The cultural apologists are wading into a row that didn’t exist until they invented it

THE signs on the placards carried by the protesters in Linlithgow town centre said ‘Hands Off Our History’. It seemed like the right message to me.

Local history is a big deal in Scottish communities. It matters quite a bit in new towns such as Cumbernauld and Glenrothes, and it matters enormously in very old ones like Linlithgow, birthplace of Mary, Queen of Scots and a royal burgh since 1388.

It matters in every land I have visited. Cultures vary enormously but human beings’ pride in them and willingness to enlighten visitors on their idiosyncrasies is similar wherever you go.

It’s how tourism works. If you’re passing that way, visit the souk in Marrakech and consider that ramshackle marketplaces such as this come with 5,000 years of history.

Souks are not like Tesco. You may have to haggle; you might struggle to see some of the wares on display sitting comfortably with British shoppers’ sensibilities. But that is easy to get our heads around. Morocco isn’t Britain.

The Black Bitch pub in Linlithgow is the oldest in the town and the story of its name is an enriching historical vignette for anyone taking the trouble to learn it.

Legend

The black bitch was a loyal greyhound which, according to 13th century legend, swam daily to an island on Linlithgow Loch to bring food for her master who had been sentenced to starve to death there. Ultimately she was caught and chained up alongside him, which is why a dog tied to a tree features in the town’s coat of arms.

The 17th century pub celebrates this legend and so do many locals who proudly selfidentify as ‘black bitches’.

It was in defence of this historical name that hundreds gathered with their placards at Linlithgow Cross last month after learning Greene King, the company that owned the pub, was suddenly anxious to change it for familiar 21st century reasons.

They feared the name was offensive because ‘black’ is a word which can refer to skin colour as well as dog hair – and ‘bitch’ is a pejorative term when used in reference to women.

The fact that neither word was being deployed in these offensive senses did not matter; neither did history.

What mattered was the modern woke lens though which Scotland’s cultural past must now be viewed and the fundamental imperative of heading off at the pass any potential offence.

Greene King decreed this week The Black Bitch would be rebranded as The Willow Tree. And, though it may sound innocuous, those Linlithgow locals who feel more insulted by the new name than anyone did about the old have my sympathies.

Who are the pub chain top brass assuming cultural offence in West Lothian where none was meant or taken?

What expertise do they bring to the table on matters of sociology and community relations in a Scottish town which appears to have muddled along fine for the last 400 years with a curiously monikered pub in its centre?

Where are the sackloads of mail from appalled locals, scandalised visitors for whom a legend is no excuse for a name which is off-colour when stripped of context?

Who are they? Cultural apologists wading in to a row which did not exist until they made it up.

Their expertise is similarly imaginary. It is of the same order as TV and radio stations detecting ‘offensive’ content in practically every sit-com and song written before the great cultural enlightenment of the second decade of the 21st century.

So misunderstood by cultural fainthearts is the Elvis Costello song Oliver’s Army he now refuses to perform it.

Intentions

‘People hear that word go off like a bell and accuse me of something I didn’t intend,’ he says. I was 11 when the song came out and I knew his intentions, but it is those who neither know nor care to understand them who hold sway four decades later.

The archives are awash with TV shows station bosses are too afraid to re-run. Some they do air carry health warnings spilling with contrition.

‘Sorry, this programme was made in the bad old days. We’re much better people now.’ Are we? It seems to me we have become cultural vandals, smashing up history, binning the stuff we grew up with and all that went before.

Must it really be stated that writing from an earlier period might not be written in the same way today? Is it really too big a burden on us to recognise that an ancient pub name sounds a bit funny because it is ancient?

The Black Bitch is a quirky but important curio in the culture of one of our oldest settlements. It’s there to be celebrated, not fretted about, apologised for and airbrushed in a fanatical rush to demonstrate woke credentials.

We travel the world and marvel at the indigenous customs, lap up the tales behind them and rejoice in the otherness of lives lived at a cultural remove from our own. Then we return home and dismantle the very thing in our land we were admiring in theirs.

I see no racism in Linlithgow folk fighting to preserve their town’s history. I see disappointment at the erasure of cultural identity on the altar of woke – and concern this destructive exercise in historical revisionism is yet far from over. I fear it is well-founded.