Restless Land: A Radical Journey Through Scotland's History by Paterson Roz & McCombes Alan

Author:Paterson, Roz & McCombes, Alan [Paterson, Roz]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Calton Books
Published: 2014-07-26T16:00:00+00:00

OUT OF THE DEPTHS

No conscription!

In the centre of Tranent, the oldest mining town in Scotland, stands a striking statue of a woman striding resolutely forward, a drum under her left arm, her clenched right fist raised to the sky, her face etched with defiance. By her side, a child is running to keep up.

This is Joan Crookston – better known as Jackie – as she appeared on 29 August 1797. That morning, she led 2,000 people through the town, in protest against the Militia Act. It was the last day of her life.

The full title of the Westminster legislation was an Act to Raise a Militia Force, in the part of the kingdom of Great Britain called Scotland . Its purpose was to raise a 6,000-strong military force in Scotland by conscripting all young men between the ages of 19 and 23, excluding schoolmasters, professors, clergy, parish constables and those with the wealth to buy their way out.

The British state and its henchmen in Scotland were deeply unpopular, and resistance erupted in towns and villages across the land. In Tranent, the huge assembly of colliers and servants, predominantly female, converged on the town square, all set to tear down the list of those chosen by ballot to be conscripted. When he saw the size of the hostile crowd, the commander of the recruitment squad, Major Andrew Wight, called for reinforcements. From barracks in nearby Musselburgh, the Pembroke Yeomanry from Wales and the Cinque Port Cavalry from the south coast of England marched into town and, in the words of labour historian Tom Johnston, began ‘shooting, spearing, slashing and riding down a populace armed only with stones’. By the time they’d finished, the streets were strewn with a dozen corpses and countless wounded. One of those killed was Jackie Crookston.

As with Bloody Sunday in Derry, in 1972, no-one was ever convicted. The Lord Advocate, Robert Dundas, the brother of the Secretary of State for Scotland, refused to take any action, declaring that the action of the soldiers had been justified in the face of ‘such a dangerous mob as deserved more properly the name of an insurrection’.

A few days after the Tranent massacre, a regional uprising blew a hole in Highland Perthshire. This was frontier territory, the start of the Highlands, a bilingual region where people would slip effortlessly from Gaelic to Scots and back again without missing a beat. It had been a stronghold of the Jacobites half a century before. The subsequent High Court indictment of the two men identified as the ringleaders, Angus Cameron and James Menzies, describes how a large crowd first surrounded the home of the minister in Weem, Aberfeldy, and invited him, none too politely, to join their march on nearby Castle Menzies, the residence of the Lord Lieutenant of the County of Perth.

Here, the ‘riotous and disorderly mob, their number amounting to upwards of a thousand, mostly armed with sticks and bludgeons’, pressed the Lord Lieutenant to have no part in this reviled Militia Act.

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