Tartans, Old And New

Press, Volume CX, Issue 32358, 25 July 1970, Page 7

Tartans, Old And New

(Bq

GAVIN SOUTER)

You won’t find the Clanedin tartan in D. C. Stewart’s “The Setts Of The Scottish Tartans,” Innes of Learney’s “Tartans Of The Clans And Families Of Scotland” or, going right back into last century, Logan and Mclan’s “The Clans Of The Scottish Highlands.”

that certainly tartans existed before the eighteenth century, but that they were not generally identified with clans until the first half of the nineteenth century. Furtlfermore—and this is where the question of honesty comes in—many of the “clan tartans” so revered both in Scotland and abroad depend for their authenticity on a literary hoax. The two leading authorities on tartans today are Mr Scarlett, a London quantity surveyor, and D. C. Stewart, a retired photoengraver who lives at Lyme Regis in Dorset. Both are members of the advisory panel of the Scottish Tartans Society, a six-year-old organisation with more than 300 members mainly in North America and Britain, but also as far afield as Finland and the Trucial States of the Persian Gulf.

Clanedin is Scotland’s newest tartan, designed to be worn by Scottish women competitors at this month’s Commonwealth Games in Edinburgh. The organising committee hopes that Clanedin will also be taken up as a Commonwealth tartan. Its colours are red. white and blue (for the Union Jack), white, black, brown and yellow (for people). I expected the Scottish Tartans Society to be up in arms about Clan Edinburgh's tartan. But not at all, “We don't mind tartans being modern,” said James Scarlett, one of Britain's two leading authorities on the subject. “Just so long as they're honest about it!”

Mr Scarlett maintains, that Victorian romanticism and Scottish nationalism erected the intricate dan tartan structure which exists today. Sir Walter Scott had a hand in it, and so did George IV, who visited Edinburgh in 1822. The King wore a kilt and plaid of Royal Stewart tartan, which had probably come into existence soon after 1800, and tartan became all the rage. This boom, in which tartans formerly known only by number in Wilson’s catalogue, suddenly became known by clan names, was legitimised in 1842 by a book called “Vestiarium Scoticum, With Introduction And Notes By John Sobieski Stuart.” This book, with the sketches by Sobieski Stuart’s brother. Charles Edward Stuart, set out. to show that clan tartans were a rigidly formed system of heraldry going back into the mists of Gaelic antiquity. It professed to be from a sixteenth century manuscript by a certain Schyr Richard Urquharde showing the tartans of “ye chieff Hieland and bordour clannes." Accepted Eagerly This was exactly what Scotland wanted. Seventy-five clan tartans were clearly illustarted in the book, but according to D. C. Stewart fewer than a dozen of these were supported by independent evidence of their previous existence. No matter. The “Vestiarium” tartans were taken up eagerly by the grateful clansmen whose names they bore. It did not seem to matter that the authenticity of the “Vestiarium” was impugned almost immediately by some antiquarians. Nor does it matter today that all authorities agree that either the Stuart brothers were hoaxed, or that they themselves perpetrated a hoax. The Stuart brothers, who claimed descent from the Young Pretender, Prince Charles Edward Stuart, were imposters—though admittedly well-respected ones. “The brothers were courteous and accomplished gentlemen," says the Dictionary of National Biography, “but apart from their Stuart likeness, the sole strength of their pretensions would appear to reside in the credence and countenance accorded them by men of rank and intelligence, such as the tenth Earl of Moray, the 14th Lord Lovat, and the late Marquess of Bute.” Cromarty Manuscript There were said to be three copies of the Urqubarde manuscript—one at the Scots’ College in Douai, one at a monastery in Cadiz, and one in Scotland known as the Cromarty manuscript All trace of these was lost until quite recently, when the so-called Cromarty manuscript was located in the archives of the presen’ Marquess of Bute. Last year the Marquess allowed the manuscript to be deposited in the National Library of Scotland so that it could be examined by a member of the library’s manuscript department and by Captain T. S. Davidson, vicepresident of the Scottish Tartans Society. “We both agree that it is not what it was supposed to be,” the manuscript officer told me. “The handwriting is wrong for the sixteenth or the seventeenth century, and the language is wrong, too.” Does it really matter? Although the yellow Macleod. the red Cameron, the red and green Fraser and dozens of other tartans are pure “Vestiarium,” they are now well into their second century of existence. Clan tartans did not flourish fully until after the clan system had withered away, but surely there will be no stopping them now.

