I’m on the train back to London after a week in Scotland, first hosting my ALL TALK show at the Edinburgh Fringe, and secondly researching my family ancestry in Ayrshire. I’ve much enjoyed the week, but I’m very much looking forward to getting home and being reunited with the Canines, and of course Simmo!
I’ve been staying in a Glasgow hotel for the last three nights, the longest period I’ve every spent in Scotland’s most populous city. Driving around it, is feels very American in layout, with a motorway seemingly only just round the corner wherever you are, and the design based on a bloc system. But you don’t have to stray far outside the city centre to find vast plots of redundant and undeveloped land. You get the impression that it is a city living on past glories, and one which hasn’t quite adapted to a modern technological age, in the way that Edinburgh has. Its hospitality sector is clearly struggling. On my first night out I went out to have something to eat just after 8pm. The first four restaurants told me their kitchens closed at 8pm.I eventually found a bar which served me the most disgusting chicken burger I’ve ever had.
I had rented a hire car from Enterprise. It was supposed to be a Mercedes A Class or equivalent. It turned out they hadn’t got any so they upgraded me to a BMW 3 series. I got in it, and it flashed up ‘Urgent Oil Change Needed’. Oh that’s OK, they said. The garage will have forgotten to reset it. Er, I’m not that stupid… So they then offered me a Merc GLB SUV, which was a pleasure to drive around Ayrshire once I had worked out how to operate the slightly confusing computer. I felt very proud of myself to have connected my phone to it all by myself. Such are the pleasures in life when you get to my age.
The problem came yesterday when I drove round Glasgow in search of a petrol station to refill it. Chat GPT sent me on three wild goose chases. What is it about Scotland that it seems to have a fraction of the number of petrol stations we have down south. Are they ahead of us in preparing to go electric? I don’t know, but it took me 45 minutes to find one. Had I looked on Google Maps right from the start, I wouldn’t have wasted my time so badly.
I spent much of the three days researching my ancestor, David Dale, so I can write about him properly in my autobiography. I hadn’t realised what an important part he had played in the creation of Glasgow as a centre of commerce in the late 19th century. Not only was he the founder and builder of the famous New Lanark Cotton Mill, which I visited yesterday, but he was a founder of the Glasgow Chamber of Commerce and the leader of the anti-slavery movement – not necessarily a post which will have endeared him to his fellow businessmen. He came from humble beginnings, like the rest of the Dales, in the village of Stewarton, just north of Kilmarnock. They all lived in very basic sheds on a farm called Stacklawhill, three miles outside Stewarton. There was a midden outside the shed, on which the local judge would read his proclamations, and a gibbet would be built for hangings. I found the site on Wednesday, and today it is host to three nice cottages.
I am indebted to my sixth cousin, Fiona Barker, who lives in the wonderfully named village of Dollar. I hadn’t realised I had so many connections to Edinburgh, through the Campbell side of the family. She and her husband Les took me on a tour of Campbell related sites in central Edinburgh, where my Great Uncle William owned several businesses including a beer and wine merchants in Nicholson Square, which is now a middle eastern perfumerie.
We then went to Currie, to Goodtrees farm, which is where my great grandfather Robert Dale, and my great grandmother Elizabeth Dunlop Campbell got married in the 1870s. The family were tenant farmers there and on the next farm, which is now a rustic restaurant run by the grandsons of former Tory MP Alick Buchanan-Smith. We were three of 60 people who sat down to a six course taster menu. Interestingly most of the other guests were in their twenties or thirties. If you’re ever in the area, do give it a try. It’s called The Free Company and every single thing on the menu is grown or reared on the farm.
On Thursday, after the visit to Stewarton I still couldn’t work out exactly where David Dale fitted into the family tree, so I emailed Fiona and we arranged to meet in Dollar. I had thought he was my Great, Great, Great Uncle, but that turned out to be wrong. The problem is that Scottish records only go back to about 1750, and he was born in 1739. She thinks he was the brother or cousin of my fifth great grandfather Matthew. All we know is that he and Matthew were at Stacklawhill at the same time, and that he wrote that Dales had lived there for four centuries.
When I went to New Lanark, they promised to look through their records to see if they had any records which the Stewarton Museum hadn’t, as to his lineage.
On Wednesday I also went to the village of Dreghorn to find Corsehill Farm, where my grandfather, John Campbell Dale, was born in October 1879. It turns out Nicola Sturgeon hails from Dreghorn too, as she told me in a text exchange about interviewing her about her autobiography. I never met my grandfather. He was 15 years older than my grandmother and died in 1953, nine years before I was born.
The Fringe itself went brilliantly, with the Michael Heseltine session narrowly pipping Rachel Reeves as to the receiving the best feedback. Michael is not a man for small talk, so before the event I wondered how it would go, but as soon as he walked on stage, the old magic returned. He was simply spellbinding and I think everyone there felt they were witnessing a bit of history. Rachel Reeves really came out of herself and showed what a wonderful sense of humour she has. However, I knew it was all going to well, when the show producer told me on Monday evening that the wind had beaten Lord Dannatt, who couldn’t get beyond Peterborough. Luckily, we still had Lord Darroch, who proved very popular with the audience. I think that every show made some sort of headlines, and everyone seems keen for me to return next year. Well, I say everyone… Not quite. The National newspaper carried a shitty article saying politicians should be banned from the Fringe, to which my response was that if there was no demand, no one would buy tickets.
I’ve now got another week off. Well, that was the plan, but I’m actually going to be sitting in for Nick Ferrari on Friday, something I don’t think I’ve done since 2017.
I’m looking forward to a week of doing nothing at home, apart from getting under Simmo’s feet and paring down the manuscript of my autobiography from 173,000 words to a more manageable 120,000. So far I’ve only managed to get rid of 7,000! Wish me luck.