COLOURED CHIEF OF SCOTTISH CLAN IN JAMAICA

Grey River Argus, 18 August 1949, Page 5

COLOURED CHIEF OF SCOTTISH CLAN IN JAMAICA

Declares Members in Scotland Want to Oust Him

(N.Z.P.A.—REUTER CABLE)

(Rec. 9.10). KINGSTON, August 16. Mr Langton George Duncan Haldane Robertson, history master at Jamaica’s Munro College, who is 51 years of age, said to-day that efforts are being made to oust him from the Chieftainship of the Scottish Clan Donnachaidh (the Robertsons). Mr Robertson, who is the 25th Chief of the clan, said that he had cancelled his ceremonial visit to Scotland, because he would not submit to a “revolting and insulting parade and examination of his colour”. He would wait in Jamaica until “his right, by birth and law, irrespective of colour”, has been established. He had heard, from Scotland, that, when he visited there, he would apparently be “paraded, microscoped, and even vivisected”. He added that action had been taken, in Edinburgh, by a minority group of the clan, to oust him, and probably to set up a “Clan Republic”.

Mr Robertson said that he was in “no hair-tearing state about his inheritance of coloured blood”. Giving the history of his ancestry, he explained that his great grandfather, Robert Joseph Robertson, had settled in Jamaica early in the nineteenth century. By a Scottish declaratory marriage, which had also been solemnised by a priest, his greatgrandfather married Jane Eliza Chambers, who was so beautiful that she was known as “the Venus of the Island”.-

Mr Robertson said his great-grand-father was “the younger son of Captain Alexander Robertson of Struan, of Drumachine, and of Inverack, the 17th chief of Clan Donnachaidh”. Mr Robertson concluded: “It should be remembered the English have a strain of coloured blood. There has not been a pure race of any colour on earth for ten thousand years”. Mr Robertson has sent a long air mail letter to .Scotland, bitterly criticising certain factions of the one hundred thousand-strong Robertson Clan, for assertions that their chief is .“a black man”. In Edinburgh, James Robertson, the secretary of the Clan Society, said that the Society had not objected to the chief, but that some of the members thought that the clan should have a chieftain resident in Britain, rather than one three thousand miles away.