Singing for Scotland at Hampden, Murrayfield and beyond


The songs that we sing individually and collectively in our hearts, homes and at public occasions tell us something – about who we are, our relationships with each other, and the society and nation we live in.

There are numerous different layers to this. There are the songs we sing and hum along to on the radio or on streaming devices; the golden oldies that remind us of favourite or not so favourite past moments; and then there are the collective songs we sing together to celebrate and define ourselves as part of something bigger.

Much commented upon, but seldom properly studied, has been how football crowds supporting the Scottish men’s national team have changed the songs they sung. Up until the late 1960s these huge crowds would sing along or listen in reverence to ‘God Save the Queen’. Then they started to get restless and began booing. And then they started to sing what became an unofficial anthem, ‘Flower of Scotland’, to the point eventually that ‘God Save the Queen’ was dropped and ‘Flower of Scotland’ officially adopted before games.

This all happened very quickly and occurred through football fans showing what they thought of the British national anthem, first being told they were being discourteous and to show respect, until the authorities knew there was no turning back and ditched ‘God Save the Queen’. The same eventually happened at a slower pace with rugby at Murrayfield.

This is both significant and symbolic and at the same time does not automatically indicate what political shifts lie underneath – on the constitutional question, party affiliation or voting behaviour.

It does represent some kind of shift though which does need exploring. Magnus Linklater in The Times on Monday – faced with thousands of Scots bursting into the bars of ‘Flower of Scotland’ at Murrayfield on Saturday as the Scottish team battled to an impressive 20-17 victory over England – felt a degree of discomfort about what it all meant.

From this he equates the cocktail of powerful emotions at Murrayfield to a caricature of Scottish nationalism: ‘disgust with everything English becomes visceral, and to be Scottish is deeply, palpably, almost despairingly, the only thing you want to be’, concluding: ‘Is this how Yes supporters feel the whole time? If so, I totally understand.’ It is a frightening picture if it were true, only corrected by the fact that the main body of modern Scottish nationalism over the past 50 years has borne little resemblance to this.

There are a set of tropes connected to Scottish identity which are trundled out and are just plain offensive about the English and trying to justify anti-English sentiments. This is though not unique to any political tradition but found across the spectrum and society – Scottish nationalist, unionist, belonging to neither, left, right, centre and even the most apolitical.

Unionists used to be so comfortable in their Scottish identity that some felt they could take out their prejudices on the English. And part of Scottish identity has been made up of not being English, and thus for some this being expressed by anti-English prejudice.

The Power of Song

What underpins the singing of songs at Hampden and Murrayfield is a shift in the idea of what people think Scotland means, entailing a reclaiming and remaking of public space and culture and how that relates to being a nation.

This does not narrowly lead inexorably to independence but does inform a lived experience of what Scotland is and makes it the territory, culture(s) and nation which defines people(s) and place(s) in a distinctive way. Not to the exclusion of other identities here, and not to the exclusion of the place of us beyond these shores. This long-term shift has been a tail wind which has informed the rise of the SNP and of independence coming in from the cold, but it is not owned by any political tradition. Rather it is a challenge to all parties and political viewpoints, culture, media, civil society and businesses to respond to this changed Scottish landscape and give it form, expression and tangible ideas.

Just before the shift began on the terraces of Hampden Park with ‘God Save the Queen’ another musical change began in Scotland. At the end of the 1950s and early 1960s a folk music revival began aided and encouraged by the likes of Maurice Blythman and Hamish Henderson (which I mentioned when reviewing earlier this year Jack Brand’s The National Movement in Scotland on Bella Caledonia).

This contributed to a generational shift in politics with the emergence of a new wave of youthful student protest, the rise of CND and the anti-nuclear issue – in Scotland due to the siting of US nuclear weapons at the Holy Loch in March 1961 and which played a part in the first electoral signs of popularity by the SNP long before Winnie Ewing won Hamilton.

A contributory factor in this strand of radicalism coming together, holding rallies, being visible and seen as a movement were anti-nuclear songs such as ‘Ding Dong Dollar’ and the legendary ‘Freedom Come All Ye’ which drew from that folk scene and revival. These even spawned a Folkways Records release, aided and supported by Pete Seeger, called Ding Dong Dollar: Anti-Polaris and Scottish Republican Songs issued in April 1962 – the first ever musical release of anti-nuclear songs anywhere in the world.

One can overstate this and be too determinist but the songs we sing and choose to sing at public gatherings matter. Iain Hamilton, the Scot who made history bringing the Stone of Destiny back from Westminster Abbey to Scotland on Christmas Eve 1950, had a fine line about this. He wrote in 1991, when looking back on a life of rebellion, challenging power and a changed Scotland:

Nobody sang in Scotland in the middle part of the century. To be more correct, those who sang did not derive their songs from Scotland. Their sources were foreign and what they sang was only an alien copy of other peoples’ ways of life.

