I was born in Scotland. I have lived as a citizen of this nation all of my life.
My parents, John Bolland and Mary Elliott, were born here too: and my grand-parents and great grand-parents.
Culturally I define myself as Scots-Irish but even here I might hesitate to designate myself as ‘Scots’. The qualifier describes where these ‘Irish’ (including for this moment Gaels) are located. Gaels (Irish or Scottish) who live in Scotland but are not ‘Scots’.
In my growing up the dominant narrative has been that ‘we’ are Gaels – whether from the North and West of Ireland or the North and West of Scotland.
‘We’ all like a wee bit tartanry and the music is, generally, of a superior quality.
‘We’ never quite succumbed: ‘we’ were just roundly beaten by superior numbers and resources, perfidious sassenachs.
The numbers, the genealogy, undermine this fantasy. By rough calculation, in terms of ancestry, I am:
- 28% Scots
- 38% Irish Gaels
- 22% Highland Gael
- 13% Ulster Scot
Or, simply going by location : 50/50 Scottish-Irish.
The persistence of identification and its weird hybridisation relate, of course, to stigma, prejudice and revelations.
Gaelic speaker versus Scots speaker
Presbyterian versus Catholic
Although my politics flow from these societal fractures, it was not politics or class which my extended family chose to define ‘us’. I do not speak (much) Gaelic and I am neither Presbyterian nor Catholic.[1] But these are the categories out of which, it feels, my life has been constructed. Even in the hyper-secular, globalised modernity of the late 20th century, the apple must not fall far from the tree.
In the beginning (before I accidently barrelled through into the ‘dirty secret’ of my Scots ancestry), I tried to frame these narrative in ‘class’ terms: Peasant, Proletarian, Capitalist and Citizen. (And then I discovered the ‘Nobs’ lurking deep in the Scot’s undergrowth!)
But the ‘Peasant’ category didn’t fit the story telling. Yes: my Gael and Scots heritage does include ‘Peasant’ experiences: tenant farmers surviving by means of subsistence agriculture, paying their rents in kind until their proprietors’ greed for silver forced them into the market-economy. But there are also burgesses[i], maltsters[ii], cadgers[iii], distillers[iv], grocers[v] and artisan weavers[vi]..
Place – The Ground Beneath Our Feet – and, therefore, ethnicity provide an organising principle for the period before these culturally-defined strands were drawn into the boorach of industrialisation in the towns of West-Central Scotland: specifically Paisley and Glasgow. It is in this furnace that the distinctive cultural strands are, progressively, smelted and alloyed through migration, exploitation and inter-marriage.
My alloyed Gael-Irish-Scot identity (or identification) is a consequence of a progressive loss of identity over the course of the Anthropocene. But it is, still, a narrative in which ‘the only way is down’ (at least until the 2nd quarter of the 20th century).
Only one individual in this ancestral narrative bucks the trend: Thomas Niccol (1768-1845)[vii]. The Capitalist. The aberration lasted barely a generation, at least in the case of my ancestry[viii]. His son, Thomas Niccol (1829-1911), my great-great grandfather, lived (and died) a ship-yard worker, not a ship-yard owner.
There is an African blessing: may the food in your mouth taste sweeter than it did in your mothers.
Ironically, given the importance to the Greenock economy of refining slave-grown sugar, Thomas, within the constraints of his time, experiences the greatest degree of ‘sweetening’ in this extended narrative. He feels, to me, like a ‘class-enemy’, a beneficiary of the processes of capitalist accumulation that have led to our present predicament.
But Tam is simply a man on the make, prospering on the ‘rising tide’ of imperialist exploitation, industrial development and ethnic clearances in the hinterland. Who can blame him? Though, of course, I do.