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WELCOME
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| This is the story of what can happen to you if you write a musical whodunnit demolishing the craziest legend in Scotland, home of some of the daftest myths ever concocted, for reasons which should be evident to the politically well-informed. |
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It may seem inconceivable that the BBC was then permitted, without redress, to use its propaganda might to prove the phoney legend, derived from a fairytale, was gospel truth, and spend up to £1m. of licence payers’ money on allegedly demonstrating the factual whodunnit was false, relentlessly destroying my reputation as a good and accurate writer for decades to come.
What business it was of the BBC anyway remains to be exposed, for its Royal Charter forbids it from taking sides in controversial subjects, which it had turned my book into by its cumulative efforts to prove the “legend”, admittedly Scotland’s holiest cow, was true.
In any other country the whodunnit would have been praised as a feat of investigation, for I wrote the book in five weeks. Indeed, if the BBC had asked one of its own investigative programmes to scrutinise the “evidence” for the legend, its reporters would have read it, then politely turned away – and howled with laughter.
This website tells the story of what instead was done to me for writing the book, and to my wife and family for remaining staunchly behind me in adversity.
E'er you look - burn the book We were made homeless, my writing career was ruined, and I was hounded into a heart attack from which no one knew how I recovered. I was told the next could be terminal, leaving my then young children fatherless and I was medically advised to give up. I later discovered I had been “vanished”, although I was the last man capable of writing the true story of what had happened to traditional pibroch, which I had faithfully promised my tutor, the final doyen, so to do.
The legend claimed the MacCrimmon pipers of Skye were the finest pipers in the world for all time to come, and had been used to foist on pipers the disturbed versions of our national music, pibroch, of Queen Victoria’s first piper, Angus MacKay. The first detailed account of the MacCrimmon fantasy was first published in an 1838 book, purportedly edited by the same Angus MacKay, which was believed without question by the BBC and its cronies.
But the BBC had not done its homework for Angus had been covertly disturbed for years and also insisted he was married to Queen Victoria. He claimed, too, the royal children were his and accused Prince Albert of defrauding him of his marital rights, and issued threats against him, discovered when doctors eventually certified Angus MacKay insane at Bedlam in 1854. The great fear was that MacKay would carry out these threats, and as he was later diagnosed by Bedlam’s medical superintendent as “the most violent patient in England”, the implications were frightening.
All this was explained in my book, The MacCrimmon Legend or the Madness of Angus MacKay, which was published in July 1980.
The self-appointed piping Establishment had earlier decided to “save” the music, which they could hardly play and had already been saved by the pipers themselves, and brazenly informed them Angus MacKay’s father, John, had been taught by the fantabulous MacCrimmons and had handed on their music unchanged to Angus.
For proof, they deceitfully said Angus had claimed so in his own handwriting, providing sound holograph evidence for the claims, concealing the truth that he had only made the claims in Bedlam after he had been certified insane. The Establishment, headed by two minor lairds who were also judges, then corruptly forced pipers to play Angus’s disturbed versions . Those who refused to render his weird versions were fraudulently denied their rightful gold medals, clasps and cups at historic Highland gatherings, in the process killing off the traditional settings of the music.
The problem was that my pibroch teacher, an intellectual miner called Robert Reid, who was known as the King of Pipers, could trace his own teachers back through the finest pipers of their respective generations in an unbroken line to the same John MacKay (born c. 1767) and their music was utterly different. It was rounded, fluent and melodious, so much so that the world-famous violinist, Jascha Heifetz, sought out Robert Reid after hearing him play, and begged him, as one virtuoso to another, to teach him “this wonderful music”.
And this was the same “wonderful music” that sustained George V, affectionately known as the Old King, in his final hours, for recordings of Robert Reid were somehow played to the Old King on his deathbed, at his own request, in 1936. Or so Robert Reid was later informed in a letter from the Old King’s private secretary, Lord Stamfordham.
Now I had also promised to ensure that “this wonderful music” was conserved in its original form for future generations, but the BBC, sheltering behind its impregnable Royal Charter, granted by the Old King’s grand-daughter, Queen Elizabeth, somehow usurped its Royal prerogative to destroy me for reasons of its own, (How the BBC ruined the book ). Meanwhile the traditional music, which had so sustained her grandfather’s final hours, was replaced with the distorted versions of a lunatic who had been covertly disturbed long before he was certified, and had been taught to the personal pipers of the Old King, which he did not want to hear.
