IT is aye good to read Jim Lynch’s letters and experiences, including “The real whereabouts of the Stone of Destiny is unknown” in Thursday’s National. As the former editor of the Scots Independent, he ought to be writing on a more permanent basis in The National.
A few months after Edward the Murderer stole the Stane frae Scone, near Perth, his troops returned to ravage the area after they discovered they had been selt a pup. The Scots knew this and didnae even bother tae turn up and collect it, efter the Treaty of Northampton, March 17, 1328, between the Kingdoms of England and Scotland.
It was meant to bring an end to the First War of Scottish Independence, which had begun with the English invasion of Scotland in 1296. Like 1707, and other Treaties, it was broken by England, as they say, afore the ink had dried on the paper.
READ MORE: The stone being moved to Perth is not the real Stone of Destiny
The stone they took was in fact a cess pit lid. The real Stane, the Lia Fal, according tae a’ the annals, was of black creosote from a meteor, with ancient runic markings. The legend was that it was brought from Ireland, by Queen Scotia of Egypt and her Celtic mercenaries and by the Scots from Ulster to Alba, and used to Crown the Scoto-Pictish Kings and Queens ever since. So the Jelly Bean and Royal bum ancestors have been crowned sitting oan a lavvie pan lid a’ these years.
Jim mentioned that the Stane was broken. As I am sure he knows, it was in fact broken when suffragettes had thrown a bomb into the Abbey and split it. The public had never been told. When Bertie Gray – stonemason, justice of the peace, Glasgow councillor and assessor to the Court of Glasgow University – joined it together again with copper tubes and Liz the Wan was crowned in 1953, she sat on the cheeky message Bertie inserted in the tubes.
READ MORE: Stone of Destiny to return to Perthshire in historic move
“March 1951. Stone of Destiny. This stone belongs to Scotland. It was stolen by Edward 1 of England in 1296. The Church of England should be ashamed to admit that they allowed this piece of stolen property to remain at Westminster Abbey from that time. It must be returned to Scotland for the re-opening of the Scottish Parliament, which was never closed but only adjourned in 1707.”
So the Stane is a fake of a fake, as Jim hinted. Its whereabouts is still a safely guarded secret and subject of more myths, from being dumped in a loch, to waiting in Canada to return after independence. The Arlington Bar in Woodlands Road, between the university and Bertie’s stone mason yard in Sauchiehall Street, afore the Berkeley Hotel, or dental school, past Charing Cross, also has a stane in an alcove in behind a perspex screen, claiming to be the one Bertie substituted. It has an invitation to sit on it and crown yerself King.
Jim also hinted that Bertie made so many replicas that he couldn’t remember which was which, as alluded to in Thurso Berwick/Morris Blythman’s sang, The Wee Magic Stane.
I heard Bertie speak to a meeting in the SNP’s old HQ in the 60s, at the corner of Elmbank Street and Bath Street. The SNP sold it off and moved to Edinburgh after Winnie Ewing was elected. Roland Muirhead, founder member and republican socialist, gifted it to the SNP. He also had premises round the corner, in Elmbank Crescent, for his Scottish National Congress, or Scottish Secretariat, with a wealth of books, pamphlets and merchandise. He took me and other youngsters aside, after the meeting, and warned us not to do anything silly in England, as I was headed there with the TA (Territorial Army, not the Tartan Army), saying that their judiciary might not be as sympathetic.
Later, when some of us were tried and acquitted in the Glasgow High Court in 1979, the Daily Record and Evening Times derogatorily christened us the “Tartan Army”, a name that was reclaimed by Scottish fitba fans.
Donald Anderson
Glasgow
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