This question of honesty goes right to the heart of tartan research, a small but busy field of scholarship which is mainly concerned with the problem of clan tartans. The problem is this: did the Scottish clans use exclusive tartans before the eighteenth century, or was the idea that people of the same name all wore the same tartan largely a romantic creation of the nineteenth century? The answer appears to be

Mr Stewart is actually the senior of the two men: he is a son of D. W. Stewart, whose “Old And - Rare Scottish Tartans” (1893) with woven silk samples is the most beautiful of all tartan books, and his own “The Setts Of The Scottish Tartans” (1950) is the most authoritative work on the subject to date.

Mr Scarlett, whose own tartan book will be published by Paul Hamiyn next year,

is generally recognised In tartan circles as D. C. Stewart’s heir-apparent The two men correspond regularly by means of tape recording, and they keep in touch in the same way with a third tartan expert—J. C. Thomson, an American philologist who lives in Arlington, Virginia. J. C. Thomson is the inventor of Twindex, a “Tartan Watchers’ Index” in which he records the setts (designs) of all tartans illustrated in books. A larger index, on file at the Scottish Tartans Society's headquarters in the Guildhall at Stirling, is D. C. Stewart’s Sindex. The Sindex lists 1025 tartans, and is still growing. Each card carries a colour strip, rather like a long military campaign ribbon, and a coded group of letters representing the thread count and colours of the tartan. The letter code is know as a "Slog” (Stewart Log). Some of these tartans have little to do with the Scottish clans. “The Canadians invent tartans at the drop of a hat,” says Mr Scarlett, who is currently working on three copies of the Sindex. Barbecue, Bay of Quinte, Sir George-Etienne Cartier, Trafalgar: these are all Canadian tartans. Slim Evidence There is also considerable doubt about how closely some “clan tartans” were really connected with the clans whose names they carry. The evidence for the wearing of tartan before the 18th century is both fragmentary and ambiguous. Scottish troops at the siege of Haddington in 1542 were described by a French historian as wearing, among other garments, “a woollen covering of several colours." This could have been tartan as we know it now, or it could have been simply a checked plaid. In 1578 Bishop Lesley wrote in Latin that “all Highlanders, both nobles and common people, wore mantles of one sort, except that the nobles preferred those of several colours," and in 1721 Daniel Defoe, writing with apparent authority about Highland troops during the 16305, mentioned “their doublet breeches and stockings of a stuff they called plaid, striped across red and yellow.”

Stronger evidence ot clan usage, or at least the kitting out of troops in uniform material by a chief, is contained in “The Grameid, An Heroic Poem. Descriptive Of The Campaign Of Viscount Dundee in 1689,” written in Latin by James Philp, a second cousin of the great Graham of Claverhouse, Bonnie Dundee. Famous Painting The “Grameid,” completed in 1707, describes the gathering of the clans around Dundee’s standard in Lochaber. “The first Chief to march to the rallying point is Glengarry with 300 of his young men, each of whom is dressed in a multi-coloured robe, patterned with three lines. He is followed by his brother Angus with 100 men all wearing garments with a purple stripe ... Sir John Maclean of Duart and his brother Alexander both wore plaids with yellow stripe." Against this must be set the famous painting of the battle of Culloden in 1745 by the artist David Morier, who had a reputation in his day for great accuracy. Morier used genuine “Scotch" prisoners as models for his picture, yet the clansmen who are shown attacking Cumberland’s redcoats are wearing very motley garb apparently anything they could lay their hands on, either tartan or plain materials.

Mr Scarlett concedes that the clan tartan idea existed in nebulous form before 1745, and that it had been encouraged by the Act of Union in 1707 and probably also by the Jacobite uprising of 1715. Highland dress was banned after Culloden, but soon after the repeal of the Dress Act in 1782 one of the main weavers in Scotland, William Wilson of Bannockburn, began producing a few tartans under clan names. It was on this foundation.