How was I to know, when I wrote the book, that the BBC’s new director-general, described as a piper, regarded the MacCrimmons as “gods” and wanted to retire as the “Laird of Dunvegan”, their spiritual if hallucinatory home? Or known that I had turned the new D-G’s dream retiral into a nightmare because I had exposed the legend as a hoax which owed more to the fairies than to hard fact? You are now invited to click on The MacCrimmon Legend.
Alistair Campsie
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The BBC's latest ploy
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Thirty years have passed since my book exposing the MacCrimmon legend as a hoax was published – and still the BBC can’t leave it or me alone. Its latest ploy was to refuse me the right of reply to a peculiar press handout unless I agreed to allow a TV camera and a BBC reporter into my home, which I considered a serious breach of my privacy, and refused.
The BBC’s behaviour was all the more strange as it had already asked me to comment on the handout, which concerned a memorial cairn for Angus MacKay (see above). It then turned out I had to agree to be filmed for a short TV clip before I could express my views in greater detail in a radio interview.
The reporter, Willie Johnston, told me that he and his son were driving up from Dumfries to report on the local football team, Queen of the South, playing at Perth, and they would pop across (another 50 miles east) to our home to film the interview, getting my 81-year-old face on screen, followed by a radio interview about Angus MacKay.
As I listened to this preposterous tale – BBC Aberdeen was only 25 or so miles north of our home, about 25 miles shorter than the trip from Perth alone – I wondered if Angus MacKay had not devised the scheme himself. I told Johnston I wasn’t interested but did agree to think about the offer and phone him back next day.
For this gigantic wheeze, Willie Johnston and his son were to make an almost 280-mile round trip through the worst Scottish snow for many a winter to ask me about the cairn, marking the spot where “the most violent mental patient in England” jumped into a river and drowned while escaping from a lunatic asylum outside Dumfries, to which he had been transferred “uncured” from Bedlam where he was first certified insane.
It so happens the BBC reporter had phoned to make his qualified offer of “no TV clip – no reply to the handout” only a few days after this website had been expanded to include a table of the 28 full-length programmes the BBC had broadcast to prove the fake MacCrimmon legend had always been true, but Johnston claimed not to know there had been any problems between BBC and myself, which I found incomprehensible.
Relentlessly the BBC had insinuated time after time that my book must therefore be false, meaning I was branded an inaccurate author, while refusing me even once the right of reply. And never once did it own up that the book had effectively demolished every artefact of the false legend, in virtual defiance of its Royal Charter which, it asserts on its website “is the constitutional basis for the BBC recognising its editorial independence and sets out its public obligation in detail.”
To test the BBC’s sincerity I phoned its reporter back next day and made him an offer, which would spare him from making a dangerous drive through the blizzards. He could record my views on the phone. I would sing a few verses of a song I had written called The Piping Destitutes, which the BBC could broadcast then refer interested listeners to the Angus MacKay link in this website. I told him it was sung to the same tune as the Ball of Kirriemuir. One verse summed it up:-
It’s bonkers to be sane, ye ken,
And normal to be mad.
That’s why their loonie music
Is degenerate and bad.
Not a chance, I was informed. It couldn’t be done on the phone. Either a TV clip at least – or no radio interview.
It was Robert Wallace, vice-president of the Piobaireachd Society and simultaneously editor of Piping Times and organiser of the highly eccentric memorial cairn project, who blew the whistle on the BBC’s “offer”, by boastfully blogging on 1 December 2010: “Firstly the BBC sent a taxi to get to the studio at 7.20 a.m. but we were held up by the weather and did the interview over the mobile on the squinty bridge over the Clyde. Much of Scotland has been snow bound for the last several days with no sign of a let-up.”
So why could Mr Wallace be interviewed over a mobile phone but not me over a land-line, without first agreeing to appear on TV? It was unbelievable. A Press officer corroborated: “Bullshit. I give the BBC statements by phone all the time.”
