200 Years of Scottish Enterprise in the East

For more than 200 years Scots played a central role in global trade, expanding British trade into Asia through their disproportionate influence in the East India Company in the eighteenth century and pushing commerce to the frontiers of empire in Hong Kong, Singapore and Southeast Asia in the nineteenth. Leading Scottish historian Professor Tom Devine explains how Scotland came to dominate Asian trade.

14 Days of GLORY

In June 2010, Scots author J.A. Henderson returned to the United States – where he lived for seven years – to realise a long-held ambition of driving from one side of the country to the other.

Daggers in the library, dining room and bar

The Crime Writers Association meet to celebrate Val McDermid’s Cartier Diamond Dagger award…When you walk into the Royal Overseas Club at 100 Princes Street in Edinburgh, it’s like stepping back into the 1950s. Behind its slim façade, the building itself is a warren, a single wooden staircase rising up at its centre, with low ceilinged corridors slinking off from side to side, each with their own special wonkiness of floor and seriously inadequate lighting. At first glance the fixtures and fittings are quaintly retrospective, at second glance you realise they are not just retrospective but actually original…

The Scottish Parliament Complex

THE new Scottish Parliament Building at Holyrood has already attracted more than enough controversy to make any such structure, or set of structures, famous – or notorious – whatever its aesthetic merits. The subject of its own dedicated public inquiry, the Holyrood Inquiry (or Fraser Inquiry), the complex was opened in 2004, three years late and at a final cost of £414 million. The latter figure was arrived at after wildly optimistic initial estimates that ranged as low as £10 million…

Scotland! Scotland! That cloud in the north, that coming storm

HAVING trod water thus far in the murky waters of Scottish politics, it now seems appropriate, following the outcome of the recent bitterly contested UK national elections, for A Broad Scot to review Alba’s political landscape. The May 6 poll was fought in the most unfavourable economic circumstances the country had faced since the Great Depression…

Thomas Fraser: Shetland Lone Star

Since October last year, the National Theatre of Scotland has been touring the country with a musical play telling the story of Thomas Fraser, one of the most remarkable characters in the history of recorded music.  The show’s first performances outside Scotland were in Ireland this July, and with plans afoot to take it further afield in 2011, now seems the ideal time to introduce Thomas Fraser to readers of A Broad Scot around the world.

It wes us!

WHEN England supporters at the World Cup Tournament in South Africa sang about football and the trophy itself ”coming home”, apart from being scunnered by their cheek, we Scots knew in our hearts that it just wesnae true – it wes us that taught the world tae kick a baw. So if football ever had a homeland to come home to it had to be Scotland!

Auld Reekie in August

IT IS often thought that the world holds only three truly modern international cities; London, Paris and New York.  Others may be beautiful, interesting or cosmopolitan, but they cannot compete with the constant global nature of these three. Well, in August each year a plucky contender attempts to punch above its weight and rank alongside them, albeit momentarily…

Oor Man in London reports…

Oor Man in London got off his bahouki twice recently, once on June 5 to report on a massive Highland Games event at England’s home of Rugby and then an equally important happening in the Sassenach capital on July 3. The latter was a full, kilt-swinging Ceilidh that the expats have been holding once a month – for want o’ nothing better tae dae maybe – since Hogmanay.

‘Tis amazing that these reports made it all the way to oor censor’s office in Hong Kong, because yin ither report has it that our scribe rarely gets aff said bahouki in his favourite howff tae catch the last carrier doo oot o’ Lunnin toon. Here they are sine, in chronic order.

World Cup daze

WHEREVER the Scottish diaspora – those real inventors, exporters and distributors of that most beautiful game, fitba, were gathered during the long nights and early mornings seven hours east of Greenwich, the FIFA World Cup 2010, as well as its concluding drama, conjured up its own inimitable atmosphere depending on the city, town or country in which they reside…

Great Highland Pipes in Asia

THERE is an etiquette, I have discovered, to practising instruments in the public parks of Chinese cities. These parks are usually crowded, with people engaging in a wide variety of sports, pastimes and activities. In order for everyone to get along, politeness requires that you should pretend to be entirely uninterested and unaware of what other people are doing. The appearance of a foreigner playing a bagpipe puts this convention under great strain. People will watch from behind tree trunks or conceal themselves in bushes…

Pipe dreams start to come true

NO one should judge a book by its cover, a sentiment that applies in particular to people. But this writer had reservations about such arbitrary wisdom when he first met Chris Lee Cho-lam. The 20-year-old was so shy and taciturn when we started to talk about the love of his life, bagpiping, that it was hard to believe this ordinary-looking young man is actually a top-notch performer with many international piping awards and championships under his sporran.