He saw a very different Scotland in the early 1990s compared to the past: 

Now everyone sings Scottish songs, and if I were a unionist politician of whatever party, but especially of the Labour Party, I would be counting the songs, rather than the votes. The people who make the songs of a country, have a habit of making the laws also.

This observation might be a bit too sweeping, sentimental and determinist but it contains something profound. It is too romantic and essentialist for sure but Hamilton is surely right when he writes that the songs we sing matter and perhaps are as important as the votes we weight and count.

Deconstructing Scotch Myths

Scotland has some serious work to do about lots of things. About the impact of devolution, twenty years of the Scottish Parliament and how it does things and indeed what it does, the nature of the SNP after fifteen years in office, our social justice credentials in a land where we do not consistently or effectively act upon them while giving the pretence that they are what make us what we are.

The latter point has been true for far too long – indeed as long as I can remember – and has been expressed by the present-day SNP, Labour when it was running Scotland, and the nation pre-Parliament which defined itself in opposition to Thatcherism.

In all the above, one strand has come to the fore and was completely missing from Linklater’s piece: the limits of a politics dominated not just by Scottish nationalism but the competing claims of two nationalisms, the other being British nationalism.

Several decades ago, in the Scotland up to the 1960s, unionism had such a sense of itself and its place that it was comfortable understanding itself as a nationalism and even a hyphenated form at that – ‘unionism-nationalism’ in the words of historian Graeme Morton. This unionism claimed all sorts of icons, symbols and myths as part of unionist Scotland which it would not dare now: Bruce, Wallace, Burns, the Declaration of Arbroath. The reasoning was that they had all contributed to the making of Scotland as a nation which then had the self-confidence to create with England the union of 1707.

To paraphrase ‘Flower of Scotland’, ‘these things are past now and in the past they must remain’. That glad, confident era of unionism has long gone, replaced by a nervous, defensive, hesitant expression whose only hope seems to be creating a bogey man of bigoted Scottish nationalism: that is after all the consistent framing of Gordon Brown.

Yet the rise and dominance of Scottish nationalism is not the end of the story either, but merely one part of a longer journey. It has aided our debates in recent decades: the arrival of the Parliament, the independence debate, and a remarkable flowering of culture and creative expression. But on the big questions of the day and the future it has, as a tradition and outlook, little to say of worth.

This is true the world over. Nationalism is never enough in newly independent nation-states or in older, established countries. Scotland has to get past the competing claims of our two nationalisms, one out and proud, the other in denial it is such a thing. We need to be able to find the spaces, traditions, values and philosophies which address and speak to the Scotlands of the future.

Who knows what that would sound to sing at Hampden, Murrayfield or in a small folk club, but if we can give voice to a post-nationalist Scotland (post-Scottish, post-British) including in song then it would be one small step on the road to living in that future.

Help to support independent Scottish journalism by subscribing or donating today.

 

Comments (19)

Join the Discussion

Your email address will not be published.

  1. Hugh McShane says:

    Thoughtful piece with a good grasp of the historical perspective. Being an active participant,ongoing, in the commentariat, I know ad-hominem attacks are not really indulged in by Gerry+others, and not just as a badge of being taken seriously, but through genuine belief. However, we, the punters, don’t need to, and I find that whenever I see a reference to Edina’s arseholes from their privileged tribe, like ML, Massie, Rifkind pere et fils, Darling et al, my reaction is of visceral dislike, for what they are,what they say+ what they do…

    1. 220211 says:

      But, contrary to popular belief, merely insulting someone is not an ad hominem attack.

      An ad hominem attack is an argument that appeals to the character, motive, or some other attribute of the person who is making a claim rather than to the substance of the claim itself. Respectable commentators like Gerry tend to avoid making such arguments because they are formally fallacious and, as such, carry no persuasive force.

      Merely insulting someone, on the other hand, is just an exercise in violence.

  2. Wul says:

    I don’t see myself as a “nationalist” at all. And I’m not “proud” of Scotland, having had nothing to do with it’s creation. In fact, I am a little embarrassed by Scotland. The land itself has been blessed with great beauty and natural resources though. And the people are good.

    I’d like to live in an actual nation, rather than a “province” or “territory”. Maybe that makes me a nationalist?

    I’d guess the switch from “Flower of Scotland” to “God Save the Queen” stayed with us because the former is much more fun to sing and the latter is a pean to subservience.

  3. Tom Ultuous says:

    WITF is ‘Wild Mountain Thyme’ not the Scottish national anthem. It’s our ‘Jerusalem’ even if it was written by an “Ulsterman” (or is that why). Do you now how many big names have done cover versions of it? Hell, Ray Donovan’s wife even sung it to Terry Donovan (Eddie Marsan) when he was thinking of topping himself.

    1. 220212 says:

      Wasn’t ‘Wild Mountain Thyme ‘written by Robert Tannahill, a Paisleyman, of which McPeake’s version is a remix, and which was itself a remix of the Edinburgh music-seller John Hamilton’s ‘Braes o’ Bowhether’?

