Tim Cornwell: A southern slant on Scottish culture

They seemed of some age and very little artistic merit; workaday images of a 19th Century husband and wife, with lacklustre frames and particularly badly painted hands.

Turning the pictures over, we found they dated from the 1840s, and showed an Edinburgh couple, whose last name was Scott. Our family was rooted in the West Country. It now turned out a couple of Scottish ancestors, painted in the 1840s, had been hanging about for decades. Scott was my grandmother’s middle name.

The Australian director of the Edinburgh International Festival, Jonathan Mills, used the word “atavistic” to describe his Scottish connections this week. I had to go to the dictionary. It means, according to Collins, “the recurrence in a plant or animal of certain primitive characteristics that were present in an ancestor but have not occurred in intermediate generations”.

Mills loves an intellectual journey. He was trying to explain why as a ten-year-old choir boy visiting the island of Cumbrae, he felt in some fashion rooted, that the place matched his physical make-up. “It’s a very harsh environment in Australia of the precise kind that Anglo-Celtic bodies are not made to withstand. Somehow Scotland’s climate is much more in tune with my body temperature.”

The interview with Mills was for a feature article in The Scotsman noting how many of the people running major cultural institutions under a SNP government devoted to promoting Scottish culture, would broadly speaking not qualify for the national football team. They include the National Theatre of Scotland director, Vicky Featherstone, and the chief executive of Creative Scotland, Andrew Dixon.

It’s said in America that the newest immigrants are the most patriotic. How had their arrivals defined their approaches? How did it shape interpretations of Scottish culture? Or their own hiring policies? Were they obliged to be more Scottish than the Scots?

All offered insights but could have fired the questions back. I’m a German-born Englishman who has filed for The Scotsman for 20 years, ten of them from the US and ten here in Edinburgh; I moved here for a job. Mills had five out of eight great-grandparents of Scottish descent, knocking my flimsiest of flimsy Scottish heritage for six.

Dixon talked about how he’d once listed his politics on Facebook as “northern”. “I’ve always been in the north, and I feel more comfortable the more north I get,” he said.

Featherstone mostly lived here to the age of seven, and said she related, in inexplicable ways, to Scottish cultural and political voices. But how had she, an English theatre director, plunged so successfully into the culture of Scotland and mostly won accolades all round? Revealingly, she said: “If I was in England I would find this hard to do this about England. I only have baggage about England, because I am theoretically English.”

When it comes to singling out and telling stories about Scotland, she said, it’s outsiders who identify their universality. When she first began talking through ideas on the future hit Black Watch, she was warned it could be parochial, centred on a group of soldiers in Fife.

One of the Scottish stories that became a focus for the NTS under Featherstone was the Darien Disaster. For those of us first getting to grips with Scottish culture – myself included – the Scottish adventure in Panama has been a fascinating, universal folly.

In-comers come to Scotland and its capital in different ways; many of us, for a job. The First Minister, Alex Salmond, said recently of Scottish and English literary cultures, that they “couldn’t be more different”.

Central Edinburgh’s population to any European or US city-dweller is startlingly uni-racial. But the interviews were a reminder that this city, even more than the country, is a melting pot of British and Scottish cultures. The nationalist debate may already be opening questions on identity, and some insecurities about it too.