A Broad Scot: Candice Moore

IT’S early on a Sunday afternoon as I turn off Wan Chai’s bustling Lockhart Road and follow The Canny Man’s signage through the Wharney Guang Dong Hotel. The tinkling lilt of Scottish folk songs drifts melodically up from the unlikely basement location. Crossing the threshold I realise, like so many others before me, that I have found Hong Kong’s answer to a traditional Scottish pub.  Aged oak shelves teeming with Scotch whisky bottles line the walls as I skirt past the wood-panelled bar, pool table, pub chair-and-table sets, and even a mounted Highland bull’s head…

The Honours of Scotland

THE Scottish ‘Honours’ are the oldest Royal Regalia in Britain and can be seen in Edinburgh Castle.They were first used together at the coronation of the nine-month-old Mary, Queen of Scots in 1543, and  subsequently at the coronations of her infant son James VI (and I of England) at Stirling in 1567 and her grandson Charles I in 1633 at the Palace of Holyroodhouse.

The Crown almost certainly dates from before 1540 when it was remodelled by order of James V. It was last worn at the coronation of Charles II at Scone in 1651…

Christmas day in the morning

Last thing anyone wants to do is work on Christmas Day, me especially. Then again . . . defence of the realm and everything.

Aye. There I was defending the realm on Christmas Eve, in the shape of Edinburgh Castle, and it looked like I was going to be defending it on Christmas Day an all. I was feeling sorry for myself, stuck out here in the cold in front of this big bloody portcullis. Whoever it was invented the wind tunnel was standing in front of Edinburgh Castle when he got the idea, I’ll bet, and all I had for shelter was my wee guard box and I wasn’t even allowed to stand inside it.

The retail front

There are brief moments when being here is extraordinary and those moments prevent me from leaving. A man came into the shop during my morning shift wearing a perfect suit. He brought a beautiful garlic bulb to the till and smiled. At this very action, the morning shift was harmonious for a few vital seconds. The timing of the man’s movement across the shop floor; the shimmer of his brilliant suit; the beauty of nature as manifest in the garlic bulb and the morning sunlight which cascaded gilded dust particles around the smiling customer: it all felt magnificent. I preferred being behind the till during such scenes rather than behind the delicatessen counter; there is a better view of the shop floor. I carefully placed the garlic bulb on the scales and then asked the customer…

The runes in the howe

Snow lay over the howe when the long ships came ashore at Hamnavoe. Full midwinter had shrouded the sky in grey, and the gale bit sharp as the teeth of the Fenriswolf. The young earl’s party, a hundred strong, crew of four ships, slogged over the treeless heath, shelterless. They were bound for Firth and the house of Erlend Haraldsson, the earl’s kinsman and foe. On the banks of Harray Loch, the snowstorm had overtaken them, blown off the iron waters of the North Sea, stealing breath and chilling bone. Snow fell on them out of the grey clouds, shrouding the contours of the ground, caked thick on backs and boots, sloughing away in layers as they moved.

The sea urchin

We always went to the wooden cottage. It lay among the dunes on the west side of the island, its walls the colour of the long sand grass that hissed outside, so that from far away you wouldn’t see it at all, you wouldn’t know it was there. The last time I stayed there I was 14, and it was that year it happened.

I woke suddenly from a strange dream – not a frightening dream, a strange dream. I lay there on my back before moving and for a moment it seemed more vivid than anything I had known before, more than all of my daily life; yet as soon as I tried to remember what it had been it began flowing away, like water through my hands…

The pride of Bolinao

A FEW years ago, geotechnical consultant Ian McFeat-Smith and his Ilocandian wife, Aileen Respicio, discovered a rare and stunning piece of Philippines coastline at Bolinao. Since then, they have designed and developed an unusual beach facility there, the Punta Riviera Resort in Western Pangasinan province. In this article, Dr McFeat-Smith describes to A Broad Scot the historical, romantic and cultural attractions of the area around their barangay (village). At Ilog Malino, rural life, education and sustainable development are at the heart of the Bolinao hotel and resort’s ambitious plans to impart ecological and corporate responsibility.

Butlins Ayr and camp-like graces

MEMORIES abound for millions of Britons who spent their annual holidays at one of the Butlins holiday camps spotted around the UK before and after World War II. And the excitement of those times was nowhere more palpable than at Butlins signature camp in Scotland…

Great Scot! Sir Harry Lauder

Born Henry Lauder at 4 Bridge Street, Portobello, Edinburgh, (then the residence of his mother’s father) on the 4^th August 1870. He was the eldest son of John Currie Lauder (1851-1882) (who had been born in nearby Musselburgh) a Master Potter and a descendant of Lauder & Bass, and Isabella Urquhart MacLeod McLennan (1854 -1905) born in Arbroath but whose family originated in the Black Isle in Rossshire.

Kenneth McKellar: A Tribute

NOT many expat Scots under the age of 65 would know that the mither country’s most beloved tenor, Kenneth McKellar – who passed away at his daughter’s home near Lake Tahoe, Nevada, on April 9 – had begun his career as a forestry worker.

Although McKellar, born in Paisley, Renfrewshire, on June 23, 1927, was technically a Lowlander, his heart was in the Highlands. A graduate of Aberdeen University, young McKellar felt he had a mission, indeed it was his passion in life, to help restore Scotland’s forests, which had been sorely depleted during the Clearances and ravaged by the modern military’s hunger for timber during World War II. So he started out working for the Scottish Forestry Commission…