Ruaraidh Stuart Joseph Erskine

Born in 1869 in Brighton, Essex but of an old Scottish family, Ruaraidh Arascain is Mhairr, as he liked to be called, learned Gaelic from his Harris nursemaid. The Hon. Ruaraidh Erskine was the second son of the fifth Lord Erskine, and he spent his childhood in Edinburgh.

He began to write, and also became immersed in politics, becoming a vice president of the Scottish Home Rule Association (SHRA) in 1892. In London, he was a minor literary figure. The aims of the SHRA were to achieve a Scottish parliament within the British Empire, which ironically, has just been reached, though the Empire is no more.

As a left-wing nationalist, Erskine soon parted from the SHRA, and from about 1900 onwards he pushed for Scottish independence. His other main cause was the revival of Gaelic, and in 1907 there was published a pamphlet - probably written by Erskine, entitled Programme for a Scottish Party. This called for the restoration of a Gaelic speaking community in the Highlands, and for a compulsory qualification in Gaelic for all those holding state office in Scotland.

Erskine produced a variety of journals, both in English and in Gaelic. The main one was Guth na Bliadhna (1904-25), which was aimed at extending the range of the language into such areas as journalism, politics, art, history and so on. An English language periodical was the Scottish Review (1914-20). The latter in particular made his views more accessible to a public who did not have the Gaelic, e.g. Lowland Scots. It had a left-wing slant of course, and was also a forum for the anti-war faction of the Scottish labour movement, carrying articles by James Maxton among others.

Erskine founded the Scots National League in 1921. Its newspaper, The Scots Independent, was founded in 1926 by William Giles and his son Iain, and is the oldest political journal in Europe. The SNL was based in London, and had an unfortunate tendency to be anti-English! It did not help matters that Erskine had several quirks in his makeup, one of which was that one of the racial characteristics of the Celts was a form of communism. He had, in other words, an idealised and over-romanticised view of the Scottish Clan system.

Despite these quirks, the SNL grew in strength and profile, and in 1928 merged with the SHRA and the Glasgow University Scottish Nationalist Association to form the National Party of Scotland, the precursor of the present-day SNP. Erskine rapidly became sidelined within the nationalist movement, and moved onto other projects, some of which were somewhat reactionary. His increasing disillusionment with the NPS eventually overpowered his love of Gaelic, Jacobism and highland dress, so that in 1930 he moved to the south of France and never took any part in Scottish politics thereafter, dying in 1960.

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