The Chevalier de Johnstone - by Ann Swinfen

Broughty Ferry is a former fishing village on the Tay estuary, four miles down river from Dundee, on the east coast of Scotland. The fishing boats have gone now, together with the men who sailed them and who manned the whaling ships which made the perilous journeys to Arctic waters in the days when whale oil was a precious commodity. In the nineteenth century the ‘jute barons’ of Dundee began to build their handsome houses here, and ever since it has been a place for quiet homes, with nothing more disturbing than the cry of gulls and oyster-catchers, the river carrying little traffic, but providing a home for seals and dolphins. The last place you would imagine to have witnessed dragoons in pursuit of a fleeing Jacobite officer in the aftermath of a terrible battle. Yet it is the place where the Chevalier de Johnstone made his dramatic escape, thanks to the courage of some unlikely friends.

 

The harbour at Broughty still guarded by its medieval castle

James Johnstone, later known as the Chevalier de Johnstone, was born in Edinburgh on 25 July, 1719, and grew up in Scotlandand London. In 1738 he visited two uncles in Russia, evidence of an early taste for adventure which would shape the rest of his life. Almost immediately after Bonnie Prince Charlie raised his standard at Glenfinnan on 19 August 1745, Johnstone joined the Jacobite army in Perth, and soon rose to the rank of captain. Throughout the 1745 rebellion, he participated in all the major battles, culminating in the massive defeat at Culloden, on 16 April 1746, when the Jacobite forces were scattered and then pursued ruthlessly throughout the Highlands by the Duke of Cumberland’s army. Most of those who were caught were hanged, while Prince Charles Stuart turned tail and fled, abandoning his followers and escaping to France. Writing later in his memoirs, Johnstone was severely critical of the prince, claiming that he could have rallied his forces instead of deserting them.

 

Prince Charles Edward Stuart

Most of the Jacobites who survived tried to go to ground in the mountains and glens of the Highlands. Some made their escape, like the prince, via the western isles and thence to France (always a supporter of the Scots against England). James Johnstone, however, made the perilous decision to head south, into the Lowlandswhich were held by the English army and by the Protestant Lowland Scots who remained loyal to the English crown and not to the half Polish, quarter Italian, French speaking Catholic Prince Charles.

And this is where Broughty Ferry enters the story of the Chevalier de Johnstone.

Johnstone managed to reach the estate of a Mr Graham at Duntrune, a man he had been told might be willing to provide help. Graham’s two sons had fought with the Jacobites, and his family had been involved in the 1715 rebellion, but he had stayed at home during the present troubles, and so was not suspect. Inspired by a particularly vivid dream, which was to prove accurate, Johnstone was trying to make his way south to Edinburgh, where he had old friends who (he hoped) might be able to smuggle him on board a ship for France. However, to reach Edinburgh he would have to cross the two great east coast rivers – the Tay and the Forth. Graham’s estate at Duntrune was some five miles to the north of the Tay, and the whole area between Duntrune and a possible crossing place at Broughty was alive with Cumberland’s dragoons.

 

Butcher Cumberland

Graham hid Johnstone in an enclosure on his estate, full of high bushes of broom, and provided food – eggs, butter, bread, and cheese for breakfast, washed down with a bottle of wine and a bottle of beer – Johnstone’s first decent meal for weeks. Afterwards, while the fugitive slept, Mr Graham devised a plan for him to reach Broughty, as it was known then (or ‘Brochtie’ in Scots, 'Bruach Tatha' in Gaelic), where he arranged for fishermen to row him across the river. He then returned to provide Johnstone a dinner of the best piece of beef he had ever tasted. Over an excellent bottle of claret, Graham explained the plan and the two men synchronised their watches. First, at five o’clock Johnstone must follow, at a discreet distance, one of Graham’s men as he walked some miles to a windmill carrying a sack of grain for his master. This Johnstone did, waiting in hiding for his next guide, an elderly woman who led him on until they reached the hill overlooking Broughty.

‘You must wait here,’ she said, ‘while I go into Broughty to see the fishermen.’

Johnstone hid himself behind the trees and undergrowth in a furrow on the edge of a ploughed field beside the road down into Broughty, more or less where our nineteenth century house stands today. On the other side of the road, on Fort Hill, stood the fort (or what remained of it) built two hundred years earlier by Henry VIII’s forces during the ‘Rough Wooing’, a campaign which was intended to bring about a marriage between the children Mary Queen of Scots and the future King Edward VI. (It failed.)

