Stone of Destiny (3 page)

It was from my father that I also learned another lesson that has never left me, which is this: man is answerable only to God for his conduct, and if there is no God, a matter about which I have always been in great doubt, then he is answerable only to his own conscience. No man-made law tells a free man what to do. All it does is tell him what the punishments will be if he breaks the man-made law. It is the moral conscience of each individual that binds people together, and makes community life possible. Not courts, not lawyers, not judges, and certainly not the police. They are merely the regulators, but we are the people. It is we who make the community. Ourselves alone.

I was one of these people, and I was very much alone. In the autumn of 1949 I went down to London, and had my first look at the Stone of Destiny.

My first reconnaissance of Westminster Abbey was a leisurely affair, and took in little detail. Detail would come later. I walked round, looked, and came back home satisfied that if I could get a few people together then it would all be possible, but I did not know a single person to turn to for help. It was a lonely time, and that was as far as it went that year. I knew John MacCormick only slightly then, and I had no close friends to confide in. I did indeed take my thoughts to Christopher Murray Grieve, the poet Hugh MacDiarmid, whose work I greatly admired, but the idea was to simmer with me for another year before it was to be formulated into any practical shape.

It is not easy for one young man on his own to formulate a plan of action. Dreams are for dreaming, and I did not regard myself as any sort of man of action. In a settled society ambitions are modest; day follows day, rubbing life thin, without any wear being noticed. The soldier who goes into action has a long training behind him, and is urged forward by the society he lives in. Ever present is the sanction of public opinion, forcing him to do things that would otherwise be forbidden. Nothing public urged me forward and indeed public opinion was very much against any sort of individual action. What I had in mind would put me outside the law, and I would have to face the
consequences. In these circumstances the personal bar to action was very considerable. A cocoon of loneliness kept my dreams apart from reality.

Then in the autumn of 1950 I was invited to join the Glasgow student committee supporting John MacCormick’s rectorial candidature. I met all sorts of people through that and the cocoon began to wear thin. I met people who began to talk of strong measures, and who pointed to the melancholy history of Ireland. ‘From the blood of martyrs,’ they muttered, ‘grow living nations.’ Their eagerness to find a martyr was only paralleled by their desire to live to see the fruits of martyrdom. To be fair to them, most of them have lived to become martyrs to endless committee meetings in the Labour Party, or the Scottish National Party, so they are not to be laughed at. For my part, I would rather have the fire at the stake. Yet I listened to their talk.

Nowadays people sing rather than talk, but the old songs had not been revived then, and the new ones were unwritten. I listened silently to talk of sending Blue Bonnets over the Border, and wondered what it all meant. Of course it meant nothing, but I had not the self-confidence to see that, and I felt that there was something missing in me. Did they know something I didn’t know? Were they going to do something that I couldn’t do? Students have talked like this from time immemorial, but I did not know that then. I was overawed by their terribly grown-up sophistication, but I enjoyed being a spectator at their performance. Blue Bonnets over the Border sounded great.

It was still a long way from listening to such talk to crossing the Border on my own account. Clearly I needed a leader. I had not yet learned the lesson that there are no leaders worth following; that leaders are egocentric humbugs, who casually use others for their own ends. The way of a man with a maid is easily explained, but the way of a leader with those who follow him and think he is great is one of the mysteries of life. Born leaders should be locked up. Leadership should be made a crime.

Yet the crime I contemplated needed a leader, and the crime itself fascinated me. Thoughts of it would not go away. It was, as I hear kids say in the slang of today, ‘neat’. The Stone had been taken from Scotland to show that we had lost our liberty. Recovering it could be a pointer to our regaining it. A promise had been made by the Treaty of Northampton of 1328 that it would be returned, and that promise had never been kept. Why should fulfilment of that promise not be wrung from them by spiriting the Stone away at dead of night? It only weighed 4 or 5 hundredweight, which was not an impossible load for several men to carry. An empty chair speaks louder than a full house. Much louder than a full house if that house is a House of the Westminster Parliament. It might just speak loud enough to awaken the people of Scotland.

For more than 2,000 years the Stone had been the talisman of the Scottish people, and, for all I knew, they might still venerate it. My childhood memories came back to me and I remembered my mother’s stories. I could almost see the thin smile on the long, lean, sallow face of my great hero, that slit-throat, the Good Lord James, the great guerilla leader of the Wars of Independence. Here was a guerilla operation in modern times, to be carried out not by ambush, but by careful stealth in the enemy camp. The very audacity of the idea would have made him chuckle. It might have the same effect on the Scots of today. It was difficult; it could be spectacular; it was symbolic; it struck at the very heart of Englishry; it righted an ancient wrong; yet it hurt no one. Spiriting away four or five hundredweight of sacred Stone from the very heart of the Empire might fire the imagination of the world if it were carefully carried out. If we bungled it, we would be the only sufferers. But we must not bungle it. Who was to be the Good Lord James?

