(Not) Forgotten Sons of Angus: Captain William Kidd

It was the fate of Captain William Kidd (1645-1701) to be mis-remembered after his dishonourable death and slandered in the centuries since as a common pirate. The legend of his life degenerated to the extent that he was eventually lampooned in the extremely non-classic film ‘Abbott and Costello meet Captain Kidd.’ Another grievous slur against him was that he was actually a native of Greenock – only joking! For those who wish to examine the evidence about his possible west coast origins, please consult the excellent blog  Tales of the Oak.

  
   For others interested in his true, Angus origins, read on. Before looking at his life, we can consider how common the family name is in God’s Own County. In the Register of Testaments in the Commissariat of Brechin records for the 17th and 18th centuries there are some 45 people with the surname Kyd, Kydd or Kidd, most of them around the southern Angus coast and Dundee. Notable members of the family with some sort of maritime connection include John Kyd, Dundee shipmaster (died 1796), the mariner Richard Kyd of Dundee (who died in 1783), and Robert Kyd, ship-master in Montrose (died in 1794). Among the other notable Angus natives who bore the surname was Stewart Kyd, a libertarian, lawyer and native of Arbroath who died in 1811.


   In 1841 the surname Kidd (or variants) was the 70th most common surname in Angus. There were shopkeepers in Brechin with the family name (see advert below) and those of a certain vintage who are familiar with the Lochee area of Dundee will well know that Kiddie’s is the popular appellation of the public house officially called the Albert Bar (occasionally frequented by this author in the distant past.). A well known Dundee publisher which flourished in the 19th and 20th centuries was William Kidd. A scout around the graveyards of Angus leads to evidence of the maritime connection; for instance at Broughty Ferry we find the memorial of John Kid, ship-master who died on 15th April 1806, aged 61. The inscription reads:

This life he steer’d by land and sea

With honesty and skill,

And, calmly, suffr’d blast and storm,

Unconscious of ill.

This voyage now unfinish’d, he’s unrigg’d

And laid in dry-dock Urn;

Preparing for the grand fleet trip,

And Commodore’s return

Does this man have a Dundee face?

   Other branches of the family flourished at Craigie, where Patrick Kyd, married Margaret, daughter of Andrew Wedderburn of Blackness in the 17th century. Patrick’s brother also married a Wedderburn (in fact sister of his brother’s wife). This branch were in possession of Craigie from around 1534 until the middle of the 18th century. Also in 1534 there is a record of Williame Kidd, ‘reidare at Dundie’. Another, later notable man with the same surname is Colonel Robert Kyd (1746-1793), a British army officer from Angus who served in India. Another notable Angus native was Stewart Kyd, d. 1811, a legal writer and politician who was born in Arbroath. Several mercantile Brechiners also had the name and there were several merchants called Kidd in Arbroath in the early 20th century also.  Lastly, by by no means least, mention must be made of world wrestling superhero (and latterly publican) George Kidd of Dundee (1925-1998). We might also mention the remote cave in Glen Mark named 'Johnny Kidd's Hole.'

   There is also a preponderance of the surname Kidd in Fife, just across the River Tay. It has been suggested that the putative link with Greenock was actually derived from an error and the actual place he was linked to was the village named Carnock, near Dundee. What other links are there? Kidd certainly named his cabin boy Dundee, and in a case where he gave evidence in court (Jackson and Jacobs v. Noell in the High Court of the Admiralty), William Kidd stated that he was indeed born in Dundee.

   Proponents of Kidd’s Dundonian origins state that his father was a seaman named John Kidd and his mother Bessie Butchart. Kidd went to the colonies and became a leading merchant in New York. He cannily married a well off widow named Sarah Bradley Cox Oort and quickly made a fortune, including in the mercantile trade. Kidd’s first vessel was the Antigua. During the English-French war at the end of the 17th century Kidd acted as a privateer for the authorities. Later duties included ridding the Indian Ocean of bona fide pirates, but in this manner of line the line between poacher and gamekeeper was perilously thin.