 

18th century dragoon

As Johnstone waited in considerable fear, a large troop of dragoons rode up the hill from Broughty, passing within feet of his hiding place, having searched every fisherman’s cottage, boat shed, and tavern in the village. They were closely followed by the old woman, in a state of panic. As it was drawing toward dusk, the dragoons rode away, having failed to find any of the Jacobites for whom they had been searching. The old woman, however, warned that the fishermen now refused to row Johnstone over the river, having been intimidated by the threats of the dragoons. She urged him to return to Duntrune.

This the Chevalier de Johnstone refused to do, and left his hiding place to hurry down the hill to the village where he had expected to be taken across the river on the next stage in his escape. He had no difficulty in finding the fishermen’s inn on the shore, and no difficulty in finding the fishermen. But the men continued to be terrified and flatly refused to take him across the river. Johnstone argued that, since the dragoons had just searched the whole village and found nothing, now was the safest time to make the journey. Still they refused.

 

The Ship Inn on the river front may stand on the same spot

The innwife, Mistress Burn, had two exceptionally beautiful daughters, Mally and Jenny. They taunted the men with their cowardice, but to no effect.

‘O Jenny,’ said the elder girl, ‘they are despicable cowards and poltroons. I would not for the world that this unfortunate gentleman were taken in our house. I pity his situation. Will you take an oar? I’ll take the other, and we will row him over ourselves, to the eternal shame of these pitiful and heartless cowards.’

[So the Chevalier de Johnstone reports her. She is very well spoken for a Broughty innwife’s daughter!]

 

The wide Tay at Broughty

At ten o’clock, Johnstone and the two girls ran the boat down the pebble beach to the river and got aboard. The Tay was then about two miles wide at this point, and it carries more water than any other river in Britain. To row across it, in the dark, in time of war, was no small undertaking, but the two girls took turn about on one oar, while the Chevalier de Johnstone took the other, and thus the fugitive officer was rowed safely across to Fife, reaching it around midnight. Once on shore the girls set him on the road to St Andrews. They refused any payment, but Johnstone managed to slip ten or twelve shillings into Mally’s pocket, before kissing them both soundly and continuing on his flight to Edinburgh. He was never to see them again, but he never forgot them.

After more adventures, the Chevalier de Johnstone reached Edinburgh and travelled thence to Rotterdam and Paris, disguised as a servant to Lady Jane Douglas, as foretold in his dream. He would continue to lead an exciting life for many years in Europe and Canada, eventually recorded in The Memoirs of the Chevalier de Johnstone.

As for Broughty and the two girls, Mally and Jenny Burn? No doubt Broughty slipped quietly back into its life as a fishing village, and presumably the girls held their tongues, for there is no record of reprisals by Cumberland’s forces. Today a simple plaque stands as a memorial to their act of defiance and courage, in the face of the fishermen’s cowardice.

The plaque in Broughty commemorating the escape

Ann Swinfen

http://www.annswinfen.com

Treasures of Oral History by Katherine Webb

Whenever I'm asked about my research process, I always say that I read as much that was written at time as I can. You simply can't beat hearing about something from the horse's mouth. Nobody knows what it was actually like to live through a particular historical event or era unless they actually did so, and, as a writer of historical fiction, I can pick up up valuable pointers on vocabulary, attitude and what was really important to those people, as well as an insight in to what actually happened.

There are some great collections of oral history around; the 'Voices' series are excellent, for example:

The local history section of a library is also often a treasure trove - the WI and other such groups will often have compiled, somewhere in their history, stories of their member's childhoods. I often write about rural village communities in the early twentieth century, and these seemingly 'small' stories of school days, hedge remedies, pocket money, do-it-yourself fun and favourite treats are endlessly fascinating to me.

Whenever I can, I try to find somebody to actually talk to who lived in the time and place I need to learn about - not always easy or possible, but so rewarding when it works out. Earlier this year, I wrote a piece for the Guardian about my grandparents - how they met, in North Africa, just after the Second World War, how I first came to find out about their adventurous, romantic history, and the effect it had on me. You can read the article here (copy and paste link into browser) -

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/mar/19/how-grandma-had-her-wicked-way-

- but the crux of the piece was that almost always, when we lose somebody, particularly an older family member, we find ourselves wishing we had known them better, and had asked them more about themselves and their lives, before it was too late. 

