OUR OLDEST ROCK STAR
With its future uncertain yet again, a salute to the Stone of Destiny...
IT was a grey Monday evening when the Edinburgh experts alighted at London’s King’s Cross. The officers they met were taciturn, even as they sped them to Hendon Police College and awaited nightfall.
Things grew ever more cloak-anddagger. Only when it was dark were the Scots taken to Westminster. Even then, bored and chafing, they had to wait in a side street for two hours – until, at last, the Abbey was secure.
It proved very Bob the Builder after that. The poles of the scaffold they had specially designed had to be carried into the Abbey and painstakingly erected over King Edward’s Chair.
The running pulley was set in place; the purpose-built handbarrow drawn up. Then, by block and tackle and most slowly, the treasure was hoisted from the seat of the medieval throne, quarter-inch by quarter-inch...
It took a full six hours and, all the while, the Scots were ringed by armed police in an ancient place of worship thick with tension and unease... but, at last, the trophy was free and secured – and the morning following was on its way home to Scotland, under armed escort and to a secret location.
You can visit it today in Edinburgh Castle, in a room so stoutly secure – the door is a foot thick – that it is really a walk-in safe.
There gleam, behind bullet-proof glass, the Honours of Scotland – our old crown; a no less bejewelled sword – and there, too, is a big oblong chunk of red sandstone, a cross vaguely carved on the top, and many other strange little marks and inscriptions.
And, almost prosaic, the two great iron rings, one at each end, for carting the thing around... no light matter, for the Stone of Destiny weighs almost 24 stone (152kg)
Most of us know the legend of what nippier Scots call the Stone of Scone. That it was the very rock on which the patriarch Jacob pillowed his head. That Fergus, son of Erc, first king of the Scots in Scotland, had it borne from Ireland for his coronation in Argyll.
That, as the centuries passed, it ended up in the custody of the monastery of Scone, just over a mile north of modern Perth, and continued to honour the behinds of successive Scots sovereigns until, on an infamous day in 1296, it was seized by Edward I of England, carried all the way to London and built into an especially designed chair.
It was all about ‘optics’ and spin. As long as the Stone was in Westminster, it bolstered Edward’s claim to be ‘Lord Paramount’ of Scotland.
All his successors would be crowned on it (as, indeed, they have been, including our current Queen in 1953) – and, without the Stone, any wannabe who somehow snatched Scotland back for the Scots would be of dubious legitimacy.
As it turned out, the Scots gave not a button, the Bruce himself at last seeing off the forces of Edward II at Bannockburn in 1314 and decisively restoring Scotland’s independence.
By 1328, resigned to the new order of things, the English signed up to the Treaty of Northampton, wherein both Scots and English kings acknowledged the legitimate sovereignty of the other, within his own bounds – and, too, as a gesture of goodwill, that the Stone be returned to Scotland.
But the London Mob would not hear of it; great was the riotry, the scheme was abandoned and even when a Scot – James VI and I – finally gained the throne of England, the Stone stayed balefully where it was.
Well, until Christmas Day 1950, when – with almost laughable ease – a bunch of Scottish students at last liberated it, thanks to woeful Abbey security, an imaginatively used raincoat, two Ford Anglia cars and a welltimed snog.
Ian Hamilton, Gavin Vernon and Alan Stuart had ascertained the details of the watchmen’s shifts and identified a point of vulnerability in the building. In the wee hours they managed to get inside, pull down an insubstantial barrier and lever out the Stone.
It was, unlike the fraught endeavour decades later, the confident work of minutes, until – to their horror – the Stone broke in two as it crashed onto the floor. They rallied, and used Hamilton’s raincoat to drag the larger chunk down the altar steps, before he scurried out with the smaller one, dropping it in the boot of one of their cars before getting into the passenger seat beside Kay Matheson.
An instant later, the Highland lass spotted a policeman by a street lamp, who had evidently spotted them – and, in instant genius, she seized Hamilton and drew him close for a protracted lovers’ clinch: the amused bobby then joined them conversation.
After a soothing cigarette, Matheson drove away, dropping Hamilton off after a few minutes. To make a long story boring, he returned to the Abbey, manhandled the rest of the Stone into the other car, and retrieved Vernon and Stuart. As the load was putting such evident strain on the car’s springs, they astutely made for Kent and hid it in a field.
Matheson, meanwhile, left her chunk of Destiny with a friend in the Midlands, before they all returned to Scotland by train.
The alarm was fast raised and the Border roads to Scotland were closed for the first time in four centuries.
The affair greatly tickled Scots, in affable
especially as the outcry from Anglican clergy was so over the top, and all was immortalised in The Wee Magic Stane by Robin Hall and Jimmie Macgregor.
‘So the polis went beetlin’ away up tae the North/They hunted the Clyde and they hunted the Forth/ But the wild folk up yonder just kidded them a’/For they didnae believe it was magic at a’. Wi’ a too-ra-li-oo-ra-li-oo-ra-li-ay...’
The Stone was subsequently recovered, repaired by a Glasgow stonemason, and, in April 1951, the police were gently tipped off as to its location.
Officers found it, draped in the Flag of Scotland, on the site of the High Altar in the ruins of Arbroath Abbey. Tellingly – though they were quickly identified and happily confessed – none of the four young people was ever charged with any offence. The Government dared not bring them to trial.
The years passed, then, in a widely derided gesture, on July 3, 1996, Secretary of State for Scotland Michael Forsyth, announced the Stone was returning for permanent Scottish residence (save, of course, when it was needed for the odd coronation). With much pomp and ceremony, at Edinburgh Castle and in the presence of HRH The Prince Andrew, Earl of Inverness – on St Andrew’s Day, of course – it was formally delivered into the custody of the Commissioners for the Regalia.
Forsyth always claimed the idea had been the suggestion of his young daughter and pooh-poohed any suggestion it was a cynical sop to nationalism.
Just as well: six months later, Forsyth was swept from power and, like all his Scottish Conservative colleagues, lost his seat in Parliament. By year’s end, Scots had voted for a parliament of their own.
Now the question of the Stone’s future is out for consultation, the options being centrepiece to a new museum in a refurbished Perth City Hall or in a wholly redesigned display at Edinburgh Castle.
But there remain deeper, more delicious uncertainties. There are really only two things we know for sure about the slab alongside Scotland’s Crown Jewels – that it is the stone recovered from Arbroath Abbey in 1951 and that it is of locally quarried red sandstone from Scone.
Many believe the Stone from Westminster Abbey is held elsewhere in Scotland. Some even say canny monks in 1296 fobbed off the Hammer of the Scots with a tall tale and an old rock – and that the true Stone of Scone has since been hidden for ever.