All that glitters could be gold for Scots miners digging deep for £200m bonanza
Scotland’s first gold miners on their hunt for glittering prize
We will expand exploration and then hit it hard next year – Civil engineer Jason Saint
The hills of his dad’s farm, with its fool’s gold in the river and piles of rubble from the old lead mine, were rich pickings for adventure when Davy Burton was growing up.
More than 40 years on, Davy is still having adventures on his father’s land, but now it’s much more than glistening iron pyrites he is uncovering.
Davy is the maintenance supervisor of Scotland’s first commercial gold mine – located on that same family farmland – and, after many false dawns, the first gold was poured at the Scotgold site at Cononish, near Tyndrum, on St Andrew’s Day last year.
Full production is now under way, with estimates of the gold being worth more than £200 million at current market value. Davy has been involved in the journey from the beginning, when geologists first took samples from the ground in the early 1980s, and today he and wife Nicola wear matching wedding bands made from gold mined there.
“It was a huge relief more than anything else to pour the gold in November,” admitted Davy, who features in a new BBC three-parter Gold Town. “Now there’s a big responsibility for all the guys to make it work and to pay back the investors and make them happy.”
It was a geologist from Edinburgh, Richard Parker, who first came to Cononish to do some tests on the land of John Burton, a third generation sheep farmer.
“Richard associated gold with the lead mines, so took some samples and found gold,” explained Davy. “He found the vein where the gold was located and persuaded an Irish company to come over and drill through. Over the course of three summers they got good results and it was decided to drill an exploration tunnel.”
Davy was studying agricultural engineering at Perth Technical College when he helped out the drilling company with manual labour, but by the time the tunnelling work started, he was working in plant hire and civil engineering and was hired as a contractor. “We all thought
Jason Saint has worked in gold mines around the world, but he says none compares to Scotland. Originally from Australia, the civil engineer came to the UK in 2004 to work on the Heathrow Terminal 5 project. He agreed to help out a friend who was working on a Romanian gold project, and what was supposed to be a two-week stay lasted four years. The job has since taken him to South Africa, Canada, France, Belgium and Germany, to name a few, but he’s fallen in love with Scotland since he began working on the Scotgold project. “It’s the nicest office view I’ve ever had,” he smiles. “No one told me about the midges, but they’re not enough to send me away.” It hasn’t all
it was going to happen in 1989-90, but in 1991 the gold price dropped and the company didn’t have enough money to do the job, so they pulled out and we thought that was the end of it,” Davy continued. “Then Caledonia Mining came along in 1996 with big aspirations, but it fell away again. When Scotgold came along in 2007 we thought here we go again, but they kept at it, invested, and it’s now got to this stage.
“I was self-employed all my life until I began working full-time with Scotgold in 2010. It’s good to be involved with something that’s been connected to me all my days.”
If Davy is front and centre, his 83-year-old dad John keeps a keen eye on proceedings from a distance. “Originally, when the agreement was drawn up, there was no mention of gold or silver, it was just for mining, but when they sent in drilling machines and came out with the ores, we knew there was gold and that was what was being looked for,” John said. While John owns been plain sailing. There was a delay in design and production on the plant didn’t start until the winter, which wasn’t ideal conditions, and then more peat was discovered than had been calculated. It made it all the more special when the first gold was poured on St Andrew’s Day last year.
There’s enough gold in Cononish to mine for nine years, but the company is already looking for the next Scottish discovery.
“I’m working with the exploration team,” added Jason. “We’ve located where we’d like to look next and we have a permanent geology team working with us. We’ll expand our exploration efforts more this year and then hit it hard next year.
“We’re always optimistic of there being more. We certainly don’t stop because we have one – we’ll keep going.” the land midway up Beinn Chuirn, he doesn’t have the rights to the gold. Instead, he receives what he calls a healthy but not life-changing amount of rent, as well as having a few shares.
“From an agricultural point of view, we would never get a rental like this from a fairly small area of land, it’s just not possible,” he explained.
Davy continued: “My dad never thought he’d see it happening, so it’s good for him. He can come up and have a look around, but he just shakes his head – he’s a sheep farmer and this is a long way from that.”
There is now a third generation of the Burton family connected to the goldmine, with Davy’s son Conor in the midst of a mechanical engineering apprenticeship with the company.
“He’s over the moon to have got his foot in the door and to be learning his trade,” Davy said.
Gold Town, BBC Scotland, tonight, 9pm.