To my mind, the BBC is the most dangerous organisation I have ever encountered. It hounded me into a heart attack, spent up to £1m. in attempting to destroy a book with an estimated shelf-life of 400 years, which I had written in five weeks, then the BBC had set out to destroy my writing career.
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Tweak off!
Now came its ugly insistence of intruding a TV camera into my home to breach my privacy defined by Article 8 of the Human Rights Act 1998, under the pretext of giving me at long last the right of reply provided I first appeared on TV? In case my then 81-year-old face was inadvertently tweaked into a caricature of itself, I was forced to publish a picture of myself, showing what my face really looked like, while holding a copy of The Herald dated 3 December 2010, meaning it could not have been taken before that date.
It still left the unanswered question of what was so imperative to BBC’s schemes that a TV clip had to be made of me speaking in my home. I simply could not fathom it out. Now what?
It was all the more brazen, because only a few days earlier the activities of BBC had been so perverse that I was forced to check an entire BBC-TV documentary involving Billy Connolly, Scotland’s international comedian, and the Scottish fiddler, Aly Bain, because it – not them -- reflected on the integrity of this website, and thus on myself. To drive the message home, the BBC screened the documentary five times in the space of a fortnight.
Anyone who had read the website and was aware of what was said in Literary louts and layabouts would have been undoubtedly led to question my own honesty and accuracy over a documentary, supposed to be merely about a crazy fishing trip, which suddenly turned into a distorted argument, by people who had never been there, over which pub the Rose Street poets drank – all based on a lumpen portrait, shown to be a fantasy.(See Fishy tales from Milne’s Bar )
Even for the hairpin-bend “thinking” of the BBC, the concept was extraordinary. And these were the persons who were permitted to run the largest and grandest propaganda machine in the world.
But not a single word of explanation nor apology from BBC for me. That was reserved for Ally McCoist, the new manager of Glasgow Rangers, the first man in history to force an apology on the turn from the arrogant, but suddenly abject BBC for distorting a film clip of him, making out he thought football violence was a joke.
All he had to do was refuse to speak to the cringing outfit and ban its reporters from his press conferences. It worked a treat. But what about the mouth-violence which the BBC had visited on my wife, family and me, for all these years? Not a cheep. Or should that be: cheapo? Perhaps it better sums up its behaviour.
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Site news and updates NEW for Ne’erday
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To mark Hogmanay 2011, no expense has been spared in bringing you the first half of The Book of No Names, exposing the biggest joke played on pipers the world over for almost 200 years. But, beware, if that don’t bust the braces holding up your kilts, the second half of the joke, for which pipers had to pay 30 quid, plus postage, will go live on Ne’erday Night, marking a happier New Year to us all, except those without a discernible sense of humour, trying to raise a laugh on a BBC Scotland show about their sense of fun.
On St Andrew’s Day (30 November) this website had paused with The deception of the piper originally the opening of The Hanoverian Hoodwinkers, part 2 of the BBC Radio Scotland four-part series, Pibroch, the Tangled Web, which was followed by two more associated links.
They were Who invented the MacCrimmon legend? and Who stole the “Campbell” Canntaireachd? Before-and-after illustrations of pibroch can also be heard at Inside the Tangled Web , which normal people can hear and decide which they prefer and find more musical.
To read the recent links go to: How the BBC handled the launch ; Who took the dirty bawbee?; Death by tongues and The BBC's triple cross , plus Downfall of a director-general : Milne and the ministers . Essential reading is the addition to Search for the Gillies MS book . Scroll down to 'A particular debt'. Bloggers are advised to sedate themselves before reading. See also Fishy tales from Milne’s Bar for further evidence of BBC’s amusing activities.
Now we have a new candidate for piping immortality, The Silver Chanter and other Piper Tales, by Stuart McHardy (Birlinn 2004) which will have a far-reaching impact on organisations as diverse as Edinburgh University and the Piobaireachd Society itself. Under normal circumstances, this paperback would not merit a mention from people like me who have tried so hard and for so long to have the bagpipes treated as a legitimate musical instrument with a corpus of classical music of an international standard to match. Instead the production contains the same old mimsy formula which tries to make pipers look like a bunch of immature romantics who still believe their music came from the fairies.
