ABSTRACT
In 1962 David Keir, editor of the Edinburgh volume of the Third Statistical Account, tried to convey the timbre of life in the capital by dining chez Sir Compton Mackenzie in the New Town. His guests were Anne Redpath, the artist, Sir David Milne, former Permanent Secretary at St Andrew’s House, Lord Cameron, Dean of the Faculty of Advocates, Alastair Dunnett, the editor of The Scotsman, and Sir Compton himself: representative of the country’s douce, semi-nationalist establishment. Their cosy discussion would have provoked a snarl or two from Brownsbank, the Lanarkshire cottage where, like Yeats in his tower at Ballylee, MacDiarmid stood guard over the Scottish Geist, but it reflected a society still confident in its distinct institutions, most of them helpfully centred in Edinburgh. Lord Cameron thought that Walter Scott eighteenthcentury Edinburgers had a point about the benefits of a parliament: ‘We could aye peeble them wi’ stanes when they werena gude bairns.’ Sir David Milne warily agreed that Scotland was a political unit of a sort:
That’s because Scotland is the right adminstrative size. In general, this goes for government as well as for running newpapers, and for a lot of other things…it hasn’t the remoteness of England, say, as an administrative unit. The contacts and the relations between the centre and the periphery in England are nothing like as close as here.
