Stone of Destiny (5 page)

Another of my heroes, although not in the international class of Mahatma Gandhi, was the man who financed us. There was a time when I was pretty coy about his identity in this chapter. He was of course John MacCormick, the founding father of the modern Home Rule movement. Despite the difference in our years we became the closest of friends. At that time, as the leader of the moderates, he could not be seen to be in any way associated with illegal acts. He was a great man, and I am glad that nowhere is there a statue to him, nor so far as I know even a portrait. Ikons for John are unnecessary. He is remembered in many hearts, not least my own, as a great, affectionate, humorous human being, who taught me the fine lesson that high causes can be pursued without bitterness, and without too much solemnity either.

It was for such a cause that I had been spying in London. Five hours later I was on the train to Glasgow. I was tired but full of burning contentment. I now knew beyond all shadow of doubt that what we planned was not beyond our capacity. Difficulty there was but that was a challenge. From now on we were to face not indecision, which is the most sick-making of all maladies, but only the cold recklessness of calculated risk-taking, which is a joy to every young man.

Four months after our raid on Westminster I was addressing a meeting in Aberdeen in support of Home Rule. Our chairman was Professor Jones of Aberdeen University, who during the war had been one of the back-room boys of the War Ministry, and had been responsible for considerable advances in the technology of scientific warfare. His book,
Most Secret War
, is the classic work on the subject. I was interested to meet him, not only for himself and his erudition, but because he fascinated me as an academic who had parachuted into enemy held territory with the Commandos on raids on enemy scientific establishments. His job was to tell the soldiers which pieces of enemy equipment should be taken back home so that we could find out what the enemy was up to.

He still kept up with the Commando officers who had led these raids on the enemy. He assured me that they had a professional interest in our raid on the Abbey, quite apart from its political motive and its public repercussions. Theirs was the interest of the professional soldier in a coup which they felt fell within the province of their own profession. I had always been fascinated by the guerilla nature of their operations, so like the traditional means of waging Scotland’s wars, and I was flattered to find that they found some interest in our own.

Certainly in the days of preparation for the raid we tried to
emulate what we believed to be their methods. There were a great many factors to be considered and allowed for, but while we had to admit that there was a great margin for chance, the more we planned and considered, the more many of these factors came under our control. Unlike the Commandos, however, our action was limited by political and humanitarian considerations. We had to succeed or come near to success, for if we failed miserably we would plunge ourselves, our movement and our country into nationwide derision, and, as England was to learn to its cost, hearty laughter is a sharp weapon.

If it was planned as something of a military operation such planning had its limits. The means at our disposal were slender. There was no one behind us for support. Unlike ordinary soldiers we were not expendable. The two of us were all there were. We had very little money, we had utterly put aside any question of using violence, for we desired a peaceful demonstration, and we were to work all the time in secret at the very centre of the enemy camp. But the greatest force working against us was one which no Commando ever knew. We were planning consciously to break laws that we had been trained from birth to revere and respect. For my part it was only the calm belief that a person’s conscience is the ultimate law that kept me going.

Now that I had a clear idea of the geography of the place, our first and most obvious task was to find out exactly how much the Stone weighed. This was not as simple as might be imagined. All the books I had read on the subject had dealt with the Stone in fact and legend; one had even dealt with it as though it were a geological specimen. None, however, had given its weight and dimensions. Although we knew its approximate size, we did not wish to calculate its weight from the specific gravity of sandstone, lest an arithmetical blunder should throw us several hundred-weight out. In this connection John MacCormick was able to help us. The next time I visited him I explained our trouble and he reached for his telephone.

‘Bertie Gray’s the man,’ he said. ‘He knows more about stone than anyone else in Scotland.’

He made an appointment for me, and I went along to visit Councillor Gray, who pursued the rather lugubrious trade of monumental sculptor. We met in his little office beside the Beresford Hotel in Sauchiehall Street, and I told him what was exciting me.

He was not surprised, for he had already had some inkling from our friend of what was afoot. I was delighted with his almost boyish desire to implicate himself art and part with us. Since he was Vice-Chairman of the Covenant Association, Rector’s Assessor on Glasgow University Court, and a member of Glasgow Town Council, I should have stood in awe of him. Respect I undoubtedly had, but it was respect for the qualities that had sucked him into high office rather than for the high office itself. Awe I had none. Although he was as old as my father, he had a capacity for being as young as the company he kept. I numbered him among my friends. Much later in the story of the Stone he was to win my respect for the coolness with which he took risks. When the hunt was at its height, he it was who dodged the police, arranged for the repair of the Stone and acted as its chauffeur on many of its journeys about Scotland.

The councillor did more than calculate the weight of the Stone for me. He got on the telephone to his mason’s yard at Lambhill and gave some instructions. The next day he drove me out to Lambhill. In 1950 few students had cars and I was not among their number. We went under the pretence that I was the prospective purchaser of the latest in tombstones. I casually admired some tombstones and slowly worked towards the corner of the yard that he indicated. There, among the long grass, lay a replica of the Stone of Destiny. It was 20 years old. It had been made in the late twenties in connection with another plot to recapture the Stone, a plot that had never come off. Lying on the ground it looked much bigger than I had imagined.

‘It weighs four hundredweight,’ he told me. An apprentice
bearing a hammer approached, and I resumed my meditations among the tombstones and reflected that its weight was likely to be the cause of some strained muscles.