  In 1698 it is said that Kidd’s crew forced him into undisguised piracy. They captured a ship named the Quedah Merchant near India. Kidd and his crew captured the ship, which had a cargo estimated at £70000. The Quedah Merchant was renamed the Adventure Prize, and was retained by Kidd. On the journey back to America, Kidd found that he was now a declared pirate and had to tread carefully. Despite precautions, Kidd was arrested, imprisoned and temporarily lost his wits. He was deported to England and questioned by parliament. Despite his previous semi-official work on behalf of the authorities of that country he was convicted, partially through perfidy, and he was hanged on 23 May 1701. His body was displayed in chains on a gibbet for twenty years as a warning to others who chose to follow the occupation of piracy. Since his time there have been various legends about the supposedly buried or sunken treasure which was hidden by captain Kidd before his arrest. Searchers have looked as far apart as Madagascar and North America for his loot, On Grand Manan in the Bay of Fundy, as early as 1875, reference was made to searches on of the island for treasure allegedly buried by Kidd during his time as a privateer. For nearly 200 years, this remote area of the island has been named "Money Cove". In 1983, Cork Graham and Richard Knight went looking for Captain Kidd's buried treasure off the Vietnamese island of Phú Quốc. Knight and Graham were caught, convicted of illegally landing on Vietnamese territory, and assessed each a $10,000 fine. They were imprisoned for 11 months until they paid the fine. But, to date, not one gold piece of Kidd’s supposed hoard has been located.

Craigo Woods - Haunted or Not?

Do fiction and folklore really mix?  Sometimes, while not even researching, you may come across odd snippets of information that look relevant to particular areas of interest.  I recently stumbled across something while reading a short-story called ‘The Screaming Skulls’ by American author F Marion Crawford (1854-1909).  It is contained in his collection Wandering Ghosts (1903) and is of interest for a few reasons.  The story is a lengthy, fictionalised reboot of the legend of the actual screaming skull which inhabited Bettiscombe House in Dorset.

  As a story, ‘The Screaming Skulls’ is so-so.  But it interested me because it was set in Cornwall, where I now live, and contained a mention about my native county of Angus.  Two of the servants are sisters who work in the house which the skull haunts are stereotyped dour Scots from Angus.  This is how Crawford describes their attitude to the supernatural:

The two hard-faced, sandy-haired sisters almost smiled, and they answered with great contempt that they had no great opinion of any Southern bogey whatever, having been in the service of two English haunted houses, where they had never seen so much as the Boy in Gray, whom they reckoned no particular rarity in Forfarshire.

   Now, this set me looking whether there was any ‘real life’ legends or stories of Gray (or even Grey) Boy ghosts in Angus.  Nothing of the sort has come to my attention as yet, sadly.  I initially thought that Crawford may have slipped a bit of genuine tradition into his story.  After all, with a name like that, he surely has Scottish ancestry?  But no such luck; it seems that Crawford had the audacity to make it up.  I had been hoodwinked by my own expectations.

   In a different category is the poem ‘John O’ Arnha’, by George Beattie of Montrose (1786-1823), which is a kind of semi-comic/supernatural Tam o’Shanter style ballad based on the boastful, partly true adventuring of an actual person, John Finlay.  More about this poet and particular work in the future.  Suffice it to say that it is well worth discovering.

   Moving on from that, we can look at an even more subtle echo of the shadowlands, this time beautifully encapsulated in the poem ‘Craigo Woods’ by Violet Jacob (1863-1946).  Here is yet another author worth rediscovering.  She was a member of the landed family who lived at the beautiful House of Dun, near Montrose, and was born as Violet Augusta Mary Frederica Kennedy-Erskine, daughter of the 18^th laird of Dun.

