervale near Dunoon. His many tours to the United States would invariably start with a steamer trip up the Firth from Dunoon to the Princes Pier in Greenock.

Roamin’ in the gloamin’ on the bonnie banks of Clyde,

Roamin’ in the gloamin’ wi’ ma lassie by ma side.

When the sun has gone to rest, that’s the time that I like best.

O it’s lovely to be roamin’ in the gloamin’.
⁴

A visit to Dumbarton Castle tells some of the older stories. It features in all the local guidebooks and websites:

Dumbarton Rock stands above the River Leven where it merges with the Clyde and is the town’s most famous ancient building. The castle, which stands 240 feet up on the Rock… forms a prominent landmark on the Clyde. The Rock… has been fortified since prehistoric times. The castle was a royal fortress long before the town became a Royal Burgh; its ownership [passed] from Scottish to English and back again. Prominent during the Wars of Independence, it was used to imprison Wallace for a short time after his capture. It was from here, too, that Mary, Queen of Scots, was conveyed to France for safety. She was trying to reach Dumbarton Castle when she suffered her final defeat at Langside.
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William Wallace, the ‘Braveheart’, and Mary Stuart are two names from Scottish history that are almost universally recognized.

On closer inspection, the twin peaks of the Rock’s summit are divided by a deep chasm: at 240 feet, ‘White Tower Crag’ is slightly higher than the ‘Beak’. The oldest surviving structure is a fourteenth-century stone arch, whence a stairway of 308 steps leads up to the top. At the bottom, the eighteenth-century Governor’s House contains a small museum. Here, one learns from the pleasant young guide that the early English historian Bede wrote about a fortified city called ‘Alcluith’, the ‘rock of the Clyde’; also that, together with Castle Dundonald in Ayrshire, Dumbarton was once the chief royal stronghold of the Kingdom of Strathclyde. ‘We were invaded in 870 by the Vikings,’ the guide informs us. On being asked who ‘we’ are, she says with a smile, ‘I’m a local girl, I’m a Pict.’

The view from White Tower Crag rewards its climbers. The modern town lies immediately below, criss-crossed by ant-like people. Central Glasgow, half a dozen miles away, is veiled in mist. But the moisture-laden air to the west increases the visibility like a magnifying glass. The Firth presents itself as a giant outstretched hand, with its fingers pointing into Gareloch and Loch Long on the right, Holy Loch in the centre, and the hills of Arran and Argyll on the horizon. In the distance to the north rise the blue-grey peaks of Ben Lomond and Ben Oss. Across the river lie the pine-clad slopes of Glennifer Braes in Renfrewshire and the Hill of Stake; and in the left foreground the airport runways.

Holy Loch is a name that frequently made the headlines in the 1960s and 1970s. It is the smallest of the sea-lochs on the Firth, only two or three miles long, but it makes a perfect, sheltered harbour. For more than thirty years it was the site of a United States Navy submarine base, and the scene of concomitant demonstrations by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Officially and euphemistically labelled as Refit Site One, the base housed the SUBRON-14 submarine fleet charged with patrolling the Atlantic. There was a floating dock, a large tender ship, a flotilla of tugs and barges, and up to ten Polaris/Poseidon Class Ballistic Missile submarines. As the underwater behemoths slipped from their dock and rode into the Firth, the captain’s periscope would have caught sight of the Rock some 20 miles upstream. These days the harbour is back with the Royal Navy, though one wonders for how long. The devolved government of Scotland is controlled by the Scottish Nationalist Party. If they ever win their proposed referendum for full independence, one of their first steps would be to demand the closure of the base.
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Dumbarton today is struggling to survive in the post-industrial age. The heyday of its ship-building came to an end in the 1960s and it has not yet found an adequate replacement. The dockside has been concreted over to form a car park, and supermarkets fill the space once used by giant warehouses. In some guidebooks to Scotland, the town is not even mentioned. Industrial decline hit the Vale of Leven earlier. Many factories there were closed down before 1939. Persistent unemployment bred radical politics, and the epithet of ‘Little Moscow’ was coined to match that of adjacent ‘Red Clydeside’. In the 1950s the run-down district was used to locate several of Glasgow’s largest projects of overspill housing. Forty and fifty years on, the massive, dilapidated estates such as the Mill of Haldane in East Balloch were the scene of equally massive campaigns of attempted urban renewal.