Thursday March 13, 1941, had been a beautiful day in Clydebank – dry, sunny, the first bashful daffodils – and, after school, after their tea and till well after dusk, nine-year old Brendan Kelly played football on Jellicoe Street with his big pal, 13-year old Tommy Rocks.
But, bedtime beckoning, they abandoned their game and sat at the tenement door, marvelling as the great full moon rose over the town, illuminating every highway and the shimmering Clyde itself.
“God,” breathed Tommy. “Look at that moon. If Jerry comes tonight, he cannae miss…” Jerry did come, that very night; the Clydebank that had retired to sleep was all but obliterated – and, as he painfully recalled in 2011, little Brendan never saw Tommy Rocks again.
The Clydebank Blitz remains the single greatest disaster in modern Scottish history. Over two successive
evenings, some 236 German planes subjected the town to pitiless saturation bombing. The attack was of such intensity that the explosions could be heard in distant Bridge of Allan; the glow in the night sky, as Clydebank burned, visible from Aberdeenshire, from the Inner Hebrides, and even from Ireland.
Officially, 528 people were killed – though, as one incredulous firefighter snapped, when advised of this, ‘On which street?’ To this day, many believe the death toll was far higher. Some 617 were seriously injured and, of 12,000 dwellings, only seven were entirely undamaged. A total of 4,000 homes were utterly destroyed; 4,500 were uninhabitable for months.
But that was academic because, by the evening of Friday, March 14, as the Luftwaffe returned with a second helping, only 2,000 folk remained. More than 40,000 had fled, or been evacuated, most with no more than the clothes they stood in. Many would never return and, all those sundered bonds of community and neighbourhood apart, Clydebank was never properly rebuilt.
The bombers destroyed schools, shops, churches – Presbyterian and Catholic and Episcopalian. Clydebank had boasted a large Highland community, with Free
Church and Free Presbyterian ministers holding regular Gaelic services: the little halls were reduced to rubble, and Gaelic was never preached again, for most of the Gaels fled, never to return.
And to this day – it is especially evident from a plane approaching Glasgow Airport – Clydebank, geographically and architecturally, is a town that does not make sense. Truncated Victorian tenements, scattered and ugly constructions from the 1960s and 70s, conspicuous gap-sites and nothing one could dignify as a thriving high street.
When Patrick Rocks sped home from his night shift in terror – it is said he actually swam across the Forth and Clyde Canal – to his tenement block at 78 Jellico Street, it was no longer there. Under a smouldering crater of Locharbriggs stone lay the remains of 31 people, slain by a single bomb. And they included his wife, his mother-in-law, six of his sons, two of his daughters, and five of his grandchildren. Later, summoned to identify the bodies, he took one look at what the blast had done, and fainted. There are things the sadly dwindling band of Clydebank Blitz survivors still cannot forget. The terrifying sounds of the attack; the rumble of still more incoming Junkers and Heinkels. The smell – the taste – of dust and soot. The bodies, everywhere, disembowelled, limbless, mangled to obscenity. Folk screaming out of high windows in blazing buildings, moments before they disintegrated…
The difficulty, later, of getting away, of getting out, through streets choked with rubble, with burnedout tramcars. The lost, homeless, terrified dogs roaming everywhere; the men grimly recovering bodies – with baskets, for bits of bodies.
The inevitable looters, from Glasgow. And the squalid funeral, days later, at the vast mass-grave in Dalnottar cemetery, without even the dignity of cardboard coffins – corpses merely wrapped in sheets, knotted with string. Or the cellar beneath a Dalmuir pub, where dozens had taken fearful shelter – and then the pub took a direct hit.
The authorities did not even bother to recover those bodies, minced beyond any identification; they just poured in quicklime. For years afterwards, people were still happening on overlooked human remains. Small boys, as late as the 1950s, found skeletons in the ruins of the Ben Bow Hotel. About 1962, an 11-year-old lad at play found one skeletal finger. It troubled him and, after much thought, he put it in a matchbox and gave it reverent burial.
When approached for television interview today, survivors – the mass of them, in 1941, just small children – still marvel how frequently they are asked to share photographs of the kin they lost in the Blitz; how such fatuous researchers still do not get it. There
are no photographs of granny, or Dad, or Jim, or Agnes. Do people not understand that they lost everything in the bombing?
Clydebank, in hindsight, had always been an obvious target for the Germans. It was a vital industrial town – surely the only community in Britain actually named after a limited company, and raised by the Clyde Bank Ship
Yard only in the 1870s. By 1941 it was home to a rake of shipyards and factories, many central to the war effort, and – critically – of densely packed population, the mass of folk living in tenement-canyons.
