I look back and laugh at the absurdity of it all. We were so daft...
It was one of the most audacious heists in history... the day four student idealists stole an icon (and broke it in the process)
THE Ford Anglia loitering beside Westminster Abbey in the small hours of Christmas Day, 1950, should really have given the game away. And when a young man dashed into view and hopped into the car beside the young woman sitting nervously in the driver’s seat, the London bobby’s suspicions were understandably aroused.
Approaching the car and rapping on the window, he was slightly surprised to see the pair engaged in a passionate clinch and apparently oblivious to him. It was all most odd.
When they finally came up for air and wound down the window, the man explained to the officer in a cheery Scots brogue that they had been searching – without success – for a bed and breakfast for the night.
Disarmed by their frankness, the bobby left them to it with a knowing wink and a cheery ‘Merry Christmas’.
Only later, when news broke of the couple’s true purpose, would a rising nausea accompany the hapless officer’s slow-dawning realisation that he had stumbled upon one of the most audacious heists in modern British history. And he had waved two of the perpetrators merrily on their way.
The man in that car 70 years ago this Christmas was Ian Hamilton, ardent Scottish nationalist and the brains behind a daring plan by four Glasgow University students to steal arguably the most diplomatically sensitive lump of rock in Europe – the Stone of Destiny – from under the noses of the establishment.
Even as he and co-conspirator Kay Matheson engaged in an impromptu smooch to throw the police off the scent, fellow plotters Alan Stuart and Gavin Vernon waited nervously inside the Abbey for the all- clear to manhandle the ‘liberated’ artefact into the boot of their getaway car.
It was not the first, or last, time that their intended act of inflammatory protest began to feel more like an Ealing comedy. It did not help that mid-pilfer, they dropped and broke the very stone they came to steal.
That they got away with it was thanks to woeful Abbey security, an i maginatively used raincoat and Hamilton’s remarkable ability to talk himself out of tight spots, which he would later direct to more useful purpose in his career as an eminent QC.
Now the Stone of Destiny will soon be on the move once more, from Edinburgh Castle to its spiritual home in Perth, where it will become the centrepiece of a planned Perth City Hall museum in 2024, marking a historic return after seven centuries.
HAMILTON has rarely talked since about that infamous night when, as a fresh-faced, 25-year-old law student he committed what was held in some quarters as a ‘treasonable’ act.
In one interview, he maintained that his purpose had been to ‘get the Scottish people to recognise that a Scottish identity really did exist’.
But he added: ‘There’s no way we were great criminals. When I look back now I have to laugh at the absurdity of it all. I’ve defended a lot of daft people during 30 years as a criminal lawyer but I doubt very much if I’ve defended anyone who was as daft as we were then.
‘The jails are full of daft people but we got away with it. They didn’t even prosecute us. There was such a reaction in Scotland – they were terrified the Scots would have risen up if we had been sent to jail.’
Daft it may have been, but there is no denying the scheme’s sheer effrontery. The students shared a common passion for Scottish patriotism and were all involved in the Scottish Covenant Association, a movement supporting home rule.
Hamilton, in particular, was a charismatic figure and soon persuaded Matheson, a 22-year-old Highlander, who was training to be a domestic science teacher, and electrical engineering student Vernon to participate in a bid to ‘repatriate’ the Stone of Scone.
Stuart, another engineering student, was a latecomer to the scheme and Hamilton was unsure about including him as he did not know how the boyish- looking 20- year- old would stand up if things went wrong.
His doubts were assuaged when Vernon whispered: ‘He could bring a car.’ Stuart overheard the conversation and added: ‘Do you want an Armstrong or a Ford Anglia?’
‘Would a Ford Anglia carry four hundredweight?’ asked Hamilton. ‘Och yes,’ replied Stuart. ‘It would carry Nelson’s column, pigeons and all.’
In this fashion, they recruited Stuart and a second Ford Anglia and set off for London in December 1950 to meet their Destiny.
SOME idealistic nationalists saw the stone as an emblem of independence. Legend has it that the artefact was once ‘Jacob’s Pillow’, on which the biblical figure laid his head while dreaming of a ladder to Heaven.
Whatever the truth, it was on this ancient 336lb slab of red sandstone, with i ts mythical carvings, that Scottish kings – f rom Kenneth MacAlpin in 841 to John Balliol in 1292 – were said to have been crowned.
During the Wars of Independence, it was looted from Scone, Perthshire, and taken south in 1296 by English invader King Edward I. He had it lodged beneath the carved-oak coronation throne in Westminster Abbey as a scornful symbol of Scottish subservience to England. Hamilton’s mob were determined to bring it ‘home’.
By the time they reached London on December 22 after an 18-hour drive, the practical shortcomings of their adventure were becoming all too evident. As Hamilton later wrote: ‘We had no money for hotels, and barely enough for food and petrol. At one point we had to phone home and beg for some more. Looking back, the naivety of it takes my breath away.