  

   Craigo Woods, wi' the splash o' the cauld rain beatin'
    I' the back end o' the year,
When the clouds hang laigh wi' the weicht o' their load o' greetin'
    And the autumn wind's asteer;
Ye may stand like gaists, ye may fa' i' the blast that's cleft ye
    To rot i' the chilly dew,
But when will I mind on aucht since the day I left ye
    Like I mind on you - on you?
 Craigo Woods, i' the licht o' September sleepin'
    And the saft mist o' the morn,
When the hairst climbs to yer feet, an' the sound o' reapin'
    Comes up frae the stookit corn,
And the braw reid puddock-stules are like jewels blinkin'
    And the bramble happs ye baith,
O what do I see, i' the lang nicht, lyin' an' thinkin'
    As I see yer wraith - yer wraith?
 There's a road to a far-aff land, an' the land is yonder
    Whaur a' men's hopes are set;
We dinna ken foo lang we maun hae to wander,
    But we'll a' win to it yet;
An' gin there's woods o' fir an' the licht atween them,
    I winna speir its name,
But I'll lay me doon by the puddock-stules when I've seen them,
    An' I'll cry "I'm hame - I'm hame!"

   The narrator of the poem, an old man of humble origins, is obviously given voice by the middle-aged, upper class Scottish female author.  Contained in the author’s Songs of Angus (1915), the poem is certainly a stunningly evocative capturing of a mood, a symbolic woodland, a shaded place between this world and possibly another.  Is the ghost real or just in the narrated recollection?  Violet Jacob knew the cadence of this land well and came back to Angus after being widowed and spending many years away.  Was Craigo Woods really haunted or did Violet Jacob merely use it as the setting for her haunted man and his imagining of a loved one’s wraith?

   There is another poem about the same place by a minor author of the 19^th century, W. F. M. McHardy, ‘The Bonnie Woods o’Craigie’, which shows exactly the same spot in a more prosaic light, with none of the yearning magic:

By the bonnie woods o’ Craigo I love to wander free,
An’ down the grassy banks o’ Esk meand’ring to the sea,
To hail the cooling breezes beneath the shady trees,
An’ listen to the humming of the homeward laden bees.

To hear the linties sweetly sing all in the greenwood shade,
While the sparkling pearly dewdrops adorn ilk leaf and blade;
The glossy blackbird whistles sweet his lovely evenin’ sang,
The cushie’s coo  is heard aloud the bushy firs amang;

While the other feather’d warblers lend forth their merry strain,
An’ rich-clad fields are waving with heavy laden grain;
All nature drest in full array, sae gorgeous an’ sublime –
A solace to the weary heart an’ to the troubled mind.

A fav’rite haunt to lovers true, their faithful vows to tell;
The merry laugh of sportive youth resounds thro’ woods an’ dell;
Fond parents an’ their children roam adown Saint Martin’s Den,
To gambol in their childish sports, the e’enin there to spen’.

Thou Bonnie woods o’ Craigo, to me thou’lt aye be dear;
The happy days I’ve spent near thee are in my mem’ry clear;
As long’s my strength will bear me up, I’ll hie me to thy glade,
An’ rest my stiff an’ aching limbs thy cooling shade.

    As a footnote, I remember many years ago when I was researching some local folklore and got a letter from an old Scots gent in England who remembered - or thought that he remembered - some lore about some woodland that people feared to walk through in in north-east Angus.  Did he mean Craigo Woods?  And, if so, did the actual tradition seep or migrate into oral folklore following the publication of Jacob's poem? That would be a powerful measure of her writing indeed.

The Tay Bridge Disaster in Legend and Verse

One of the worst spirits to haunt Dundee, in a certain sense, is that dubious poet, William Topaz McGonnagall (1825-1902).  Never mind that he was born in Edinburgh of Irish parents, he gravitated eventually to Dundee and here his name was made.  Here is his immortal take on the serious subject of this post, the Tay Bridge Disaster:

                       

                             Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv'ry Tay!

                             Alas! I am very sorry to say!

                       That ninety lives have been taken away 

On the last Sabbath day of 1879, 

Which will be remember’d for a very long time. 

’Twas about seven o’clock at night, 

And the wind it blew with all its might, 

And the rain came pouring down, 

And the dark clouds seem’d to frown, 

And the Demon of the air seem’d to say— 

“I’ll blow down the Bridge of Tay.” 