This is especially true for anyone with an interest in history. The elderly are, of course, invaluable sources of knowledge. The generation who lived through the Second World War, the 1950s and swinging sixties, are gradually being lost to us. But on a personal level, I find the stories of those we know and love to be so much more compelling. And so, in the spirit of preservation, I decided to interview my beloved dad for this blog post:

John Alfred Webb, born in 1937

Dad turns 80 soon. 80! I can't quite believe it and neither can he. When I think that somebody so closely related to me remembers the Blitz, it gives me an odd feeling - as though it has become more real, when before it was just something that happened in the past to other people. It makes Dad seem like a time traveller of some kind. Which of course he is; we all are. Dad was born and grew up in Ilford, East London; he was too young to be evacuated, and so remained with his parents in London during the blitz. I interviewed him about his earliest memories, now so far in the past (sorry, Dad) and this is what he told me:

"My earliest memory, aged 3, is of seeing contrails in a blue sky, which must have been during the Battle of Britain, and not understanding my mother's explanation of aeroplanes with men in them... The first Christmas I remember, maybe when I was 4 or 5, was waking up to find presents on the foot of the bed, including a wooden lorry, painted in camouflage colours, complete with a load of miniature sandbags. I was also convinced that I had seen Father Christmas.

I remember my mother spending all day on a Monday doing the washing, with a copper and a mangle. Then later in the week she would spend all day ironing it, with two flat irons that she heated on the gas stove and used in rotation - it was all very Dickensian.

Dad, seated, with his older brother David and sister Margaret

My memories of the Blitz include being woken in the middle of the night, wrapped up in a blanket and carried in a rush to the shelter in the garden, but most of all the noise of the anti-aircraft battery in Barking Park (about a third of a mile from the house). Another vivid memory is my frustration at not being allowed out to see a burning German bomber on the way down, or the burning house across the road, which had been hit by an incendiary bomb.

At that young age the war was fragmented for me, and did not really figure again after the Blitz, until the advent of the V1 flying bombs and V2 rockets. A V1 hit the school I subsequently went to, about to approximately a third of a mile away; and a V2 rocket hit Seven Kings Park, also a third of a mile from my primary school, during lunch playtime. I don’t remember feeling afraid, but I must have been, because the sudden noise of a siren being tested (they were used as fire alarms) opposite my workplace in 1955, caused my heart rate to go up to about 200 bpm - it had obviously touched my subconscious memory.

My favourite meal in earlier days was my mother’s steak and kidney pie – a highlight of the week after school lunches, which were somewhat unusual. My least favourite was anything containing cheese, a result of unhappy memories at primary school when food was in short supply during the war. (ed.: After 70 years of this cheese boycott, Dad has recently started eating mild cheeses like brie and feta. Go figure.)

My memories of school are mixed. I was quite daunted by grammar school at first - teachers in gowns and mortarboards, and initially a very strict disciplinary regime. Overall my memories are positive, but we were a small school and in the sixth form you had to take part in some activities, e.g. acting in house plays, which were not by choice, and I always dreaded. I think we were privileged to receive a very good education. Careers advice was in its infancy as was not very good – the headmaster was not really interested unless you were going on to university.

Dad with his father and sister Margaret, on holiday at Corfe Castle, Dorset; Dad aged eleven

Family holidays were few and far between due to the war and the lack of cash after it. My parents, sister and I went to Swanage in 1948 and Exmouth in 1952. We stayed at private houses on both occasions for the said financial reasons. My last family holiday was to Sandown, Isle of Wight, with my parents and my best friend Brian Johnson – the occasion of my first real encounter with the opposite sex. (ed.: I intend to find out more about this!)

I do not remember my father being very “hands on”. He was too busy being in the army during the war and working afterwards. We just did as we were told (most of the time). My sister and I fought like cats and dogs when we were young, with me always coming off worst. We drove my mother to despair.The first encounter with the doctor that I remember was when he visited my primary school after I had broken my leg in the playground. This came about at the age of 5 after a collision with a “huge” girl, who was 7 years old.

I do get annoyed when people, usually on tv, talk about the 1970s as though they were the Dark Ages of taste. There are so many comments, often from people who were not there, judging them by today’s thinking/standards. Today's tastes and opinions may be viewed very differently in the future. Certainly most practical aspects of life are better now, though, for example the standard of living, the quality of food and clothing, the ease of travel to virtually anywhere on the globe. 

