SCOTS CLAN CHIEF: OBJECTION ON SCORE OF COLOUR

Greymouth Evening Star, 18 August 1949, Page 6

SCOTS CLAN CHIEF: OBJECTION ON SCORE OF COLOUR

KINGSTON (Jamaica). August 16.—Mr Langton George Duncan Haldane Robertson, aged 51, a history master at Jamaica’s Munro College, said today that efforts were being made to oust him from the chieftainship of the Scottish Clan Donnachaidh (the Robertsons). Mr Robertson, who is the twentyfifth chief of the clan, said he had cancelled his ceremonial visit te Scotland because he would not submit. to the “revolting and insulting parade and examination of his colour.” He would wait in Jamaica until “his right by birth and law irrespective of colour,” had been established.

He had heard from Scotland that, when lie went there, he would apparently be “'paraded, microscoped, and even vivisected;” Action had been taken in Edinburgh by a minority group of the clan to oust him, and probably set up a “clan republic.”

Mr Robertson said he was in “no hair-tearing state about his inheritance of coloured blood.”

Giving the history of his ancestry, he explained that his great-grand-father, Robert Joseph Robertson, had settled in Jamaica early in the nineteenth century. By a Scottish declaratory marriage which was confirmed by a priest, his great-grand-father had married Jane Eliza Chambers, who was so beautiful that she was known as the ‘Venus of the island.” Mr Robertson said that his greatgrandfather was the “younger son of Captain Alexander Robertson, of Struan, of Drumachine, and of Inverack, seventeenth chief of the Clan Donnachaidh.”

Mr Robertson concluded: “It should be remembered Jhat the English have a strain of coloured blood. There has not been a pure race of any colour on earth for 10,000 years.” Mr Robertson has sent a long letter by air mail to Scotland. In this letter he bitterly criticises certain factions of the 100,000-strong Robertson Clan for assertions that their chief is a “black man.” In Edinburgh, Mr James Robertson, secretary of the Robertson Clan Society, said that the society had not objected to'the chief, but some members thought the clan should have a chieftain who lived in Britain, rather than one 300 miles away.