When the train left Edinburgh 

The passengers’ hearts were light and felt no sorrow, 

But Boreas blew a terrific gale, 

Which made their hearts for to quail, 

And many of the passengers with fear did say— 

“I hope God will send us safe across the Bridge of Tay.” 

But when the train came near to Wormit Bay, 

Boreas he did loud and angry bray, 

And shook the central girders of the Bridge of Tay 

On the last Sabbath day of 1879, 

Which will be remember’d for a very long time. 

So the train sped on with all its might, 

And Bonnie Dundee soon hove in sight, 

And the passengers’ hearts felt light, 

Thinking they would enjoy themselves on the New Year, 

With their friends at home they lov’d most dear, 

And wish them all a happy New Year. 

So the train mov’d slowly along the Bridge of Tay, 

Until it was about midway, 

Then the central girders with a crash gave way, 

And down went the train and passengers into the Tay! 

The Storm Fiend did loudly bray, 

Because ninety lives had been taken away, 

On the last Sabbath day of 1879, 

Which will be remember’d for a very long time. 

As soon as the catastrophe came to be known 

The alarm from mouth to mouth was blown, 

And the cry rang out all o’er the town, 

Good Heavens! the Tay Bridge is blown down, 

And a passenger train from Edinburgh, 

Which fill’d all the people’ hearts with sorrow, 

And made them for to turn pale, 

Because none of the passengers were sav’d to tell the tale 

How the disaster happen’d on the last Sabbath day of 1879, 

Which will be remember’d for a very long time. 

It must have been an awful sight, 

To witness in the dusky moonlight, 

While the Storm Fiend did laugh, and angry did bray, 

Along the Railway Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay, 

Oh! ill-fated Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay, 

I must now conclude my lay 

By telling the world fearlessly without the least dismay, 

That your central girders would not have given way, 

At least many sensible men do say, 

Had they been supported on each side with buttresses, 

At least many sensible men confesses, 

For the stronger we our houses do build, 

The less chance we have of being killed.

Bad bard:  McGonnagall.

  But enough of that tragic-comic bard and down to the facts.  At around 7:15pm on 28^th December 1879 a wild storm ravaged east and central Scotland.  The worst consequence of this weather was the collapse of the Tay Railway Bridge.  It was a supreme tragedy that a northbound train, which had come from Edinburgh, was crossing the bridge at the time. The train was seen running along the rails, and then suddenly was observed a flash of fire.  The engine and all six carriages plunged into the Firth of Tay before the train could safely reach Dundee.   The number of dead is not absolutely certain, but was reckoned to be 75 souls, both passengers and crew, calculated according to the number of tickets sold at St Fort Station in Fife., although it was initially thought that between 150 and 200 people were killed.  Dundee constabulary identified the names of 60 people who perished that night.  Nobody from the train made it out of the river alive.  The number of bodies recovered was 46.

   It was reported in the Times next day: 

The scene at the Tay-bridge station to-night is simply appalling, many thousand persons are congregated around the buildings, and strong men and women are wringing their hands in despair.  On the 2d of October 1877, while the bridge was in the course of construction, one of the girders was blown down during a gale similar to that of to-day, but only one of the workmen lost his life...

   The bridge had started its life only eight years before and its designer, Sir Thomas Bouch, died within the year. (One of the victims of the disaster, ironically, was his own son-in-law.)  Repercussions about the cause of the tragedy and accusations of design fault caused his design for a Forth Bridge to be abandoned and may have hastened his demise.  The actual construction was such an architectural wonder that people, celebrities and otherwise, would come far and wide to look at it.  Among those who came to view it was General Ulysses Grant, the 18th President of the United States of America, in 1877.  The construction had been completed in that year, the directors of the bridge marking the occasion of 28^th September by crossing the river on the engine ‘Lochee’.  After the tragedy there was an official enquiry which found that design faults had contributed to the event.  The train engine that pulled the train was dredged up from the river bed and was restored into service. Staff from the North British Railway sardonically nicknamed it The Diver and it continued in operation until 1908.  Some of the doors from recovered carriages were later displayed at the Barrack Street Museum in Dundee.

