Do you want to know about social
injustice in Scottish history? Let me tell you a story. Now as I do, if
you're interested in the people, places and events in Scottish history
then click the subscribe button in the bottom right hand side of the screen at
any time. In the meantime let me tell you my story.
Now civil strife and social injustice happen in
lots of places, but it's the 29th of August and, from one of the two main
locations of the events in our story, I want to take you back
to Tranent, East Lothian in 1797. The Union between Scotland and England
happened 90 years ago. After hundreds of years of fighting with
our southern neighbors, the good thing about the Union was that finally
wars had stopped. I mean there were the Jacobite wars of the first half of the
Century, and of course we've been dragged into
England's wars: The War of the Spanish Succession,
The war of the Austrian Succession, there have been some wars in India, The
Seven Years War, The Mysore War in India, The Anglo-Maratha War in India,
oh there was that rebellion in the Americas (they'll come a sticky end)
and of course now we're at war with France, but apart from that it's been
pretty peaceful. Now the thing about all these English
wars is that now they've become our wars too. We've been incorporated in
the English army, well almost, you see in 1757 they
introduced The Militia Act, that meant the creation of military
reserves locally in each county. Now these reserves would provide backup
on the home front so that regular army could be sent
abroad, but the requirement only applied in
England and Wales. Here in Scotland we just continued as we
were with volunteer units here and there, normally organized by nobility or Clan
Chiefs, you know up in the Highlands where they talk
Irish an' that? Then three years ago a Royal Warrant
created Lord Lieutenants in each county. Here it's the Marquis of Tweedale, but he
had deputies and one of them, David Anderson, lived in
this house St Germain. I know it sounds French,
and I get the irony. The house is split into seven now and I've been welcomed
here by the owners of the St Germain Bed and Breakfast.
So the Lieutenants had to organize volunteer forces to protect the counties
in case of invasion by the French. The French, who up until this Union
thing had protected us against the English,
or did we protect them? I'm not sure, anyway. Now this year they've passed The Militia
Act for Scotland and these Lord Lieutenants
are required to raise militias in every county.
Not volunteers... They draw lots and a ballot to decide who will be
forced to join the militia. So the country is in uproar, not just
here in Tranent, but everywhere, and it's not just that folk are sick of
their sons going off to war, being forced into militia means that you
can be sent anywhere in the country as part of the home defence.
Now what if you've got a harvest to get in, what have you got business to run,
what if they do send you off to some foreign land? Now I know they say that
you won't serve abroad, but they said that to the Black Watch
and look what happened to them! That's another story for another video. The
point is that you can't trust the London
Government not to send you off to some foreign war
for which you didn't sign up, and to which they promised
not to send you. There's one more reason that folks are furious about The Militia
Act, but I'm going to save that until later, aye
your eyes will pop oot yer heid when you hear it and I don't want you to miss
the story. So it's August 1797, there's civil unrest all over because of The
Militia Act and these Lord Lieutenants with a list of names and their roulette
wheels. On the 29th of August the Deputy
Lieutenants, tasked with raising the militia in this
area, were to meet in the Glens Inn in Tranent
to draw the lottery, and of course to consider any exemptions.
You see, you could be exempted for service if you had a justifiable excuse.
Let's say you had bone spurs for example. I'll be honest, I don't know what bone
spurs are I just know that it gets you out of enlistment,
but if you were a boxer, a fit, healthy black boxer,
you might even be the greatest boxer, you couldn't get out of it then.
Anyway they're ludicrous examples and it's all fantasy, and imagining,
the point is that there was a big meeting to take place in Tranent on the
29th of August, so let's go there for a bit. This is town centre and this is Jackie
Crookston. She's banging her drum and she's got a
wee bairn. You see the night before the meet she went
up and down the streets of Tranent leading hordes of women and their bairns
and shouting, "we'll have no militia here", to anyone that would listen. These women
also went around the surrounding towns and villages banging that drum and
telling folks to come to Tranent tomorrow
to air their grievances and let the authorities know there'll be no militia
here, and whilst this mobile woman was going
around surrounding villages, back here in Tranent,
somebody threw stones at a dragoon. In different towns in villages teachers
faced varying levels of harassment. You see teachers had the lists of the
able-bodied men that had been through the school system as boys, and it was
these lists that were used for ballot in the militia. Some teachers
were accosted and had their lists stolen so they couldn't be used the next day,
others had no problems. By the morning, the teachers' complaints
had arrived back here at St Germain, the house of the Deputy Lieutenant, David
Anderson. Realizing that folk were upset, the
gentleman Lieutenants headed to Tranent accompanied
by yeomanry and cavalry and they sent to Musselburgh for further reinforcements.
When they got to Tranent, Jackie was still banging on about no militia.
See what I did? The officials arrived at the Glens Inn around midday
Now after a bit of shouting and Jackie Crookston's drum banging, the business
of the day was announced to the crowd and the Lieutenants and teachers, etc
went in to get started with weeding out the exemptions and drawing lots.
One by one, district by district, individuals came in to offer up their
evidence of why they should be exempted. Now obviously the crowd outside is still
restive, but in spite of their complaints the
process goes on. Then in comes a potter called Neil Couterside.
What he places on the table isn't a justification for his own exclusion
from the list, but a document signed by the townspeople opposing The Militia Act.
