Proof of poet's date with Destiny revealed

Published on Saturday 16 February 2008 18:58

HE WAS Scotland's greatest 20th-century poet and identified as a potential threat to national security by no lesser a figure than George Orwell.

But history could have recorded Hugh MacDiarmid as the man who liberated the Stone of Destiny – while dressed as a workman.

New research has revealed that the radical writer was at the heart of an audacious plot to retrieve the iconic artefact from Westminster Abbey, more than 15 years before the act was carried out by a band of young Scottish academics.

Previously, MacDiarmid's stated intention of seizing the Stone of Scone was largely laughed off as an alcohol-fuelled delusion. But now, John Manson, who has spent decades studying the life of the poet, believes he has found proof that the plot, which dates back to 1934, was very real.

The author has unearthed correspondence in the National Library and Edinburgh University library which shows MacDiarmid believed his actions would spark a wave of unstoppable nationalist sentiment across Scotland.

In an unpublished draft of his book, Lucky Poet, the communist and Scottish nationalist wrote: "I had travelled down from Edinburgh to London specially to try to remove the Scone Stone from under the Coronation chair in Westminster Abbey, believing that once brought up over the border again, the Scottish people would refuse to allow it ever to go back to England and that the inevitable controversy might well set the whole Scottish movement alight at last.

"My friends and I unfortunately on close inspection found the removal of the Stone at that time impracticable."

Manson claims to have found letters which suggest that the idea for the plot came from Graham MacGibbon, a Glasgow engineer. In four letters sent to MacDiarmid, who at that time was living in Whalsay, Orkney, he offered help with finance and transport, and even volunteered to create a special container for carrying off the Stone on "a rubber-tyred trolley with rope handles."

MacGibbon then urged the poet to contact his "man in the south", who Manson has identified as nationalist sympathiser Angus Clark.

In a subsequent letter to MacDiarmid, Clark enclosed a detailed plan of the Abbey alongside a masterplan for the heist.

It suggested that the "heroes" enter the place of worship from the side entrance dressed as workmen and that the Stone be "placed in a sack and carried out like a sack of cement on one man's shoulders".

Also involved in the plot was Robin Black, editor of the left-leaning Edinburgh journal, The Free Man.

In a letter to MacDiarmid he wrote: "Both men are OK for Sat. Leave here by day bus. C can drive but would want car taken out of London – for traffic reasons – first. …Now we are all set at this end. Waiting our final instructions. Both C and D game and eager. All the best. For Scotland. Yours, Robin."

MacDiarmid is believed to have made several visits to Westminster Abbey before meeting Clark in Oxford Street on March 21.

Manson wrote: "This date was near the end of the time-frame which MacDiarmid had set and it was probably on this occasion that the attempt to remove the Stone was called off."

The retired teacher, who edited a Penguin collection of MacDiarmid's work, says there is no indication as to why the mission was called off. But he is not convinced by theory that MacDiarmid left the plotters penniless by frittering away their fighting fund on alcohol.

He said: "The evidence from various letters suggests that this was a serious and very real plan. I have no doubt that MacDiarmid had every intention of going through with it. Why it did not take place remains a mystery."

Manson believes that the plot may have inspired the later successful heist. "I know that Ian Hamilton, who was one of those who retrieved the Stone in 1950, did meet with MacDiarmid in Glasgow on at least one occasion."

Dr Scott Lyall, who has written several books and articles about MacDiarmid and his radical politics, was unaware of his involvement in the aborted heist of 1934.

The Exeter University academic said: "MacDiarmid was seen as being in the centre of nationalist circles and it would not surprise me in the least if he had been involved in a plot like this."

MacDiarmid helped found the National Party of Scotland, the forerunner of the SNP, and was also a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain.

In 1950, the author George Orwell added MacDiarmid to a list of suspected subversive communist sympathisers, which he handed over to British intelligence.

The poet, who died in 1978, is hailed as a leading figure in the Scotland's literary renaissance.

The Stone of Destiny, which was smuggled out of the Abbey at Christmas in 1950, was – officially – returned to Scotland in 1996 and is kept in Edinburgh Castle.

Lifelong battle against Caledonian cringe

Hugh MacDiarmid was born Christopher Murray Grieve in the Scottish border community of Langholm in 1892.

He grew up above the town library and soon developed a voracious appetite for reading as well as poetry.

After serving in the Royal Army Medical Corps during the First World War he became a journalist in Montrose where he served as a Justice of the Peace and nurtured an interest in radical politics.

He felt deeply that Scottish life and culture was ill-served by its subordinate position within a colonial UK and railed against the Caledonian "cringe" in his epic 1925 work, 'A Drunk Man Looks At The Thistle'.

Like his contemporary Lewis Grassic Gibbon, he became a staunch socialist, and in 1928 was a founding member of the National Party of Scotland – the forerunner of the SNP.

George Orwell described the Scot as "reliably pro-Russian".

He is now recognised as the principal force behind the Scottish literary Renaissance and has memorials in Edinburgh and Langholm.