Following on my excursion to Lambhill, Bill, the councillor, John MacCormick and myself met several times per week. During his visit to London, Bill had found time for a visit to Westminster, and his impressions tallied with mine. On the other hand, it was years since the other two had been there. They were able to act like a House of Lords with an impetuous Lower Chamber, and give us the benefit of minds that were not squinting from too much contemplation of the subject. As we talked, several salient points emerged.

In the first place, we decided that a daylight raid was out of the question. We regretted this decision, for it would have been a fine thing to have spirited away four hundredweight of stone in broad daylight from under the noses of the Dean and Chapter. But the difficulties were too great, and although we considered having a bath-chair made with a special aperture under the seat to contain the Stone, we realised that this would be of little use, since the Confessor’s Chapel is up a flight of narrow wooden steps from the floor of the nave.

This meant that a night raid was essential, but before we moved to plan it, we came to the unanimous conclusion that the execution must be carried through by the smallest possible number of people. Scotland has no tradition of underground movements and secret societies, and the slightest hint of our intention meant ignominy and failure.

The last point that occupied our minds was what we should do with the Stone when we had removed it from the Abbey. We were certain that whatever else happened there would be a hue and cry up and down England, and every road on the Scottish Border would be watched. We therefore decided that we would take the Stone south, and hide it, to be recovered when the heat was off.

With all this in mind, we evolved the following plan. One of us
would conceal himself in the Abbey towards closing time, and as soon as he had been locked in he would climb over the iron grill separating the east chapels from the nave and hide himself in the Confessor’s Chapel, which was then under repair. I claimed this honour for myself as the conception had been mine and I was selfish enough to demand as large a part as possible in its execution.

I would lie quietly in hiding, watching the nightwatchman and finding the pattern of his patrols, for although we knew that he came on duty at 6 p.m. and had an office some considerable distance from the Confessor’s Chapel, we were not certain how often he patrolled the building.

At 2 a.m. or as soon thereafter as I was satisfied that the nightwatchman had completed his rounds, I was to screw the lock off the door leading from the Margaret Chapel to the Abbey grounds, where an accomplice would be waiting. Failing that, I was to force the padlock from the door in Poets’ Corner. The door from Poets’ Corner and that from the Margaret Chapel are almost adjacent. We would then remove the Stone from the Chair, lash it to an iron bar, and carry it outside, where a small, inconspicuous car would be waiting. This car would drive to a quiet side street where the Stone would be transferred to a larger and faster car, which would head straight for Dartmoor, where the Stone would be hidden. Meanwhile the small car would race out towards Wales. If it had been seen outside the Abbey, and if the police recognised it and stopped it, the driver would try to convince the police that he had handed the Stone over to the Welsh Nationalists, whom, of course, we had not contacted and had no intention of contacting. This would lead to the police following up an entirely false scent in Wales, which might be useful when we returned to fetch the Stone from Dartmoor. This was a good plan. It was the basis of our subsequent action, but it had to be sorely amended under stress of circumstances, for the unforeseeable always happens.

Having now arrived on the brink of action, Bill and I commenced
to fix a date for the enterprise. To me, Christmas was the only possible time, for the English celebrate it in a very thorough way, and while we did not want to spoil their joys or tarnish their festival, I maintained that we should come down on them while they were lying in drink with their minds unbuttoned.

On the other hand Bill was in no mood for precipitate action. He had many engagements to fulfil over the Christmas and New Year period. In addition to the seasonal festivity the student body was preparing to celebrate the fifth centenary of the founding of the university, which event fell on 7 January 1951, and Bill, as President of the Union, was much in demand. He showed me his diary which contained inescapable engagements for every day over the Christmas and New Year period. The plan would keep, he argued. It could be done any time. Some other factors might arise that would help us.

But I was not so sure. Secrets of this nature do not mature like good wine, and moreover I had screwed my resolution to the last turn, and I was not sure that it would not suddenly unwind if I were denied the prospect of immediate action. Bill was adamant. I was stubborn. It was the contest between the thruster, whose value is a sudden, furious output of power, followed by months of inertia, and the canny statesman who works and works and works, and can work and wait.

‘I’ll go myself,’ I told him in the bitterness of my disappointment, and there the matter rested.

In the days that followed I was not a happy man. In my uneasiness, I almost lost sight of the final purpose and gave up the struggle; for I knew that if I did not go to Westminster that Christmas I would never go at any other time. There was no one else I could turn to in whom I could place the same confidence I had placed in Bill. He held a position of respect in the university, and many students, who would gladly have faced uneasy issues with him, would have turned away with a smile if I had asked them. Together we could have talked even a Scottish
politician into helping us; alone, I knew of no one I could inspire.

Then, as all the old arguments and plans came flooding back to me, I thought that there might still be a way. I remembered the £10 I had spent on my trip to London, and all the talk and thought and dreams about the Stone, and I decided that if I was not forever to consider myself a vain-mouthed braggart, I would have to go on, come what may.

At first I thought I might be able to design a little bogey on which I could place the Stone and wheel it from the Abbey like a baby in a pram. This baby weighed four hundredweight, and as I am only five foot six and weigh nine and a half stone, I was being madly optimistic. I had, however, a belief in my ability to lift a great weight if events proved it necessary, and when indeed the occasion arose, I did not find my strength lacking. What beat me in the end was the flight of wooden steps down which I would have to trundle the Stone from the Confessor’s Chapel. Try as I would I could design no bogey that would silently descend stairs. It was the middle of December and I was back where I started.