Many Clydebank folk would love to know why, in March 1941, the town was so poorly defended: why anti-aircraft guns nearby fast ran out of ammunition, why RAF fighters circling overhead were repeatedly denied permission to engage with the enemy. And why, in contrast to many other bombed British towns, there was so little post-war reconstruction. One local enjoyed a holiday in Germany about 1964 and couldn’t get over it – the streets immaculate, folk obviously well-off, shops full of fine things, jewellery, leather goods – “and there we were back home in Clydebank, still sitting in the rubble”.
But most bewildering is the great forgetting. As Home Front historian John Calder bleakly recorded in 1969, Clydebank “had the honour of suffering the most nearly universal damage of any British town”. Yet few books about the Blitz even mention the town and its ordeal.
A big part of that, of course, is the tendency of so many who do not know the town to conflate Clydebank with the generic “Clydeside”, red or otherwise. But the Blitz iconography engraved in the national consciousness, too, is of the likes of London and Coventry – not least because, at the direction of the laughably named Minister of Information, their blasted streets and indefatigable citizenry were exploited for propaganda purposes.
But its panjandrums censored any mention of Clydebank – and certainly the scale of destruction and loss of life – from the newspapers. There were but vague reports of some bombs on a town in the west of Scotland. A photograph of that mass-grave was cropped, at censors’ orders, so its sheer size was not apparent. A detailed account of the attack by one survivor was intercepted by the authorities: his letter would not surface till 1971. Neither Prime Minister Winston Churchill nor any national figure came to console Clydebank: the future Queen Mother never had to look it in the face. The decision in high places was deliberately to conceal the relative success of the raid – relative, because not one yard or factory was significantly damaged – from the Germans, lest they try again; and to keep Clydebank going as a workshop of the war. Striking workers were lured back; temporary homes knocked up; extra sugar rations. Some young men even ambled in for their shift from tents in the Kilpatrick Hills.
But there were deeper, darker reasons. Whitehall and the Scottish Office had convinced themselves Clydebank was a hotbed of Communist sedition. And there was a real fear of igniting Scottish nationalism – and by no means unfounded: early in 1945, the SNP would win its first parliamentary seat. So the government and the nation turned their back on Clydebank and its people – and, eight decades on, few have any idea what befell the risingest burgh in Scotland.
Professor June Andrews is a renowned dementia expert. In 1992, she was appointed head of the Royal College of Nursing in Scotland before returning to practice as a Director of Nursing in the NHS. She has also been a senior civil servant in the Scottish Government, leading the Centre for Change and Innovation to foster improvement in delivery of health care. She is a Fellow of the Royal College of Nursing, the world’s largest nursing union and professional body and, as professor emeritus, advises the Dementia Services Development Trust.
The first few months of the pandemic showed us what we already knew: we are facing a crisis in care for our growing elderly population.
With preparation for the anticipated influx of Covid patients to hospitals came a tipping out of elderly patients who no longer required medical treatment into care homes; some of those elderly patients were positive and the virus ran amok, claiming many lives.
A degree of buck-passing followed, with much condemnation of the concept of private care homes run for profit. But, June Andrews says, for- profit care homes only exist because the NHS removed itself from the care of older people by shutting geriatric hospitals, and then councils partially removed themselves from care of older people by ceding much of the responsibility to the private sector. Now, the public sector cannot afford to bring all care homes back under its control.
Ever since the Second World War, we have been encouraged to believe the NHS will look after us from cradle to grave. The problem, Andrews says, is that the growing number of elderly people with dementia or other chronic illnesses makes this ideal economically unsustainable.
“Policies that move in the direction of more free care are very popular and welcomed by lots of people when they are announced, but the assumption is it’s going to come from somewhere that is not going to hit any of us financially, and that’s just not possible,” she says.
Her radical suggestion is the introduction of filial responsibility legislation, where families are required by law to take responsibility for their own, with health and social services only stepping in when that proves impossible.
Under the current system, those individuals who have the resources to pay for their own care are expected to do so, even if that means selling their home. But,
at the moment, if the parent can’t pay, the children don’t have to. As a result, Andrews says, some families take control of their parents’ assets so they can receive free care (and the assets remain within the family).
“Look- back” by local authorities tracks when parents have transferred assets such as property or capital to avoid paying for care. There is no limit to how far back they can look, and in recent years they have done this even more actively and further back. Yet Andrews claims it is still possible to ring-fence your home and your assets.