There is little else worth adding except that my name is later changed to “Alexander Campsie” and Angus MacKay’s assessment by McHardy indicates that he acquired most of his clap-trap about him from the Piobaireachd Society to whose annual conference he was invited to retail it in 2008, four years after his struggle with the facts were published, but not then seen by me.
He thus advanced his thinking: “Tales can be seen as telling us the true story of the common people, to a certain extent in their own words. Stories survive because people still want to hear them. And in Scotland the pipes have always been important to the people playing them and the people listening to them, not just to the lairds who could afford to maintain a professional piper. In his book The MacCrimmon Legend, Campsie inadvertently shows the limitations of what one might call the ‘educated’ attitude towards Highland Society.”
Indeed, the first I knew of this congruence between him and the Piobaireachd Society was when I searched Google one day to discover which falsehoods had been peddled about me by the fairy folk this time, and I discovered under the side-heading Pibroch Society 2008 the startling advice that Mr McHardy had regurgitated the stuff in a talk on “Piping Legends and Stories” at the agm concerned.
A copy of his “talk” followed in which he described himself as “A historian as well as a folklorist”. A few paragraphs down he told the audience: “I’m going to utter the word Alistair Campsie”. What on earth did it mean? Had I become a sort of epithet for rabble-rousing? He went on that he had read my book and “came to have a problem with it. To quote Mr Campsie
The nation was wholly illiterate. Neither bards nor seannachie could write or read but if they were ignorant there was no danger of detection. They were believed by those whose vanity they flattered.
In his book McHardy, who is not a piper, and couldn’t tell the difference between pibroch and proctalgia, self-righteously burbled: “This statement misses the point spectacularly.” But not half so spectacularly as himself, I fear. The paragraph is indented to assert the quotation is from yours truly, meaning me. But the problem for McHardy, for Birlinn’s editor (for this is a raw Birlinn original) and for Birlinn’s integrity itself, is that the quotation is not from me at all, but from Dr Samuel Johnson who made his 1773 trip to the Highlands and Islands of Scotland to ferret out the truth about the Highland tale of all time, the Ossian job. The quotation is properly punctuated within quotation marks in my book, The MacCrimmon Legend or The Madness of Angus MacKay, to give it its full title, is properly footnoted, and cross-referenced to its real source.
McHardy then claims that I referred “to the Seannachies” in the note as “storytellers”, without owning up he had somehow altered Johnson’s spelling and added the Seannachies “were in fact” (I love it) “also the guardians of the genealogies of the clans, a matter of great importance in a tribal society” in the same way he presumably is the guardian of Birlinn’s accuracy with books about piping. Howls of approval from the audience who then presumably hose each other down with Fairy Liquid. Oodles of froth all round.
Now, in his paperback only a few pages earlier, McHardy had lamented: “Scotland has very few early written sources. The invasions of both Edward I and Oliver Cromwell, nearly four hundred years apart, both saw widespread destruction of indigenous written material...it is easy to understand the lack of early Scottish documentation.” If this was such a calamity why did McHardy then censor out the second half of Johnson’s quote in my book? He had given the quotation a new relevance and importance. “Books are faithful repositories, which may be a while neglected or forgotten; but when they are opened again, will impart their instruction; memory, once interrupted, is not to be recalled.”
On the basis of McHardy’s false allegation that I was responsible for the quotation concerned, which he then misquoted, he promptly launched headlong into one of the worst defamatory rants about an author that I have certainly ever seen. To worsen the situation, the defamation had been published on an Edinburgh University website dealing with life-long education. On investigation McHardy’s talk was being used to instruct “the Scottish Tourist Guide Association training course”; i.e. the guides who took tourists around Edinburgh where McHardy’s book was on display amidst the other tourist attractions.
I immediately wrote to the university and was informed “the link was broken...the instant your email was forwarded to me” which was seen as an admission of guilt. I was far from well. I was then 81 and could not find a lawyer to advise me. I was extremely busy completing this website, bringing the real history of pibroch to the present day for future generations as I am unfortunately the last man who can do so.
