'Tied up with pink ribbons' : repression, counterculture and Scottish national identity, c.1926-c.1967

Abstract

This thesis unearths the radical debate about Scottish national identity that took place in Scotland between 1926 and 1967, and it labels this period the ‘Long Renaissance’. Employing the innovative lenses of culture, sex and location, the thesis further contributes to recent analyses of the origins of left-wing nationalism in Scotland, offering a cultural pre-history of such a stance. It draws upon generally disregarded left-wing print-culture and the hitherto largely untapped personal archive of poet and folklorist Hamish Henderson. The intellectuals of this Long Renaissance believed that an authentic sensual Scottishness had been repressed and corrupted by the following: the Scottish Reformation and its legacy; the 1707 parliamentary union with England, and industrialisation. These thinkers fought to overcome Scotland’s sentimental image as popularised by the Kailyard school of Scottish literature and by saccharine, Anglicised folk-song, both apparently symptoms of religious, political and capitalist repressions.

Having first contextualised earlier indictments of hypocritical Scottish Calvinists, Chapter One (c.1786-1936) then examines the evolution of these indictments into condemnation of Scottish Calvinism. Chapters Two and Three (c.1925-c.1962) consider ideas that Scottish sensuality had been repressed and corrupted in Scotland’s small towns and cities by Scottish Calvinism, domesticity and industrialisation, but that remnants of a liberated sensuality had survived on Scotland’s rural fringes. Chapters Four and Five (c.1951-c.1967) follow Henderson as he built upon these ideas. Henderson’s concept of Scottish national identity was a universal bawdy Scottishness that had the ability to transcend boundaries of class, gender, sexuality and location. The Long Renaissance intellectuals’ works were less popular than Kailyard kitsch, but they did attempt to sketch a radical and culturally free Scotland, thus anticipating the modern egalitarian Scottish nationalism that would evolve during the late 1960s and the 1970s. Henderson’s own ballad ‘The Freedom Come-All-Ye’ even graces the Scottish Parliament’s Canongate Wall.