From Dunkirk to Arbroath .. pivotal anniversaries to remember this year
● Milestones in history and politics to life-saving breakthroughs, the events that will be remembered throughout 2020, writes Conor Matchett
The forthcoming year will be a time for Scotland to remember some of its most pivotal moments in its long history from anniversaries covering everything from the very beginning of the country’s national identity to the end of wars and pivotal political moments.
Nationalism and the potential for an independent Scotland has dominated the political debate over the last decade, no more so than in 2014 during the independence referendum.
However 2020 will mark the 700th anniversary of one of Scotland’s most pivotal moments, the signing of the Declaration of Arbroath which took place on 6 April 1320.
Within the declaration, designed to reaffirm Scotland’s status as an independent, sovereign nation apart from England, the signatories referred to the hope never to be brought under English rule.
In one of the most famous passages, the declaration reads: “As long as but a hundred of us remain alive, never will we on any conditions be brought under English rule.
“It is in truth not for glory, nor riches, nor honours, that we are fighting, but for freedom - for that alone, which no honest man gives up but with life itself ”.
There are some historians who argue the declaration, which followed years of fighting with England involving legendary historic figures including William Wallace and Robert the Bruce, served as the inspiration for the wording of the American declaration of independence nearly 500 years later.
Arbroath will host several events to mark the anniversary including a horse-led procession of more than 500 people from the town’s abbey to the harbour, as well as a re-enactment and songs at Arbroath Abbey.
More than 400 years after the declaration, and 275 years ago in 1745, the second Jacobite rebellion took hold of Scotland under the leadership of Charles Stuart, also known as ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’.
The rebellions were eventually put down by King George II after the rebellion had captured Edinburgh and had reached as far south as Derby.
Scotland’s nationalism and strong sense of identity never disappeared, but the push for independence slowly drained away until 1945 when the country’s first Scottish National Party MP.
It means 2020 will see the 75th anniversary of the election of Robert Mcintyre to Westminster after his victory in the Motherwell by-election on 13 April 1945.
There are also expected to be events commemorating the biggest military victory in the history of the United Kingdom, namely the end of the Second World War on its 75th anniversary.
Victory in Europe Day (VE Day) took place on 8 May 1945. Prime Minister Winston Churchill made his victory speech and appeared on the balsive cony of Buckingham Palace, and street parties took place across the country.
2020 will also mark one of the United Kingdom’s darkest days. Events and commemorations will mark the 80th anniversary of the evacuation at Dunkirk where thousands of British soldiers were rescued from the beaches of France by the Royal Navy and hundreds of civilian ships.
The year will also offer an opportunity to recognise how far Scotland has come, not only in science and technology but also in social attitudes.
In October, it will be exactly 60 years since Edinburgh witnessed one of the most impressive medical feats in history.
Sir Michael Woodruff, who had researched organ transplant for decades prior to the operation, became the first doctor to perform successfully a full kidney transplant in the United Kingdom at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary.
The professor had spent years waiting to find the perfect patient, opting to hold out until someone with an
both, it seems, addicted to the same thing – not drugs or alcohol, but lost love. He’s attractive, and nature looks all set to take its course – even if, thanks to VR, Cassie has to work out whether to choose the uncertain present over the idyllic but dead past.
However, before you all shout out “Take the uncertain present!” the plot lopes off towards even deeper moral dilemmas. Suppose, Alexander imagines, extreme users’ virtual reality could be affected by other people’s. Suppose, in other words, that people could see straight into each other’s minds ...
“One thing about that,” she smiles. “It would certainly make interviews pointless.”
I suppose it would. I’d be able to see at a glance the way Jane Alexander thinks. I’d be able to go all the way back to one of her own happiest memories – a sunny day in Edinburgh; she was 18 and had come down from her native Aberdeen to visit her friend; they’d walked up Salisbury Crags, and the city and both their futures seemed spread out in front of them. I’d catch a flicker of everything she’d poured into her mind since: first, learning illustration at Edinburgh College of Art, then the creative writing Mphil in Glasgow, then the PHD at Edinburgh on the sense of the uncanny in Scottish literature. I’d see how all that had turned first into this novel, and then into the short story collection she is working on now, which hinges on how new technology is changing our sense of the strange. I wouldn’t even need to read it.
I’d see, too, some of the people in recovery from substance abuse she’s taught creative writing (she’d never dream of writing directly about them, though she concedes her fiction is often about damaged, vulnerable characters), and some of the writers she worked with and made her take her own fiction seriously too. I’d see what kind of a teacher she is: my own guess is a very good one indeed.
Of course, she’d be able to see into my mind too. And she’d know for sure that when, I told her I’d enjoyed the book, that it had made me think about virtual reality in far greater depth than I can imagine Black Mirror ever doing, and that I hoped it did really well for her, it wasn’t a word of a lie.