TRAVEL round the Argyll coastline – allegedly longer than that of France – and you can see a man in a bathtub, the ribs of a wooden ark and a puffin newly painted on a boulder.
Of course, each of these installations has a story to tell. The bathtub sculpture is the work of someone who used to be employed at the Loch Melfort Hotel and sits on a rock in the sea just off that impressive place.
Yet while this wet individual (who apparently has the sculptor’s face) has been there for some time, the ark only appeared a few weeks ago.
It is the creation of David Blair, who runs the Kilfinan Community Forest, along with some others in Tighnabruaich who support Extinction Rebellion and is intended to stand as a stark reminder of the peril in which our planet has been placed by selfish and careless humankind and as a spur to action at COP26 and beyond.
READ MORE: Scottish town's 'Jim Crow' rock gets a fresh coat of paint with Puffin redesign
It is also very beautiful both in setting and execution and it is therefore to be hoped that the planners of Argyll and Bute Council allow the message they are lucky enough to have on their doorstep to strike home without official interference, at least for a while.
The Puffin Rock, as I hope it will now be called, is the strangest story of all, but one which should kindle optimism about our collective ability to make a better world.
The rock is a large erratic which sits on the shore at Hunter’s Quay, between Dunoon and Sandbank. From the late 19th century it has been marked on the largest Ordnance Survey Maps as “Jim Crow”, which is, of course, a racist term of abuse originating in 19th-century America in a vaudeville song, delivered in blackface. This derogatory name came to be applied to black people in general and to a series of laws which discriminated against them.
Some in Dunoon and Cowal have claimed that the eponymous Jim Crow of the rock was merely a local builder who had a yard near the site. That is possible but what is certain is that for more than a hundred years people have been painting a black face on the boulder, complete with red lips, even, astonishingly, when the town was home to many black American servicemen.
There was a time when this was just accepted but that time is long past. In 2010, the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia at Ferris State University in Michigan called the rock a “monument to racism” and in 2017 the father of murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence (above), who saw it on a visit to Argyll and Bute, said he found its continued existence “very disappointing”.
Many local people shared that view and some eventually took the matter into their own hands, regularly painting the rock a plain grey, only to see the offensive original quickly, though anonymously, re-instated.
The local community council was also split on the issue, with some people arguing even in recent times that the image was nothing to do with race and (inevitably) accusing those who wanted change of “political correctness gone mad”. Nonetheless, when I was the local MSP I received regular complaints about the rock and to its credit the local paper, the Dunoon Observer, was also active in condemning its continued existence.
Things reached a head in 2018 when two members of the Hunter’s Quay community – John Farrell and John Kelsall – approached the former LibDem MP Alan Reid (below), now a local councillor, and myself to ask us to broker a final resolution of the matter.
I asked former Church of Scotland moderator Lorna Hood and her colleague Eleanor MacMahon to help us hold a meeting in Dunoon which would bring together those who still defended the rock with those who criticised it, including pupils at Dunoon Grammar School.
It was a difficult discussion but thoughtful mediation by Lorna and Eleanor produced in the end an agreement that the rock would no longer be repainted (it was at that stage a plain grey again) and that the art department of the school would take forward a competition, facilitated by my office, for a new design which would then be applied to the rock.
The online vote proved popular with a Puffin cleverly drawn by pupil Alex Fraser the clear winner. Lockdown delayed progress on site but the work has now been completed by advanced higher art pupils at the school, organised by their teacher Lucy Neish and with paint kindly donated by local company Marine Blast. Two things remain to be done: an interpretation board that tells the rock’s story needs to be erected, and an attempt has to be made to get the name changed on the Ordnance Survey map.
The latter may prove the most difficult challenge but it is worth trying, not least because the young people involved thought that the change of image wouldn’t be fully successful without expunging the old name too.
There is no doubt those who will see what has happened to the Jim Crow rock as simply another example of what they would sneeringly call a woke, cancel culture. But the involvement of the community, the enthusiasm of the young people and the acceptance of change by most of those previously opposed says something else.
It testifies to a sensitivity which can only be positive.
As Stephen Lawrence’s father, Neville, said when he first saw the rock: “We do not need to have this kind of division in the world. We need to respect each other.”
Having the Jim Crow rock permanently visible on the shore by a Scottish town wasn’t respectful. In fact it insulted a whole race.
It had to go, and it has gone, but thankfully in the most constructive way possible.
Something bad has been replaced by something good making the rock – at least – as worthy of seeing, and going to see, as the man in the bathtub and the ark.
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