Yet a positive development began when one of Scotland’s leading whisky distillers moved into Dumbarton to employ the laid-off dockers. ‘George Ballantine’s Finest’ is one of the most popular and best-known brands of blended whisky in the world. Every bottle bears the proud assignations: ‘Scotch Whisky, Fully Matured, Finest Quality’, ‘George Ballantyne & Sons, Founded in 1827 in Scotland’ and ‘By Appointment to the Late Queen Victoria and the Late King Edward VII’. According to the country of its destination it also carries a marker saying, ‘Finest Skotská Whisky’, or ‘Whisky Szkocka 40%obj.’ or ‘Finest Skót Whisky… Származasi Ország: Nagy Britannia (Skocia)’. At the bottom, the label reads ‘Bottled in Scotland’, ‘Product of Scotland’ and ‘Allied Distillers Limited, Dumbarton G82 2SS’.
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In whatever language, there can be no doubt: this is Scottish Scotch from Scotland.

In the early twenty-first century Dumbarton is indeed in Scotland, and Scotland is part of the United Kingdom. But it was not always so, and it may not always be so in the future. One needs only stand atop the Rock and count the centuries. A hundred years ago, Clydeside was the lifeline of an imperial conurbation which served the Empire’s manufacturing enterprises. Two hundred years ago, it was the centre of a region of the United Kingdom, often known as ‘North Britain’, whose Scottishness was fading, but whose Britishness was rising. Three hundred years ago it had just crossed the threshold of an unprecedented constitutional union with England. Four hundred years ago it was ruled by a king who had recently migrated to London, but who remained Scotland’s sovereign. Five hundred years ago, before the Battle of Flodden, it was part of a country which regarded itself as England’s equal. A thousand years ago, under King Macbeth and others, it belonged to a realm where Gaelic was still the dominant language. One thousand five hundred years ago it belonged to the ‘Old North’.

Dumbarton is an English name, the Anglicized form of a Gaelic predecessor,
Dun Breteann
, meaning ‘Fort of the Britons’. This, in turn, provides the clue to the people who lived on the Clyde long before the Anglophones and the Gaels arrived. Oddly enough, when the modern County Council was formed in 1889, the older spelling of the name was revived to give ‘Dunbartonshire’ a tinge of authenticity. (The county was abolished in 1975, since when it has been joined to the wider Strathclyde Region.)

Nonetheless, the form of the name most frequently associated with the Rock has gone round the world, carried in the memories of Scots emigrants. There is a Dumbarton in Western Australia, a second in Queensland, a third in New Zealand and a fourth in New Brunswick, Canada. In the United States, the Dumbartons are legion: in Maryland, in Virginia, in South Carolina, in Louisiana, in Wisconsin… One finds Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC; Dumbarton Village in Houston, Texas; a Dumbarton Bridge across San Francisco Bay; a Dumbarton Church in Georgetown, DC; a Dumbarton School in Baltimore; and a Dumbarton College in Illinois. In the American Civil War, the US Navy once captured a Confederate vessel called
Dumbarton
; and the Royal Navy has a fishery protection ship called HMS
Dumbarton Castle
. One finds a Dunbarton in New Hampshire.
⁸

How many Dumbartonians, one wonders, know how it all started? For them at least it may be important to know that Dumbarton was not always a minor satellite of a modern metropolis. Supported by the fertile farmlands of the adjoining
Levanach
– the Vale of Leven, the original homeland of Clan Lennox – it was the centre of a powerful realm, the capital of an extensive state. Indeed, it was the seat of kings.

II

Few historians these days talk of the ‘Dark Ages’. Knowing that the phrase was coined in the 1330s by the early Renaissance poet Petrarch, they feel that the implied contrast between the ‘Light’ of the ancient world and the alleged ‘intellectual Gloom’ of what followed is unjust.
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In British history, the ‘Dark Ages’ is rarely employed except for the two or three centuries which started with the retreat of the Roman legions and which are notoriously short of sources. This is exactly the period that embraces the ‘Kingdom of the Rock’.

Obscurity, therefore, is the period’s hallmark. Coherent narratives can only be established with great difficulty, and historical investigations are a speculators’ paradise. Substantiated facts form tiny islets of sure knowledge in a vast sea of blank spots and confusion. Scarce sources are often written in eccentric languages, studied only by ultra-specialists. All judgements would benefit from being classified as undisputed (very few), deductive, analogous or tentative (most).