My mum, Alison, on the left; Mum's grandparents and Dad, right. (1970s fashions...history will decide! Ed.)

However, life was simpler and more sensible in many ways a few decades ago. We believed, rightly or wrongly that most politicians had the good of the country at heart and were not devious, “economical with the truth”, and looking after No.1. There are now too many career politicians who have never had experience of anything else in the commercial or professional world. At a more trivial level, we did not have “Health and Safety” or political correctness; and the country was not the blasted talking shop it has become. (Why else did the main character in “Life on Mars” jump off the roof to get back to the 1970s?) Car manuals definitely did not have 750 pages back then! I dislike the swearing that has become commonplace, particularly with comedians.

I never formally proposed to your mother. We had been together for over a year, and had been sharing a house with two friends under fairly basic conditions. Eventually, after Mum had dropped some fairly subtle hints, it just seemed a very good idea. Having decided, we were married two or three months later. I regret not having thanked my parents for all their efforts and support until I finally realised and appreciated it, by which time it was then too late." (ed.: potentially some kind of hint here?)

Mum and Dad on their wedding day, November 1971

There's something so poignant to me about the thought of my grandma using flat irons heated on her stove to do the family ironing. Surely the world has changed more in the past 100 years than at any other time in its history to date. But then, who nows what the next 100 years will bring!

The Hungry Gap and the Sterkarms - Susan Price

Susan Price : A Sterkarm Tryst

I was having a bit of a discussion with my editor, Matrice, who is working on my book, A Sterkarm Tryst.

She wanted to know what season of the year the book was set in, because my descriptions confused her. Sometimes she thought it sounded early in the year, and sometimes it sounded late.

It's set in late summer, or early autumn, I said. Crops are almost ready for harvest but not quite yet. Some leaves are starting to turn, but there are still late flowers. Some berries are ripe, many still unripe.

This season was always a good time to fit in a bit of swift aggro. The fiercely cold winters of the 16th Century, with their deep snow, hadn't set in yet, and if you acted quickly, you could clobber your opponents during 'the hungry gap.' And perhaps be a little less hungry yourself.

The Hungry Gap fell around July or August and reminds us how seasonal life was in the past, and how much we've lost touch with that seasonality.

The harvest was gathered in roughly around the end of August and into September. Hay was made and grain was cut, threshed, stored. Fruit, nuts and mushrooms were gathered and stored. Throughout the summer, cows had been milked and the milk turned into butter and cheese for storing. Eggs were preserved.

It was expensive to keep animals alive through the winter, sheltering and feeding them. So most unwanted animals were sold earlier in the year, when they were young and, of the rest, only the best were kept alive. The rest were slaughtered around mid-October, and the meat smoked, salted or dried.

All the hard work was celebrated with a party - and most other big parties, such as weddings, were also held at this time of the year, because there was plenty of fresh food. You had a blow-out at Christmas, of course, to help everybody get through that cold, dark part of the year. Bitterly cold, because this was the period when the Thames froze solid, so imagine what the weather was like further north. And very, very dark without any light except fire and candlelight - and every candle had taken time and effort to make, every piece of fuel had been gathered, dried and stored.  Whatever food you had in store had to be carefully tended to get you through the rest of the year until the next harvest.
    

 God bless the master of this house,

The mistress also.

And all the little childer that round the table goo -

God bless the house, the barn, the byre

The dog outside the door.

God bless what'er you have in store -

And give you ten times more!

The Soul-Cake Carol.

Smailholm Tower, wikipedia - click for credit

Households like the Bedesdale Tower in the Sterkarm books wouldn't have been small. 'Family' at the time was often understood to include servants as well as blood relatives, and the family living at the tower would have included men at arms, many maids, cattle men, kennel men, stable boys and so on. Most of them would have expected to be fed from the tower's stores as part of their wages. That's why the tower's yard is crowded with storehouses, the upper storeys of which serve as dormitories.

Every large farmhouse would have needed to feed a crowd every day, too. Imagine being the women who had to oversee those stores and manage them. That's why, from the Viking Age onwards, the sign of a woman in charge of a household was a large bunch of keys hanging at her waist - to keep those stores locked up!