Obviously the chairman rejects this document out of hand and Couterside is sent
away with a flea in his ear. Is that just a Scottish expression to
be sent away with flea in your ear? I don't know. Anyway,
when Couterside related the events indoors, to the crowd
outside, then the women retreat to the back and the men
move forward, "Whoa!", says Captain Finley of the Cinque Ports Cavalry
and he sends his troopers forward. A woman
throws a stone and knocks a trooper's hat off.
Now that must have felt brilliant, but as a trooper gets down from his horse to
get his hat the trooper somehow falls. Captain Finley orders his men to
unsheathe their swords and Oh my God! they charge: trampling and slashing the
populace. The mob start throwing more stones and
all hell breaks loose. Inside one of the officials tries to
read the riot act. Now I don't know if you know what I mean
by "reading the riot act"? Can you let me know in the comments
section below, and if people don't know about this particular part of British
history then I'll cover it in a different video. Anyway, outside the
cavalry troops who are apparently a bit soused, they're going up and
down the street charging and slashing. This sends people up the alleyways, and
on the roof of one building a guy called William Hunter starts throwing down
stones and bricks at the troops One soldier is sent round the back of
the house to shoot him from behind, and as he tumbles from the
roof, several other soldiers wait for his fallen body with outstretched weapons,
so that as he topples from the roof he's impaled
on their swords. Now this is the first, but not the last
gruesome act of the day. Pembrokeshire's cavalry turn up,
now if there was any doubt about the previous troops these guys are
definitely pissed, so much so that one Sergeant slumped
sozzled from his saddle. An officer thinking he's been knocked off
his horse calls, "Why don't you fire?" They do.
George Elder was shot dead with the first volley of bullets.
The events are known as The Tranent Massacre.
Now I don't know how many you need in dead and injured to call it
a massacre, what I do know is that the troops,
who let's remember, were essentially in a recruitment drive,
didn't limit themselves to those who'd been involved in the rioting.
The drunken troops were given the order to clear the county for two miles around. The 29th of August is after the glorious
12th and the troops acted like they were shooting game.
It started in the town. Nineteen-year-old Isabel Rodger who'd been sewing cloth in
the doorway of her house was shot dead. William Lawson was a carpenter taking
wood in his cart from Ormiston to Tranent. When he was accosted by troops he
explained that he'd never been near the riot
but they shot him anyway. Stephen Brothersone, along with his wife and an
old man were out for a walk about a mile from Tranent
as the troops arrived, the walkers stepped off the road to let them pass.
It wasn't enough to shoot the innocent Brotherstone,
as he lay dying in his wife's arms the dragoon then got down from his horse,
drew his sword, and slashed six times as head and body cutting through to the
bones. The same troops continued on and shot
dead William Laidlaw, a peasant, labouring in the field.
A thirteen-year-old boy called Kemp, who carried letters between Tranent and
Ormiston was chased down like an animal and stabbed and hacked to death in a
field. Peter Ness, a sawmill worker, hadn't been
in Tranent but in a field outside the town he was shot multiple times, then
robbed of his pocket watch. After he was killed, he was found dead
with his pockets turned inside out, but there was more pillage than that:
John Adam, a collier who lived in a village a
couple of miles from Tranent was walking to the shops to do a few errands.
Dragoons approached him, shot him in the head,
and as he lay dying took from his pocket the two shillings that he'd
carried to buy messages for his pregnant wife. At the start of this, I was going to name
each victim to remember them, but to be honest it's too harrowing even
now. The soldiers also burst into a farmhouse
and shot up a family that didn't even know there was a riot going on.
Deputy Lieutenants in charge on the day sued The Scots Chronicle for libel
because they published a letter relating to one of the deaths.
The even greater sadness is that without the evidence accumulated for that civil
suit we may never have known the names of
these victims. Remember that the whole exercise was to
recruit people into the very organization that was currently
slaughtering innocents and protesters alike
in the streets of Tranent and surrounding countryside.
As recruiting drives go this wasn't the most successful.
They were finding bodies in cornfields for weeks,
and it was another 11 years before a militia was finally established for that
county. Now I said that I'd one big point I was going
to leave to the end and I'm coming to that,
but just before I do, let me tell you about the court case.
On the day 36 townspeople were taken as prisoners to Haddington and then later
to Edinburgh for trial, but the only witnesses against them were
the soldiers who all gave contradictory evidence,
and all the accused were released. Maybe I should have said all the
survivors because of course Jackie Crookston with a big drum
had been shot dead in the street. This isn't the only time there's been
injustice and civil unrest in Scotland, in fact at the end I've got a playlist
that you can click for some other examples of unrest in Scottish society,
but the thing is that none of this needed to happen.
You see The Militia Act stated that if you were selected by ballot from the
list you didn't have to join the militia, all you needed
was to have enough money to pay somebody else to join a militia
in your place, and that's the information I left till now.
It was only the poor who had to join a militia.
That's what the miners, potters, weavers and farm folk at Tranent were up in arms
about. That's what the innocent dead of the
29th of August 1797 signify, and that's the searing social
injustice that this video highlights. How much have things changed? You'll have
to decide that for yourself, but share this story. Tha mi an dochas bum bith lath math leibh Tiorridh an drasda