   A second, successor bridge was built, parallel and just upstream of the first, following a design by William Henry Barlow.  It opened in summer 1887 and fourteen men lost their lives during its four year construction.  The foundation pillars of the first, ill-fated bridge can still be seen of course jutting out of the Tay.  

   For those who are correctly appalled by the well meant literary excesses of McGonnagall, other works to feature the disaster include The Brück 'am Tay by the German author Theodor Fontane (1819-1898), which uses the characters of Macbeth’s witches to signify the horror of the tragedy.  Other written representations occur in A J Cronin’s novel Hatter’s Castle,  Alanna Knight's 1976 book A Drink for the Bridge, plus The Blood Doctor,  by Barbara Vine, published in 2002, and a play by Kevin Dyer named The Bridge, staged at Dundee Rep in 2010.  More scurrilously, there is an episode of the Goon Show which also features the disaster.

Theodor Fontane.

   Supernatural traces of the event are not abundant .  It was once said by some that a ghostly train appeared above the river on the anniversary of the event.  Screams of the doomed passengers were also sometimes reported, but this 'tradition' seems entirely  spurious.  More intriguingly, the author Violet Tweedale (1862-1936) reported (in her book Ghosts I Have Seen, 1919) that her father had suddenly commented during the dreadful contemporary storm in Edinburgh, ‘At this moment, seven fifteen, on Sunday the 28^th of December, 1879, something terrible has happened. I think a bridge must be down.'  Geoff Holder, in his book Haunted Dundee (2012), gives another recorded psychic episode perhaps connected with the disaster, sourced from Frank Podmore's  Apparitions and Thought Transference (1894).  According to Podmore, a lady in Perth - identified only as 'Miss Y' - was struck one Sunday evening with a terrible premonition.  She had an overwhelming, eerie feeling that was accompanied by intense feelings of death and disaster.  She screamed and ran to her mother, but could not tell her what she thought it meant.  Next morning the family learnt of the Tay Bridge Disaster.

   

Accent on Change

I have said it before (posts on 6^th June, 2015, and 29^th June, 2015; and I will probably say it again):

By fu, fat, far and fan
Ye can ken a Forfar man.

   This relates to the distinctive replacement of wh by f in the broad dialect of North-East  Scots.  How much this is still true – is the accent ‘pure’ or even surviving on its last linguistic legs? – is open to question.  But for a long period a fairly distinct boundary within Scots pronunciation seemed to run right through Angus.  D D Murison stated that the distinct border of North-East Scots ran in ‘a line drawn from beyond Nairn to Monifieth’.   This may have been true at the time he wrote (1979), but may no longer be so.  Language is naturally fluid and that is one of its wonders.  It is a major component in the distinctiveness of areas and tells us much about history.  Take a look at the place-names on maps showing the very far north of Angus and you will notice that the names are more anglicized, less Gaelic than counterparts over the border in Aberdeenshire and Perthshire.

   According to some classifications the northern periphery of the sub-dialect of East Central North Scots includes the accents found in the city of Dundee and in western Angus.  According to a differing definition ( in the Concise Scots Dictionary), west Angus falls within the East Mid Scots group A, while east Angus is lumped together with the Mearns (Kincardineshire) as a distinctive subset of North-East Scots.  The author of one of the earliest and best Scottish dictionaries, Dr Jamieson, resided for a long time in Angus and collected a great many words that were unknown in the west and southern parts of Scotland.  There was always a tendency, among certain people of course, for a kind of gentrification that could be highly self-deluding.  This persists to this day.  A recent TV documentary on BBC2 featured a well-heeled street in Edinburgh.  One of the residents, whose family had lived there for many generations, stated (without a spark of satirical intent) that he spoke a strangulated version of upper-class English because that particular part of Edinburgh always had that accent.  What a linguistic conundrum that would be, if true.