‘Truly we did not know the size of what we were taking on. None of us thought that it would still be talked of all these years later.’
On an initial reconnoitre on Christmas Eve, Hamilton hid in the Abbey, crouched behind a statue, when it closed. When a night watchman shone a torch on him, he admitted, without lying: ‘I’m locked in.’
‘I sensed he was as surprised and afraid as I was... but he was a kindly man... he asked if I was homeless, offered me money, bade me put my shoes on, and turned me out the west door,’ said Hamilton.
He did not go far. Matheson and the other two were waiting nearby. With the surrounding streets deserted late on Christmas Eve, the three male students tried again. They jemmied their way into the Abbey through a side door and prised the big stone out from under the Coronation Chair. It was the work of minutes, until the stone – the weight of a sumo wrestler – broke in two as it crashed onto the floor.
‘I would like to say that I was terribly overawed about having broken the Stone of Destiny,’ Hamilton recalled. ‘But I wasn’t. I was glad because with a quarter of it away, it made it easier to handle.’
Using Hamilton’s raincoat, they dragged the larger chunk down the altar steps, before he scurried out with the smaller piece, dropping it in the boot of one of their cars before getting in beside Matheson.
An instant later, she caught the eye of the policeman standing by a street lamp and, in a moment of quick
thinking, seized Hamilton for their game-saving clinch.
With the bobby safely despatched, Matheson drove away, dropping Hamilton off after a few minutes so he could return to the Abbey and help wrestle the rest of the stone into the other car.
When news of the ‘theft’ was announced hours later, all hell broke loose. A huge manhunt began and police sealed off roads on the Border for the first time since the reign of Mary, Queen of Scots.
The disappearance was greeted with amusement in Scotland, in part prompted by the more splenetic outbursts down South. The Church of England called it blasphemous, while the Dean of Westminster accused the culprits of ‘committing an act of sacrilege’. George VI was apparently ‘very distressed’ at its loss.
By then, Matheson had evaded police checkpoints to temporarily leave her piece of the stone at a friend’s house in the Midlands.
The others, having anticipated that police would be searching for cars going north, drove south to Kent and hid the rest of the stone in a field before heading back to Scotland for the fuss to die down.
When they went back for it two weeks later, the field housed a travellers’ encampment, centred on the stone. After convincing them that ‘we come from a country of gipsies far up to the north’, they were allowed to take it.
Back on home soil, the pieces were reunited and a stonemason was employed to repair the damage while the gang worked out what to do next.
It did not take long for the police to close in on the unlikely band of thieves, aided by some elementary deduction by staff at Glasgow’s Mitchell Library.
Hamilton said: ‘We’d made absolutely no attempts to cover our tracks. The police just went into the Mitchell Library and asked if anyone had been showing a special interest in the Stone of Destiny.
I’d researched the whole business there. They checked the records and found I had borrowed every book on Westminster Abbey.’
When officers visited her family home at Inverasdale, Ross-shire, and demanded to know where the stone was, Matheson fibbed that it was in a nearby peat bog, laughing later that she had an entire year’s peat cut for her by the police.
In the end, the stone’s reappearance was every bit as dramatic as its disappearance. On April 11, 1951, it was discovered on the ruined high altar of Arbroath Abbey, draped in a Saltire, at the site where the Declaration of Arbroath – asserting Scottish independence – was signed in 1320.
The stone was swiftly returned to Westminster Abbey and was in place for Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation in 1953.
BUT t el l i ngly, having happily confessed to their involvement, none of the culprits was prosecuted. Sir Hartley Shawcross, the Attorney General, informed the Commons that he had no desire to create ‘martyrs’ or ‘heroes’, though he described the affair as ‘deplorable’, entailing ‘vulgar acts of vandalism’ that had caused ‘great distress in England and Scotland’.
An unrepentant Hamilton said: ‘I don’t consider that retrieving my country’s property was breaking the law... he [Shawcross] referred to us as “these vulgar vandals” and that has been one of my favourite phrases ever since.’
WITH their moment i n the l i melight over, Hamilton and the others returned to pursue their careers, becoming pillars of the community and rarely talking about their exploits.
Hamilton wrote a book about the plot, titled The Taking of the Stone of Destiny, which was turned into the 2008 movie Stone of Destiny, featuring Robert Carlyle, Charlie Cox and Kate Mara.
Vernon died in 2004 and Matheson i n 2013, while Stuart, a respected Glasgow businessman, passed away aged 88 in 2019, leaving Hamilton as the sole survivor.
Now aged 95, the father of four lives in quiet retirement in Argyll.
Yet all but Vernon lived to see the day the Stone was returned permanently to Scotland (except for coronations). On St Andrew’s Day 1996, more than 10,000 people lined the Royal Mile to see it being transported to Edinburgh Castle.
Now, finally, it will return to Perthshire where, some might argue, it should never have left.
But of course, as four ‘daft’ young students proved 70 years ago, nothing is cast in stone.