Stirling Stories – Page 2

Many people wonder about the value of museum collections and the cost of keeping items from the past. This latest Stirling Smith acquisition, a magazine of 1960, tells us so much about the social history of the town. The art work on the cover dates to 1948 and was done by James Atterson (1898 – 1961), head of Art at the High School of Stirling whose style was so distinctive that it is immediately recognisable. Atterson was a public-spirited man who would design Stirling-themed images for organisations in the town and build and paint sets for theatrical productions. Between this and teaching, there was no time left over for his own art and only small works seem to survive.

The Magazine records improvements in nursing and the names and addresses of the 300 members of the Stirling Royal Infirmary Nurse’s League, with their year of qualification, the earliest being 1904. The annual ball was in the Golden Lion Hotel. Among the medical improvements noted was the new Central Syringe Sterilising Unit, prior to which every ward boiled their own syringes, and the new Occupational Therapy Centre at Orchard House.

In terms of history the magazine is priceless, though the cost was £2.99. It was secured by Friend of the Smith Frances Chatfield in the Oxfam Bookshop.

Following the success of the digitisation of the paintings in public collections, Art UK has now turned to sculpture, including the 40 pieces owned by the Stirling Smith Art Gallery and Museum. This maquette of the oldest William Wallace sculpture is by Alloa sculptor Walter Awlson. It was commissioned from him in 1997, for the exhibition Scotland’s Liberator, marking the 700^th anniversary of the Battle of Stirling Bridge. It was a difficult matter to get the proportions correct. The piece was modelled in red earthenware and fired, to match the original which was carved from Dumfriesshire red sandstone.

The maquette is one metre high. The original statue, overlooking the River Tweed at Bemersyde near Melrose is a massive 30 feet high and was made by architect, builder and sculptor John Smith, who with his brothers, was also commissioned to build Sir Walter Scott’s house at Abbotsford. The sculpture was commissioned by David Steuart Erskine, the Eleventh Earl of Buchan (1742-1829), a scholar, antiquarian and patriot who founded the Scottish Museum of Antiquities. The dress and features of the work are based on a now-lost mediaeval portrait found by Buchan in France.

Most subsequent Wallace portraits are modelled on this one and although Sir Walter Scott secretly wanted to see the statue demolished, it still stands as the oldest and biggest.

The news of beavers returning to the River Forth, as reported in the Stirling Observer, is timely. This beaver shop sign is at present in the exhibition on shop fronts in the Engine Shed. In the eighteenth century, the word “beaver” and “hat” were virtually synonymous. Beavers were hunted to extinction in Scotland in the 1600s, and beaver skins were imported from Scandinavia and later from the American colonies to supply the hatters’ trade.

The beaver possibly had her first mention in the Stirling Observer in a front-page advertisement of 8 November 1849 for Owen’s London Hat Warehouse ‘at the sign of the gilded beaver, foot of King Street, Stirling’. This was at 3 King Street, occupied by several other hatters in the decades which followed.

Stirling had four hatters’ premises in the nineteenth century. The trade was not a healthy one. Use of arsenic and other chemicals in dressing the fur resulted in damage to the central nervous system, which often displayed itself in the form of tics and involuntary muscle movements. This gave rise to the common saying “As mad as a Hatter”.

The shop sign was rescued from a bonfire by property owner Peter Wordie in 1970, and in 2009, he gifted it to the Stirling Smith. It was restored by funding provided by the Friends of the Smith.

In keeping with the weather brought by the #beastfromtheeast, the featured image is of the only Scottish beast which can truly withstand freezing temperatures. ‘Black Beast Wanderer’ is the title of Joseph Denovan Adam’s study of a solitary highland cow, caught up in a snow storm. Adam (1842 – 1896) ran a school of animal art at Craigmill in the 1890s.

The small black highland cattle or ‘kyloe’ were the native cattle of Scotland, and the economy of the Scottish Highlands depended upon them. They could feed on rough, poor or even marshy ground and could withstand the most severe winters. Even today, they are the sole breed which can remain out of doors in the icy winters of Sweden; all other breeds require to be sheltered.

Once a year, the cattle were taken to market in autumn along the drove roads by the cattle drovers from all parts of the highlands and islands, to the cattle trysts or sales in Doune, Stirling and on Stenhousemuir, Falkirk. The cattle were moved at the rate of about 30 miles a day, to maintain optimum weight and condition. The droving trade came to an end with the advent of the railways in the 1840s, but Stirling’s central geographical location and its historical connections with the trade are the reasons the city has two livestock marts today – United Auctions and Caledonian Marts.

The series of talks by specialists continues on Thursday 15th February when at 12 noon, Andrew McBride, Peatland Action Programme Manager will speak on Peatlands: Scotland’s climate control mechanism at the Stirling Smith Art Gallery and Museum. Andrew is based at Redgorton, Perthshire, with Scottish Natural Heritage.

For those attending the talks, it has been a learning curve. Last week, Rebecca Crawford, Peatlands for People Project Officer, based in Stirling, was speaking on Wester Moss, the Bog Squad and Butterflies. The existence of Wester Moss in Fallin, near Polmaise 3 & 4 Pits, was news to some of the audience. It is a raised bog, as opposed to the blanket bog shown here. A conservation initiative with many volunteers is restoring the life of the bog by removing the trees and the scrub. This relatively small bog captures an estimated 600,000 tons of carbon beneath its mosses and waters, transforming it into peat. An apparent ‘wasteland’, it supports 134 different species of butterflies and moths, as well as creatures such as the bog sun jumping spider. The latter is found in only five places in Scotland, and Wester Moss is one of them.