   The snobbery about ‘couthy’ language has a long, disreputable history.  The author of the New Statistical Account for Dundee noted in the 19^th century:

Amongst the better classes in Dundee, from the progress of education, and a wide and daily intercourse with other parts of the kingdom, as well as foreign lands, the style of conversation has rapidly improved.  Among the lower classes there are still many expressions used which may be called Angusisms, - while the tone of speech is neither so drawling as if Fife, nor so sharp as in Aberdeen.  

    Hooray then for the Dundee pan-loafers, but change was to come with growing urban industrialisation.

   Just to the north, the Rev David Cannan, in the New Statistical Account of the parish of Strathmartine noted:

A considerable improvement has taken place in the language of the people within the last forty years.  Many Scottish phrases are becoming obsolete; and a number of trades-people speak English with considerable propriety.

   His counterpart in Arbroath, the Rev Thomas Doig also remarked on a change:

The language generally spoken is the Forfarshire dialect of the Scottish tongue, with a peculiarity of accent distinct from that which is observable in the neighbouring towns of Dundee and Montrose.  Amongst the gentler classes, however, correct pronunciation is much more attended to than it was thirty or forty years ago.  The shibboleth, by which a native of Arbroath may be detected most readily, is his pronunciation of any word in which the letters o and i are found in conjunction, as in the words oil, spoil, anoint, point, &c.  It is impossible to exhibit on paper the sound which a native of Arbroath gives to these words; but a stranger who has once heard it, will never forget it.

   Further north, the Rev. Robert Smith and Joseph Paterson of Montrose pointed out the substitution of f for wh, and again pointed out the tendency of the upper strata of society to speaking ‘proper’ English.  Gaelic, as we hinted earlier, faded away in Angus at a fairly early period.  There were no native speakers in the 19^th century, except a few families in Glenisla who had migrated from Kirkmichael in Perthshire. But the Rev James Watt, in the New Statistical Account  for Glenisla, quaintly commented, ‘...the language generally spoken is the dialect peculiar to Angus-shire, with a slight approach, in the upper district, to the Gaelic accent’.

    Dundee's accent is reckoned by some to have rapidly evolved (distorted?) in response to the peculiar sonic demands forced upon workers by hellishly loud jute mill machinery and there is some logic to this supposition.  Dundee, like Liverpool in its way, stands apart linguistically from its mother county, but the disparagement of its distinctive tongue could possibly be likened to the attitude towards the Brummy tongue in England, scorned by pure-speaking English cognoscenti.

   No doubt our tongues will turn again.  As long as we don't all start speaking in uniform, soulless Estuary English.

Dundee Jute Mill Workers.

Toom Tabard, an Empty King at Stracathro

The hollowed out ghost of a king haunts the quiet kirkyard of Stracathro, the scene of his brutally symbolic humiliation.  If this sounds like one of the Ringwraiths of Lord of the Rings, the mortal kings who were seduced and consigned to an eternal un-dead state because they were seduced by their own attraction to dark power.  Pure fiction, or is it?  The kirk of Stracathro is a relatively modern building, but the place is of interest to archaeologists and others for its ancient history.  Not the 12^th century battle which happened near here, nor indeed the 13^th century event which we will discuss soon.  In 2012 archaeologists from the Roman Gask Project were searching the area for evidence of the world’s most northerly Roman fort, itself a remarkable thing certainly.  The Roman fort here marks one end of a frontier which predates the Antonine and Hadrianic borders.  While the team were searching for Roman age remains, they found a trace of the medieval church site next to the location of the Roman fort.  It was in this church, in the year 1296, that the Scottish king John Balliol was humiliatingly stripped of every badge and emblem of kinghood. 