  4. Malcolm Kerr says:

    For the sake of accuracy, the US’ nuclear weapons were at the Holy Loch, not Loch Fyne, and nothing at all can be deduced about what ‘Yes supporters’ think from a Scottish rugby crowd at Murrayfield.

    1. Gerry Hassan says:

      Thanks for that corrective. Don’t know how I did that and will correct.

      1. Fixed now, thanks Malcolm, my fault.

        1. DonDon says:

          I notice that you have changed “sighting” to ” siting”, Well done!

  5. Tom Ultuous says:

    Much of the violence and racism in international football is down to the English fans. There’s also a fairly large group of Scots who support England, hate their fellow Scots and are more prone to riot or indulge in racism.

  6. Malcolm Kerr says:

    I suspect I’m not alone in finding this really offensive. Free speech, and all that, but I wonder if this comment should be removed, not least for the two very offensive racist words used. Neither is acceptable, particularly when delivered anonymously. I’m not a great fan of Flower of Scotland myself, and I don’t like it as a national anthem, but it isn’t about rejecting a racial minority. It a historical reference to a Scottish victory over an invading army in the fourteenth century.

  7. 220213 says:

    ‘Flower of Scotland’ is certainly a nationalist song, and it dates from a time when nationalism was informed by all sorts of ethnic nonsense and folk singers like the Corries routinely expressed a casual racism and antagonism in general against all sorts of ‘others’ (‘Chinkies’, ‘Pakis’, ‘women’, and ‘gays’, as well as ‘the English’).

    The sporting and other cultural rivalries between the so-called ‘Home Nations’ of the Empire has long been part of Tory nationalism in Scotland, and the popularity of ‘Flower of Scotland’ can perhaps be best understood in that context; as the equivalent of house rivalries within schools and college rivalries within universities.

    Thankfully, ‘those days are past now and in the past they must remain’. ‘Scots’ are now an increasingly multiracial and multicultural people rather than a specific ‘race’ or ‘ethnicity’. ‘Flower of Scotland’ is surely not an appropriate anthem for such a nation.

    1. Have you got references for this racism?

      1. 220213 says:

        Scotland the Brave

        Land o’ the purple heather.
        Land o’ the dirty weather.
        Land where the midges gaither,
        Scotland the Brave.
        Land o’ the Pakistanis,
        Andy Capp and Saturday sannies.
        Land where they sell their grannies,
        Scotland the Brave.

        Used to say in faither’s day,
        You could hear the bagpipes play,
        But now you hear the regal tones
        o’ Elton John and The Rolling Stones.
        Land that is full o’ stinkers,
        Wee fat Jews and VP drinkers.
        Whisky put a lot o’ stinkers into Scottish graves.

        Land that is full o’ skivers,
        Comic singers, deep sea divers,
        Turbans on our bus condrivers,
        Scotland the Brave.
        Land o’ the brutal Bobbies,
        Councillers wi’ part-time jobbies,
        Architects wi’ paying hobbies,
        Scotland the Brave.

        https://youtu.be/kK6LkpfZ94s

    2. Malcolm Kerr says:

      Where to start? I don’t like Flower of Scotland much myself. Least of all as a national anthem, and that is of course, because we are a multicultural country. It is fair to say, however, that there is no reference to ‘the English’ anywhere in Flower of Scotland, which celebrates a (rare) fourteenth century victory over an aggressor, while expressing some grief over the associated loss of life. Your scatter-gun approach to dissing ‘folk singers like the Corries’ is lazy and unworthy. The Corries wrote their own material as well as popularising traditional songs in the context of the 60s folk revival. They didn’t use the derogatory racial stereotypes which you are suggesting.

      1. 220214 says:

        Folk music everywhere tends to reflect the prejudices of its milieu. Scottish folk music isn’t exceptional in this respect.

    3. Hugh McShane says:

      re. 22 guy, + I’m sure it’s a guy, agree with last sentence- want evidence for the sweeping assertions in first para.-sounds like more metro-woke revisionism from, I guess, s’one not alive in the Corries heyday- loose,muddle-headed ,mischievous.. ach, forget it-yer a numptie!

      1. 220214 says:

        As has been said before, Hugh, contrary to popular belief, merely insulting someone is not an ad hominem attack.

        An ad hominem attack is an argument that appeals to the character, motive, or some other attribute of the person who is making a claim rather than to the substance of the claim itself. Respectable commentators like Gerry tend to avoid making such arguments because they are formally fallacious and, as such, carry no persuasive force.

        Merely insulting someone, on the other hand, is just an exercise in violence.

Help keep our journalism independent

We don’t take any advertising, we don’t hide behind a pay wall and we don’t keep harassing you for crowd-funding. We’re entirely dependent on our readers to support us.

Subscribe to regular bella in your inbox

Don’t miss a single article. Enter your email address on our subscribe page by clicking the button below. It is completely free and you can easily unsubscribe at any time.