“You even get lawyers who are selling people the idea of putting their parents’ property into a trust because then it doesn’t count as something that belongs to the parent. It belongs to the family trust if you do it early enough,” she says. “What the local authority is looking for is evidence that you did this, deliberately, to avoid paying for care.”
Filial responsibility, however, works on the assumption that being a parent has “cost” the older person an amount in their lives, and the children must pay some of that back when it is needed.
In the US, children can be jailed for failing to provide food, clothing, shelter and for the medical needs of their parents and, if your mum or dad is in a nursing home or if an agency is providing care, those organisations can bring legal action against you to recover the money. In Germany, too, the line of responsibility goes up the family tree as well as down, with grandchildren, children and parents all
It’s hard to have difficult discussions
required to provide support to one another. India is one of four countries – along with China, Bangladesh and Singapore – which have enshrined filial responsibility in law. In Singapore, people over 60 can file claims against children for not caring for them; in Bangladesh you may be fined or jailed for failing to pay up.
“The law usually states how much support the children need to provide and it is activated when the parent starts to need to be supported at public expense,” she says. “In those countries children can only avoid it if there’s real evidence their parents abandoned them – there are family courts and tribunals to decide on this.”
Andrews believes filial responsibility legislation would have many advantages, encouraging relatives who currently shy away from discussing such matters to confront the future. It would provide a mechanism to financially compensate those members of a family who even now shoulder most of the caring responsibilities.
“At the moment it’s hard to get families to have difficult discussions, especially about what should happen if frailty and dementia sets in,” Andrews says. “Nor are family members open about what they earn or what savings they have. In many discussions I have with families the parents joke and say: ‘Just shoot me if I get beyond it,’ but in reality, all of us need to have had mature discussions about how we are going to care for parents who become frail or have dementia – are we going to do it ourselves or pay someone else to do it? Or do we assume the state will be there for us?”
It is easy to see how such discussions can quickly become explosive. What happens, for example, if one sibling earns more than the others and resents having to shoulder the bulk of the financial responsibility?
But Andrews, who does consultancy work with families, says these resentments already exist. “I always expect families to want my expertise in dementia, but instead I end up mediating their family tensions.
“An example would be someone telling me, ‘ My sister has gone to live abroad but she helicopters in and doesn’t realise my dad has dementia. She is resisting us getting him into a nice care home’ or, ‘My brother lives up the road and never comes and cleans for mum and when I say, ‘ We should get a cleaner,’ he says, ‘Don’t waste her money’, but I know he just wants the inheritance’.”
With filial responsibility, these issues would have to be fairly resolved, through a tribunal or family mediation, which could become a thriving industry.
Andrews says some families might take the decision that the lowest-earning sibling should give up work to care for a parent. Is there a danger the burden might fall disproportionately on women?
“It already does,” says Andrews, “but at least there would be a statutory framework and legislation could protect those family care workers by allowing them to be paid from the parents’ capital.”
Of course, there would be families where the parents have been abusive or absent, again a possible role for family courts or special tribunals. And there will be families which lack the income or capacity to make any contribution.
But, Andrews says, with filial responsibility legislation there would be even more support for those people with few resources because “you wouldn’t have affluent people’s parents living in care homes at public expense because the family had been devious enough to relieve their parents of all their goods before they reached the stage of needing care, for example for dementia”.
Legally- binding filial responsibility would open up other conversations, for example about family housing.
“Adult children and parents could be housed in adjacent blocks of flats to ease caring or ancillary living pods in the garden of the house like they have in the US,” Andrews says.
She suggests insurance that parents or children could take out to cover any future care arrangements, saying: “If you gave me 10 years warning that I was going to be financially responsible for my parents I might take out an insurance policy or parents might do so to offset the financial burden on their children.”
The concept of filial responsibility legislation is controversial. As Andrews points out, the policy would have to be announced at least a decade in advance to give families time to prepare and the notion of family duty would have to be culturally embedded through the education system.
But she believes it would be no less popular than tax hikes to fund free care to our increasing elderly population and, in any case, the current system is unsustainable.
“Governments say, ‘Communities have to do more, the third sector has to do more’, but that’s too vague,” she says.
“Although it’s popular for people to imagine they won’t be held responsible for their ageing relatives, that’s just not feasible because of the demographics. The health and social care systems we have were designed for a population that wasn’t like the one we have now.
“With filial responsibility legislation, the NHS, local authorities, communities and the third sector would still be there and take up the slack after those with the family responsibility had done all they could. But this new system would release public resources for those who have inadequate or no family support. It would benefit those with the greatest need.”