The stores dwindled day by day with every meal served. That Christmas feast had to be planned. As the year turned into spring, the level of grain in the bins dropped. The cheeses and blocks of butter were eaten up. The barrels of salted meat and fish were emptied. The flitches of bacon were carved up.

By the time July was reached, there were far more empty barrels than full and people were heartily sick of dried, salted and smoked food - but nothing in the fields or hedges or woods was yet ripe.

People ate the first hawthorn leaves, calling them 'bread and cheese.' The harvest of fresh food must have been looked forward to so keenly.

Today, when we can nip out to the supermarket and buy fresh food regardless of the time of year, and keep bags of frozen (and almost fresh) food in our home-freezers, we have forgotten 'the hungry gap.' Imagine standing in a summer field - wheat or oats tall and waving, hedgerows thick with flowers and leaves, little garden brimming with greenery - and nothing ready to eat.

If the weather was poor and held back the harvest, then the wait was longer - and the food in store still went on dwindling, day by day. The gap in those years was wider and hungrier.

If you struck at your enemy at this time of year, burned and trampled the crops standing in their fields - burned or stole what they had left in store - burned their houses - then you ensured that they had a miserable, hungry winter ahead of them.
  
Matrice was not altogether convinced by my talk of the hungry gap - she's a good editor and it's her job to question. She said that her Irish ancestors didn't have a hungry gap because they planted relays of potatoes and other vegetables from early in the year, to take them through summer.

 Yes, but the Sterkarms would never have seen a potato or heard of one. The historical parts of the books are set, roughly, about 1520. This is something like 200 years before potatos became a staple crop in Ireland and the Scottish Highlands.

And although improvements in technology and agriculture were being made, the developments that really changed things came later. The north country reivers didn't go in much for arable farming - they were, as their ancestors had been for centuries, practicers of 'transhumance.'  That is, they were cattle-farmers who moved their animals between sheltered lowland pastures and higher meadows for summer grazing.

They grew oats for grain, because it was the only cereal that grew at all well so far north, and such fruit and vegetables as they had would have been much closer to the wild variety - or actually were the wild variety, gathered from woods, moors and hedgerows.

Some of my Scottish friends have doubted this since, for them, the 'Kingdom of Fife' is 'the UK's bread-basket' with its wide and beautiful fields of wheat. But Fife only became so productive of wheat after the agricultural revolution of the mid to late 1700s, when more intensive and scientific methods of farming were introduced, together with the development of hardier and/or more productive strains of wheat.

wikimedia: wild strawberry - click for credit

For instance, I have strawberries in my garden that ripen early in the
summer, and some that ripen in the autumn - but these are varieties that have been bred by intensive modern agriculture. The Sterkarms' strawberries would have been wild ones. They flower, fruit - and that's your lot until next year. Wild strawberries are doing it for themselves, not for us.

It reminds me of my beautiful dog-rose, which has a brief burst of flowers every year. They last about three weeks and then - no matter how much I dead-head - they're gone. Everything about life in the past must have had the same aching transience - Come and kiss me, Sweet and Twenty, Youth's a thing will not endure!

Their warm, light summers were brief and followed by a long, dark and grindingly cold winter, in dwellings which were hard to keep warm. How they must have longed, even more than us, for spring and summer, and how they must have tried to enjoy every warm day - every snowdrop, every violet, every hedge rose.

Wild rose, wikipedia - click for credit

For the Sterkarms, after the relief and joy of harvest, would have come October, November, December, January, February... with the weather becoming more flesh-nippingly cold all the time.

Then April, May - things are beginning to leaf and flower, but there's still nothing much you can eat. 

Then June, July - it's warmer and lighter, but still nothing's ripe - and your stores are running very, very low. August must have been torture! Everything visibly ripening but still not quite there.

And this was in a good year. In the modern West, we don't know how lucky we are.


Susan Price is the Carnegie-winning author of The Ghost Drum.

          Her latest book is The Drover's Dogs.   

       "I don’t think those dogs ever mistook me for their master. They were good herd-dogs and I thinkthey knew exactly what I was — a little calf, lost from the herd. A lost little pup wandering loose. They knew that what they had to do was take me in charge, and herd me along, and watch over me, until they had brought me somewhere safe."

               It’s a long way home — from East to West 
                    across Scotland’s mountains and lochs.





A Sterkarm Tryst - published January 2017
             Available for pre-order