   As a great-great-great-great-grandson of King David I, Balliol became king in 1292.  But, for a complex number of reasons, and primarily the avaricious connivance of King Edward I of England, Balliol was not able to rule effectively or to be his own man.  The degree to which this was due to his personal failings, sheer bad luck, bad judgement or the malign will of King Edward I of England is open to question, but the facts are these:  Edward was eager to control and manipulate this Scottish king that he had engineered into power.  In 1293, for example, John was forced before an English court, found in contempt and compelled to give up his three main castles. While John was willing to be a vassal king Edward expected him to be a humble servant and put him in an impossible position. When war broke out between France and England Edward's requests became even more outrageous and King John went to make a treaty with France. This treaty of 1295 meant neither country could seek a separate peace with England.  Such was the beginning of the enduring ‘Auld Alliance’ between Scotland and France, a remarkable and profound alliance forged by a king reckoned the weakest that Scotland ever had.

 John Balliol marched his army and against Carlisle. King  Edward marched northwards and soon controlled most of the Scottish lowlands. John had few allies and indeed few options left and he surrendered to Edward in 1296, signing a document which admitted his folly in attacking Edward and handed over control of the land and people of Scotland.

Edward made John suffer by having him dress up as king one last time and then taking the crown from his head, the sword and sceptre from his hands, the ring from his finger and even the fur from his coat. John was publicly humiliated and would later be given the nickname Toom Tabard, meaning empty coat.  Balliol was then imprisoned in the Tower of London and was eventually released into the custody of the Pope. From 1301 until his death in 1314 (significantly the year of the Battle of Bannockburn) he lived on his estate in Picardy.

 The truth behind a legend, even a legend of failure, is hard to disentangle.  Like the despised English King John, known as ‘Lackland’, it’s certain that Balliol was mocked by those who sought to distance themselves from him.  To be painted as a weak vassal of the English despot is a simplistic picture in a complicated period where even eventual champions like Robert Bruce, the future king, swore fealty to Edward.  And yet John Balliol was the monarch who instituted the long-running Auld Alliance between Scotland and France in 1295.

   The Angus connection with his downfall follows King John’s invasion of England., supporting Philip the Fair of France.  Following the Scots’ ineffectual invasion of Cumberland, Edward stormed Berwick.  It was here that Henry, abbot of Arbroath, brought him a renunciation of Baliol's homage and fealty, which led the English monarch to exclaim, 'Has the foolish fellow done such folly? If he will not come to us, we will go to him.' Dunbar was captured and then Roxburgh and Edinburgh Castle was taken by Edward. Stirling.

King John wrote a letter to Edward of England from his camp at Kincardineon 2^nd July, admitting his error in the alliance with France.  On 7^th July, in the churchyard of Stracathro, there was a pitiable drama when Baliol was forced to renounce his alliance with the French king.  He was made to sign a document admitting he had allied himself with his feudal overlord's enemies and surrendered his kingdom to Edward. His surcoat was publicly stripped from his body, humiliatingly removing the arms of Scotland.  Three days later, at Brechin, dressed in a plain white gown, King John gave up his kingdom to Antony Beck, bishop of Durham, representative of the English king.  On that same day he appeared before King Edward at Montrose, who had come north from Dunbar and gave him the white rod, symbol of resignation by a vassal of his fief into the hands of his superior. There is some confusion whether the symbolic humiliation of the surcoat being ripped happened at Stracathro or Montrose.  But no matter.  Also present were the future king, Robert Bruce and his father.  In response to their ambitions and glee at the fate of their enemy, Edward of England sourly commented: ‘Have we nothing else to do but win kingdoms for you?’ In August the former king was taken south to England and had periods of imprisonment before being deported to Picardy.   

   The legend of John’s disgrace descended down the royal line itself.  When John, Earl of Carrick, succeeded to the throne he was obliged to discard his ill-omened birth name John and became King Robert III.  Future Stuarts avoided the name and this aversion may have filtered down into the modern royal family who also avoid the name, following the deaths of sons of queens Alexandra and Mary who bore that cursed name.

Forgotten Sons of Angus: Moonlight of the West

History – even relatively recent history – has at least two faces, depending on who is telling the tale.  Thomas Moonlight was a native of Boysack Muir, in St Vigeans, near Arbroath, born in 1833 and emigrated to America at the age of twelve, unaccountably bored with his situation as a junior assistant to a draper in Scotland.  For some years he was a farmer in the gloriously named  Kansas settlement of Kickapoo (probably not as exotic as it sounds), but then joined the U.S. Army in 1853 and became a famous and at times infamous soldier in the American Civil War and then the subsequent Indian Wars.

