Ruaraidh Erskine
Ruaraidh Erskine of Marr (15 January 1869 – 5 January 1960) (
Early life
Ruaraidh Erskine was born The Honourable Stuart Richard Joseph Erskine at 1 Portland Place, Brighton, East Sussex, England on 15 January 1869. He was the third of the four children born to William Macnaghten Erskine, 5th Baron Erskine (1841–1913), an army officer, and his wife, Caroline Alice Martha Grimble. The family were descendants of the Erskine Earls of Buchan.[1]
Erskine claimed that he learned to speak
Journalism and the Neo-Jacobite Revival
In 1890, Erskine and
In 1891, he stood as a candidate for the Buteshire constituency as a "Scottish Tory Home Ruler",[5] but by October of that year, he had withdrawn.[6]
In 1901, Erskine began to edit a new bilingual newspaper, Am Bàrd, which ran until July of the following year. In 1904, he launched Guth na Blaidhna, a bilingual periodical which promoted Scottish Gaelic
In 1914, Erskine revived The Scottish Review, a title which had been edited by the
Scottish nationalism
In 1892, aged 23, he became vice-president of the Scottish Home Rule Association, but he grew to oppose the notion of home rule for Scotland within the United Kingdom and went on to support Scottish independence.
In 1904 he formed the Guth na Bliadhna (Voice of the Year) publication and used it to advocate independence and a coming together of the Gaels of both Scotland and Ireland to aid each other in a campaign to establish their respective languages as the official language of their country. He also used the magazine to call for the formation of a political party to campaign for independence. His activities with the publication brought him into contact with William Gillies, with whom he formed the Scots National League (SNL) in 1920, thus going some way towards the realisation of the formation of a Scottish nationalist political party.
Despite his aristocratic background, Erskine had links with the
He championed the
Erskine attempted to get independent representation for Scotland at the Paris Peace Conference at the end of the First World War. In this he was ultimately unsuccessful, but it did attract the support of figures such as James Maxton, a prominent figure in the Independent Labour Party at the time.
Erskine and Gillies led the SNL into joining with other groups to form the National Party of Scotland (NPS) in 1928. The NPS was quite different in outlook to the SNL had been and many SNL members left the NPS due to this factor, including Erskine. After this, Erskine was to play little role in politics.
Erskine was long accused of being
Personal life
In May 1891, the engagement of Erskine and Muriel Lilias Colquhoun Graham was announced;[7] they were married on 18 July 1891.[8]
Further reading
- Cairns, Gerard (2021), No Language! No Nation! The Life and Times of the Honourable Ruaraidh Erskine of Marr, Rymour Books, Perth, ISBN 978-1-9196286-0-8
- Alex, Murray (2023), Decadent Conservatism: Aesthetics, Politics and the Past, Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-285820-7
See also
- Hugh MacDiarmid
- Compton MacKenzie
References
- ^ a b c [1] Derick S. Thomson, ‘Erskine, Stuart Richard (1869–1960)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Oct 2009; online edn, Sept 2010
- ^ ISBN 9781919628608
- ^ "The Whirlwind". New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
- ISBN 9781317629528.
- ^ "The Note Book". Sheffield Evening Telegraph. 15 January 1891. p. 2 – via British Newspaper Archive.
- ^ "News". Glasgow Herald. 29 October 1891. p. 6 – via British Newspaper Archive.
- ^ "News". Morning Post. 20 May 1891. p. 5 – via British Newspaper Archive.
- ^ "Marriages". Northampton Mercury. 31 July 1891. p. 8 – via British Newspaper Archive.
External links
- "Erskine, Stuart Richard [known as Ruaraidh Erskine of Mar]," Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
- "Connections across the North Channel: Ruaraidh Erskine and Irish Influence in Scottish Discontent, 1906-1920" at The Irish Story
- "Snake Women and Hideous Sensations: The Strange Case of Gaelic Detective Short Stories by Ruaraidh Erskine of Mar," Scottish Literary Review
- "A Fitting Offering to the Gaelic Thalia or Melpomene”: Ruaraidh Erskine of Mar and Drama in Scottish Gaelic," Litteraria Pragensia
- "Neo-Jacobites, Decadents and Fin de Siècle Nationalism," The History of Scottish Cosmopolitanism at the Fin de Siècle (video)
- Gerard Cairns, No Language! No Nation! The Life and Times of the Honourable Ruaraidh Erskine of Marr (Perth: Rymour Books, 2021)
- "Masculinity in Ruaraidh Erskine's Short Stories in the Context of Fin-de-siècle Detective Fiction," Association for Scottish Literature (video)