I found him on John MacCormick’s Rectorial Committee. Among all the others he stood out as being the born leader of such an expedition. He was Bill Craig, who was President of the
Union that year, and a big man in the corporate life of the university. He had already graduated with one degree, and was studying for a further one. He had charm and ability, and above all he was able to lead. Indeed in the fun and frolic of a rectorial election he led me into much temptation to which I readily succumbed, and together we got into all sorts of trouble, which was not real trouble because he had the useful facility of knowing how not to be caught. I learned much from him.

He was 26, a year older than me, as I was just newly 25. Like me he was small in stature, but he had a commanding presence. By sheer force of argument and personality he could persuade the most reluctant audience whether in public or private, because he was as able a speaker in debate as he was in committee. He was a ready-witted politician in the Liberal cause, which, then as now, permitted its adherents to formulate their own policy, and I don’t mean that as a jibe.

For the job we contemplated, qualities were needed other than those of a politician, and he possessed these par excellence. Calm and unruffled in the most adverse of circumstances, he had that type of temperament which can never admit defeat, and will turn disaster into glorious victory. Add to this that he is small and Pictish, like so many Scots, because we are all as much Picts as Scots, and imagine a Puckish smile concealing a wicked sense of humour, and you have a picture of Bill.

Yet before I approached him I wanted to have something to lay before him. I dropped no more than a hint in the right quarter and saw from the reaction that there were people in Scotland not averse to financing such an enterprise. For my part the idea had now grown from a mere discontent to a passion that made me think of little else. Apart from the hint about finance I had mentioned the scheme to no one. The need for secrecy was great. I had seen others bluster and talk about what they were going to do, and then fail to get to the starting point, and I did not wish to be one of them.

My starting point came in early November of 1950. I knew then that my decision was made. I was going after the Stone. Hell mend you or bend you, I was going to have a crack at it. I became impatient of politics, and discussions and arguments, and closed my mind to them, for I was now convinced that my course of conduct was right, and if it was wrong, it hurt no one but myself. Further dreaming could not have made the issue clearer. I decided to approach Bill Craig.

I met him in the street one November afternoon, and prised him apart from his friends. I told him in a few words what was on my mind.

He laughed and swore at me when he heard what I had to say, and called me his evil genius. Here he was, on the threshold of his career, when I came along to tempt him from the path of success. I was a fool, and the scheme was hair-brained and impossible, to say nothing of being illegal.

I reminded him of some of the things we had been up to recently, which had been on yon side of the law, and yet were still sweet to remember. There had been various misadventures including a Tory loudspeaker van that had been unaccountably silenced. He grinned.

‘What are you going to do with it when you get it back to Scotland?’ he asked.

‘I haven’t thought that far,’ I said. ‘We’ll have to leave that to the people of Scotland. But it will at least show us whether or not they’re worth fighting for. If they don’t support us, then Scotland’s as dead as Queen Anne.’

He thought for a long time, standing there in the street, as the light closed in on a grey November afternoon. It was in Sauchie-hall Street, along near Charing Cross.

‘All right,’ he said at last. ‘I’ll come.’

I was rapturous. At last I had someone to whom I could pour out all my arguments, someone to whom I could tell how I thought it could be done. We walked together along the street
towards the university, two little short men, their heads close together, the one small and dark and thin and intense, the other open faced and frank and laughing at my enthusiasms.

‘It will shake the world,’ I said. ‘To raid the heart of London. To bring back the age-old symbol of our country. A big stone gone and only an empty chair. Five pounds’ worth of stone. Two thousand years of history. Scotland will wake again.’

‘You’re a silly romantic,’ he said. ‘But I’ll come.’

With Bill Craig in the operation, I was certain that our chances of success were greatly enhanced, and we settled down like a general staff to plan our campaign.

I do not think we were at all presumptuous in what we were trying to do. In the space of a few short hours we planned to show to the English government that there was a limit to their domination of Scotland; we planned also to show to the world that Scotland was awake again, and above all we wished to give to the Scottish people a symbol of their liberty.

With our total ages little more than half the age of any single senior politician, we hoped to do something that might earn a place in the history books, and would almost certainly earn us an English jail-room. So what? It has been pointed out to me that many of the minor events that have gone to make Scottish history have been carried through by young men and women. It will be a bad day for any country when its young sit at home and do as their elders tell them. It will be even worse, and the end of all our freedoms, for the old as well as the young, when youngsters of conscience are afraid of the police.

From the beginning, we accepted that the police would inevitably catch up with us. Both Bill and myself were known as active supporters of the Covenant movement in Glasgow. Because there had been little illegal Nationalist activity since
before the war, we surmised that the police would have no dossiers of suspects to guide them. Police do not work by magic. When a crime is committed they look at the crime. Then they look at the
modus operandi
. Then they look at who’s out of prison and draw up a list of suspects. For this crime there was a whole nation of suspects, or so we hoped. On the other hand, it seemed obvious to us that an exploit of this type could only be carried through by people with a great deal of free time on their hands. Such deduction on the part of the police would force them to suspect students, and since Glasgow University has always been a centre of Nationalist activity, we guessed that it would not be long before the police were on our tracks. There were then 7,000 students at Glasgow University, but we prided ourselves that we would be high on the list of suspects.