Broken hero?  Thomas Moonlight.

    Was there ever a better name for a dashing adventurer than Colonel Moonlight?  There is a legend about the origination of this distinctive name.  Some time in the middle of the 17^th century an Angus farmer and his wife sitting at their hearth were disturbed by the sound of a crying baby at their doorstep.  They opened the door and brought the chilled and abandoned bairn inside.  There was no clue as to who had left the child there.  For some reason, whether it was whimsy or some odd superstition, they did not give the foundling their own surname even though they brought it up as one of their own, but they gave it the name of ‘Moonlight’, after the condition of the night on which he was found.  A twist to this ancestral fable is attached to Thomas’s contemporary, the intrepid George Fairweather Moonlight (1832-1884), a gold-digger who sought his fortune in America and then New Zealand.  Though he was actually born in Glenbervie in the Mearns, legend says he was discovered as an abandoned child on the hard, moonlit streets of Aberdeen one night. (Prosaic people may prefer to believe that the Angus surname actually comes from the place-name Munlichty.)

   When the war between the states broke out Moonlight enlisted for the northern states as an ordinary soldier.   Quickly rising to the rank of orderly sergeant, Moonlight went  from strength to strength in the subsequent campaigns and  he eventually became colonel of the Eleventh Kansas Cavalry.  He dazzled at the battled of Dry Wood, Pea Ridge and Westport.  Then he reigned in 1864 at the end of the Civil War.  Although one army veteran recalled more that 40 years after Moonlight’s death that ‘there was no better or braver man in the Civil War’, it remains hard to judge how effective a fighter he was in the campaigns.  He wrote his own account of his military adventures, but a recent analysis has concluded that ‘He caustically evaluated the performance of others while lauding his own actions’ (‘ “The Eagle of the 11^th Kansas”:  Wartime Reminiscences of Colonel Thomas Moonlight,’ K. Lindberg,  M. Matthews, T. Moonlight, The Arkansas Historical Quarterly, Vol. 62, No. 1, Spring 2003.)

   The record of Moonlight’s reputation becomes distinctly darker when he re-enlisted to fight the native Americans in 1865.  Colonel Moonlight has been blamed for the disastrous Battle of Platte Bridge.  Moonlight was in charge of the famous Fort Laramie when he sallied out with 500 men in search of his native enemies in May 1865.  Unfortunately the force was led in entirely the wrong direction.  Things worsened the following week when, on the 26^th May,  he captured two Oglala braves and had them hanged.  His men – or at least some of them – warned him against his subsequent move:  leaving the corpses twisting on the gallows, to the fury of the local population.  The following month there was a further misjudgement.  He led a lightning raid out of Laramie which exhausted the horses and let a large section of his force to limp back to their base.  A raid by Lakota braves deprived the remainder of their steeds and the men were humiliatingly forced to walk 60 miles back to their fort.  The colonel was said to have been drunk during the episode and, even worse, had not put a guard on his remaining horses.  The antagonized and ascendant Lakota Sioux and Cheyennes continued to raid army camps and ambush stagecoaches and on 26^th July 1865 a native force of some thousands defeated the army at Platte Bridge.  There were relatively few army casualties, but the defeat was still humiliating.  On the 7^th July Moonlight was thrown out of the army. 

Fort Laramie.

   And yet, Moonlight was not only a survivor, but proved by his native talent and character in the equally ferocious area of politics and diplomacy.  He became Secretary of State of Kansas in 1868.  Four years later he became a Democratic  state senator and in 1887 he was appointed governor of the Wyoming Territory.  He became minister to Bolivia in 1893 and died in Leavenworth, Kansas on 7^th February 1899.

Advertisement in The Arbroath Directory, 1926, showing the surname still evident locally