WE Scots are often accused by our southern neighbours of whining
whenever we feel angry enough to point out unfair treatment of our
country by English officialdom.
Girner or no girner, having cooled down into a mild frenzy, I must
upbraid the British Tourist Authority (BTA) for its unpardonable
shortcomings when it comes to advertising to foreigners this
many-splintered chunk of the map of Britain, which begins above the Lake
District and comes to an end somewhere north of Edinburgh.
I do not know exactly what the credentials of the BTA are, but I
suspect that the organisation is charged with selling to foreign folk
the visitability of places in Scotland, England, and Wales. The Scottish
Tourist Board does the same for Scotland, I suspect, and area tourist
boards do likewise for individual regions.
To the point: to mark the start of the 1993 summer season the BTA
published a brochure entitled Literary Britain, a glossy affair with a
map and artworks on one side and text and pictures on the reverse side.
The map has 82 numbers on it, each of them introducing a place where
foreign visitors may retrace the footsteps of a famous literary
personage.
Scandalously, Scotland has only nine numbers, three of which are
marked on only because they have been visited by non-Scottish figures.
The Lake District, on the other hand, has eight numbers.
That would be effrontery enough for any Scot proud of his country's
literary talent. However, it gets worse. Hugh MacDiarmid's Langholm is
not marked. That will come as no surprise to aficionados of the poet,
who have become used to his being ignored even in Scotland, let alone in
the England he despised. But Burns's mausoleum in Dumfries is overlooked
by the map, as are his homes in and around Dumfries, to which Japanese,
American, and Russian tourists come in droves year in and year out. Neil
Gunn is not mentioned, nor are Sorley MacLean, Dunbar, Fergusson, and
many others.
Scott and Carlyle are there. So are Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Robert
Louis Stevenson. Skye, however, is marked, and there is a nice picture
of Portree, only because Johnson and Boswell (admittedly a Scot) once
visited the island. The map has an inset for the Shetlands and Orkney,
but for no reason. There are no numbers, not for Brown nor Linklater.
Aberdeen is chalked up as visitable because Lord Byron went to grammar
school there. Okay, Byron had Scottish roots, but what about Lewis
Grassic Gibbon? Jura is annotated because Orwell wrote 1984 there. I was
expecting to see Daniel Defoe's name somewhere north of the Border, if
only because of his spying forays for the English, but his name is not
even in the southern part.
And who do we have south of the Border? Well, Wordsworth and Dickens,
of course, Chaucer, Tennyson. Jeffrey Archer is there; so too is John
Mortimer because he wrote Rumpole of the Bailey; there is Roald Dahl,
author of that classic, Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.
Colin Dexter is there because of the popularity of Inspector Morse. I
looked in vain for John Buchan's name in the Borders, where there is a
shrine to his works, but no, there is a number against his name in the
deep south.
The BTA has considered it prudent to tell foreign visitors that Buchan
was holed up at Broadstairs near Dover in 1914. It does not matter that
the Galloway landscape inspired Buchan to write The Thirty-nine Steps.
The map gives us Gerald of Wales, but not Dunbar; John Le Carre and Dick
Francis, but not James Hogg or David Hume; Catherine Cookson but not
Allan Ramsay.
If all this is becoming a bit much to take, then let us have an
explanation. The Scottish Tourist Board politely declined to comment.
The BTA vigorously defended its publication, through its press officer,
Jane Mackay (eek, a Highlander).
She said the map was meant as a ''taster'', and explained that authors
whose works had been televised were there for foreign tourists. That
does not wash, however, when you shrug your shoulders at Gerald of
Wales, and wonder why the Dumfries home of J. M. Barrie is not
mentioned, although a garden in the town inspired him to write Peter
Pan.
A. J. Cronin's book was recently made into a remake of Dr Finlay on
television, yet we do not learn from the BTA that he was educated at St
Joseph's College in Dumfries; we do, nevertheless, learn that Henry
James lived in Rye.
There is a serious side to this. As many as 105,000 of the offending
brochures have been published in English, Spanish, Italian, German, and
Japanese.
Literary minded foreigners armed with the brochure will give Scotland
an unwarranted body swerve, because some individual at the BTA's London
HQ, inter alia, thought it inconceivable that Hugh MacDiarmid was known
in Japan and Russia (Hymn to Lenin, never heard of it?).
The BTA has sold Scotland short. I sincerely hope that it is able to
make amends in time for next year's tourist season.
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