The NTS must be more careful before it links things to slavery

The NTS website comments on the list as follows: “JM Barrie’s birthplace, Kirriemuir: Barrie’s father worked in the cloth weaving trade, which was linked to slavery.”

David Barrie was indeed a handloom weaver in the 1860s when JM Barrie was growing up. Mechanisation had already largely replace handloom weaving and dominated the jute trade.

Handloom weaving continued for fine linen. There is no doubt that jute cloth – or burlap – did feature as cheap clothing for the plantation field hands.

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However, it was the gold rushes in the USA, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand that were the drivers of the Tayside textile trade. Add to this the huge amount of warfare in the 19th century, the Royal Navy sailcloth demands and the worldwide railway booms, and the proportion of cloth used in slave owning states is minimal.

We also have to consider motive. Did the Tayside jute and flax producers supply the markets in the USA with the express intention of prolonging slavery?

Did the slave owners use burlap to clothe their ill-fated workforce? Yes. Did David Barrie use some Industrial Revolution FedEx to spirit quality handloom woven linen directly to the southern states of the USA? No.

While it is commendable that the NTS is looking at the history of its properties, can I suggest that they adopt a more proportionate approach to it. Before it seeks to tarnish a noble occupation and threaten the survival of Barrie’s Cottage, reading the Little Minister by JM Barrie, about the weaver riots in Kirriemuir, might help the NTS realise the extreme hardship and poverty conditions weavers and spinners in Scotland in the 1800s suffered.

Ron J Scrimgeour

Past Deacon, Weaver Incorporation of Dundee

FOLLOWING the particularly interesting letters from Malcolm Cordell and Andy Doig in today’s (August 27) National about the ramifications of the Gove/Galloway huddle, I wonder how they will implement it.

Could it be that the name Conservative won’t figure in the list choice for next year’s Holyrood election? Not that they will have gone away, just that they might well rebrand themselves as Unionists pure and simple. Rather than get ideas above their station, they would remain as Conservatives in the constituencies. In the lists just calling them selves Unionists they could not only hope to hoover up the unattached Galloways of this world, but also the hard line voters who would support them tactically without formally voting Tory. It would be interesting to also see which prominent members of the old “better together” gang would be prepared to go Tory-light as they no longer hold a political office.

David Rowe

Beith

I HAVE been like an excited child waiting for that polling card to arrive through my door so I can vote in Indy2.

To vote “Yes” to independence for my country, so that it can forge its own future. And so, I was deeply disappointed when I read that Andrew Neil etc, want to disenfranchise me. You see, it seems I am a fraud. I am not Scottish!

I was brought up and educated in Scotland, my life and home are in Scotland, my parents and grandparents are Scottish. But because of the cruelty of colonialism and the British Empire, I was born in Africa, in the last moments of Britain’s dying days of its strangle hold and oppression there. Where the local population, the genuine Africans, had no rights, could note vote and had no say in the future of their own country. Decisions on their future were made in a far off place.

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But they got independence from colonial rule and were able, for the first time, to vote and decide on their own country’s future.

At the grand old age of 18 months, I was brought to Scotland. I voted “Yes” in 1979, the very first time I could vote. I voted “Yes” in 2014 and I looked forward to voting “Yes” again in Indy2. I had so looked forward to voting “Yes” again, so that the people who live in this country of Scotland could themselves decide on the future of their own country. But Neil et al have told me I am a fraud. Yet if it had been the other way round, and I was born here and left at 18 months, I could. And so, he would have me left in the situation of those Africans in the country I was born in, who were native to the country, their families had been there for generation on generation but had no right to vote.

When my voting card arrives in the post, under the Neil rules, I will have to return it with a very, very heavy heart after having written “not eligible to vote”. I hope the person who was born here and left at 18 months and lives in some other place, when they vote, votes the way I feel will be good for my country, even though they have no knowledge of life or existence here.

Crìsdean Mac Fhearghais

Prestonfield