In the years leading up to the Great War, Stirling was a hot bed of suffragette activity. With the death of Prime Minister and Stirling MP Sir Henry Campbell – Bannerman in April 1908, suffragettes of every party converged on Stirling to fight the Stirling and Dunfermline Burghs by-election. Campbell – Bannerman had been an opponent of women’s suffrage. His successor, A H W H Ponsonby, also Liberal, was no different.

The Great War 1914 – 1919, which was sustained by female labour at home, demonstrated the strengths and capabilities of women.

After two centuries of struggle for equal voting rights, the Representation of the People Act (1918) was given royal assent on 6 February. It was a partial victory, as women voters had to be 30 years of age or older, but it was a landmark. Almost a hundred years to the day, there will be celebrations when tomorrow at 2pm, the distinguished historian Bernadette Cahill gives a talk in the Stirling Smith. She has published on American Women’s Suffrage history, and will talk about some little – known episodes in the history of the Scottish suffragettes. This will be followed by equali – tea and special biscuits to mark the day. Admission and parking is free, so join us in the celebration.

At 3.30pm on Friday 2 February, the Stirling Smith hosts the launch of an important Stirling book. This book collects two pamphlets, ‘For as long as it takes!’ Cowie Miners in the Strike, 1984-85, originally published in 1985, and One Year On. Sacked Polmaise Miners Speak Out, published in 1986. ‘For as long as it takes!’ was written by Steve McGrail and Vicky Patterson, who were partners at the time. One Year On was edited by Steve.

Vicky died in 2003 and Steve died in 2016. The book is published jointly by Sue Harley, Steve’s widow, and the Glasgow – based Scottish Labour History Society. The pamphlets are reproduced in the original sequence of their publication, with an afterword by Jim O’Hare, one of the sacked men whose testimony was not included at the time. Eleven men with a collective service of 219 years in the pits were sacked and suffered discrimination in the years which followed.

Although there are many books on the 1984 – 5 Strike, most are written from a southern perspective and few acknowledge or even mention the part played by the Stirlingshire Miners. Polmaise was the first colliery to come out on strike, and the last to return.

This is a free event, so come along and learn more.

This sad token of the short life of Lady Arabella Stuart is a ‘protest portrait’ and is one of the hundreds of pewter pieces in the Stirling Smith collections.

Arabella was an English noblewoman of Scottish descent, a great-great-granddaughter of Henry VII of England and considered as an heir to the English throne of Elizabeth I, before her cousin King James VI of Scotland was given preference by Elizabeth’s ministers. Her very existence was thought by King James to be a danger, and any marriage was an additional threat to his safety. Her marriage to William Seymour who himself had a claim to the throne led to her arrest and imprisonment in the Tower of London. She died there five years later from malnutrition, at the age of 40.

The medal is inscribed ‘O God grant patience and perseverance’ and in Scots ‘Who can compare with me in grief? I die and dare not seek relief’ with an image of Arabella, recognisable from portraits in other collections.

Arabella was a highly educated woman who left over a hundred letters and who was reputedly tutored by Christopher Marlowe. There were many who were sympathetic to her plight, but unwilling or unable to do anything about it.

For the next 8 weeks, the main subject at the Stirling Smith Art Gallery and Museum will be the story, the glory and the environmental importance of Scotland’s peat bogs. The carse lands in and around Stirling were formerly peat bogs, created through the growth of mosses. The healing properties of sphagnum were well known in two world wars and the environmental importance of Flanders Moss is now recognised.

The Flow Country touring exhibition is presented by the Peatlands Partnership, working with the Heritage Lottery Fund, the RSPB, Scottish Natural Heritage, the Highland Council and the Environmental Research Institute. The Flow Country which stretches through Caithness and Sutherland in the far north of Scotland is the best blanket bog of its type in the world and hugely important for biodiversity. The area is also of key significance in Britain’s efforts to mitigate climate change. There is more carbon locked up in the peat of the Flow Country than in all of the UK’s forests combined. Keeping this carbon locked away is vital in helping to regulate the planet’s climate and work is ongoing to restore areas damaged by past management.

The exhibition lets you explore the bogs without wetting your feet, and there will be a series of 6 free lunchtime talks on Thursdays from 1 February.

Featured today is one of T. S Smith’s lesser known paintings. It is an illustration for an episode in the novel ‘Gil Blas’ written by Alain-Rene Lesage in 1735.

Few today know anything of this novel, but it was read, appreciated and referenced by many other writers including Jonathan Swift, Charles Dickens, Dostoyevsky and Mark Twain. The hero of the novel, Gil Blas, is born in poverty to a chambermaid and a stable hand but is educated by his uncle. He encounters many classes of society, finding that honesty and integrity bears no relationship to social class, and that there are criminals in every level of society. Hard work and intelligence eventually bring him rewards.

Perhaps because of the similarity to his own life, Smith was attracted to the subject, for which he painted two works. Smith was illegitimate by birth, and supported by his uncle when his father died. Because of his illegitimacy, 18 other people pursued a claim to the estate of Glassingall, Dunblane, which Smith inherited only after an 8 year legal battle. The struggle was famous in its time, and it is thanks to the money from Glassingall that the Smith Institute came into being.

Only 10 Gil Blas works are in public collections in Britain. Two of these are by T. S. Smith.