However. I found time to contact the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) and asked how I could discover what else, if anything, the Piob. Society held about me, and was advised to write to it using a pro forma devised by the ICO itself, which stated: “Please send me all the information relating to myself to which I am entitled under the Section 7 (1) of the Data Protection Act 1998. If you need further information from me, or a fee, please let me know as soon as possible...” The Piob. Society replied: “We cannot find in any of our literature or proceedings any reference to Alistair Campsie.” I was astonished by the rejective reply, especially when I completed this short review and decided to check on McHardy’s status before the rejig of this website went live.
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How to Navigate this site
This web site is designed to be read like a book. When you come to the end of one link – in reality a chapter – you will find the word “continue” on which you should click to go to the next link or chapter. This will bring you to the top of the following link, and so forth.
Certain links contain within the text x-refs to other related links. You may find it easier to click on the x-refs and, after reading, to return to the original link before proceeding along the sequence.
The web site is divided into four sections, each named in a box at the top of the Home Page. To discover their contents all you have to do is click on the box concerned and an index appears revealing the names of the links, plus an explanatory caption.
HEALTH WARNING
Time and space have at last been found to scrutinise William Donaldson’s extraordinary book, The Highland Pipe and Scottish Society 1750-1950, which appears to have been elevated into the Bloggers’ Bible.
It is true this review was written several years ago, giving me time to enjoy the bloggers’ claims that the “work” was of messianic scholarship, proved by its positive blizzard of footnotes, or citation sickness, compared to my own book, insultingly claiming it had none, proving they had never even read it.
Strangely enough, when a short example of this affliction was recently published in Search for the Gillies MS book , it appeared to cause an epidemic of autism among the Dunsire bloggers, whose customary contributions were enhanced by not being able to spell their ungrammatical rantings. They fell silent, not an insult left to "prove" their case.
The Piper’s Press therefore cannot accept any liability from the consequences of reading the following review, which is entirely your own decision. Click on The wisdom of William Donaldson for the facts.
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Freedom of speech in Scotland
The author’s friend was how the Scottish National Party desired to be known when it came to minority power in 2007, claiming that freedom of speech for writers would be paramount to its thinking while creating the best intellectual climate in which to write. But fine words butter no bannocks in Scotland, as I learned when I asked for help in combating the silence into which I had been thrust.
Yet I had done more than my share for the national music of my country, on which I had worked so hard and so long for nothing, because it needed done, and no-one else could do it. The music provides our anthem or its signature tune, if you will. Only an intellectual barbarian could deny it. The true history of our national poet, Robert Burns, and trying to uncover the reasons why he died in poverty, while he had been tricked out of a fortune from his Edinburgh edition alone, merited the deepest forensic scrutiny, which I also undertook, for it has happened to too many serious Scottish writers in the past for it to be a coincidence.
I had therefore written to two successive Ministers of Culture, Linda Fabiani and Michael Russell, asking them to place my predicament before the Parliament and to investigate how a Scottish author could be so treated in the 20th century in defiance of the Human Rights’ Act. I also asked for help in safeguarding the copyright of my final book, a political novel, about Robert Burns, The Clarinda Conspiracy. I had been told it was being made into a blue movie, obviously without my permission.
Neither minister had the manners to reply in person but had me brushed off with a civil servant’s dismissive response, claiming I needed a lawyer. No, all I then needed was the protection falsely promised by the SNP. Yet another broken pledge.
Quixotically I kept quiet about its behaviour before the 2011 election in case it reflected on the result in any way unaware, like the SNP itself, the party was to become the undeserving beneficiary of such an overwhelming spate of votes.
But like many gifts it had the double-edged virtue of swiftly demonstrating how well or otherwise the SNP could deal with absolute power, which had been handed to it on an undeserved plate. Of my Burns novel, utter silence, after which the government’s scheme for a bio-pic of Burns, as the centrepiece of its Homecoming disaster, vanished overnight without a word of explanation. Surely the Scottish nation thinks its writers are worthy of more than such contemptuous rejection by its politicians.
And I say this in the hope that my fellow writers and musicians will never again experience the same cruelty which was inflicted on my family and me, but not for them alone. I say so for the intellectual freedom of all the children of our future, no matter if for now they only draw a chalk line on a slate, or tuck a blade of grass between their thumbs to blow a note in true. Perhaps their piping voices should matter most to us in the international community of the arts.
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© Copyright 2012 The Piper's Press
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