King Edward I of England returns over the border after subduing the Scots in 1296: “It does a man good to be shot of a turd.” James Boswell, aged 22, records his first meeting with Samuel Johnson at Tom Davies’s bookshop in Covent Garden, 16th May 1763: “I drank tea at Davies’s in Russell Street, and about seven came in the great Mr Samuel Johnson, whom I have so long wished to see. Mr Davies introduced me to him. As I knew his mortal antipathy at the Scotch, I cried to Davies, ‘Don’t tell where I come from.’ However, he said, ‘From Scotland.’ ‘Mr Johnson,’ said I, ‘indeed I come from Scotland, but I cannot help it.’” In autumn 1844, a 25-year-old Queen Victoria makes her second visit to Scotland, spending three weeks with the Duke of Atholl in Perthshire. She writes in her journal on her return: “The English coast appeared terribly flat. Lord Aberdeen [a Scots peer, later Prime Minister] was quite touched when I told him I was so attached to the dear, dear Highlands and missed the fine hills so much. There is a great peculiarity about the Highlands and the Highlanders; and they are such a chivalrous, fine, active people. Our stay among them was so delightful. Independent of the beautiful scenery, there was a quiet, a retirement, a wildness, a liberty, and a solitude that had such a charm for us.” The poet Hugh MacDiarmid attacks music hall performer Harry Lauder, 1928: “The reason why the Harry Lauder type of thing is so popular in England is because it corresponds to the average Englishman’s ignorant notion of what the Scot is—or because it gives him a feeling of superiority which he is glad to indulge on any grounds, justified or otherwise. ‘Lauderism’ has made thousands of Scotsmen so disgusted with their national characteristics that they have gone to the opposite extreme and become, or tried to become, as English as possible; ‘Lauderism’ is, of course, only the extreme form of those qualities of canniness, pawkiness and religiosity, which have been foisted upon the Scottish people by insidious English propaganda, as a means of destroying Scottish national pride, and of robbing Scots of their true attributes which are the opposite of these mentioned. It is high time the Scots were becoming alive to the ulterior effect of this propaganda by ridicule.” The novelist Anthony Powell publishes his satirical anti-Scottish diatribe, Caledonia, in 1934:
“...Of Race, whose Thought and Word and Deed
Have made a new INFERNO North of Tweed,
Where they can practice in that chilly HELL
Vices that sicken; Virtues that repel.
Did they remain among such uthaw’d Latitudes,
And Scot with Scot alone exchanged his Platitudes,
Travellers but few would mark their stinted Bonhomie,
And smile to see each finicking Oeconomy.
Alack! They ever stream through ENGLAND’s door
To batten on the Rich, and grind the Poor,
With furtive Eye and eager, clutching hand
They pass like Locusts through the Southern Land:
And line their purses with the yellow Gold,
Which for each Scotsman, London’s pavements hold,
And in return, no matter where you find ‘em,
They brag of Scotland, now left safe behind ‘em.” [Extract]
Neal Ascherson writes about English immigration to Scotland in Stone Voices (2002): “Much of it originates in the 1980s, when very different groups began to seek an escape northwards from the social turmoil of Thatcherism. Redundant industrial workers used their severance money to buy houses or small businesses in Scotland. Younger idealists, especially from the northern cities of England, sought refuge in the Highlands and Islands to become ‘neo-peasant’ crofters in places they supposed to be beyond the reach of market forces... “Are the English unwelcome? There is certainly growing resentment... There have been very few acts of violence, none of which can be exclusively traced to the Englishness of the victim, and a few allegations of discrimination against English job applicants. But on this matter people keep their ill-feelings private, accessible to family and friends but not to strangers. Scotland likes to think of itself as a polite and hospitable country, and the English have been the first people to praise those qualities. Except at football matches, openly anti-English behaviour is held to be very bad behaviour. And Anglophobia, to self-critical Scots, implies something unflattering about Scotland. As a character famously says in the film of Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting: ‘It’s shite being Scottish. Some people hate the English; I don’t. They’re just wankers, but we were colonized by wankers. We couldn’t even find a decent country to be colonised by.’”
