Who was G.A. Dixon?

For someone  who was claimed to be such an eminent  archivist as G.A. Dixon , he was decidedly difficult to find.

He or she was the person who wrote a group of the most scurrilous letters ever published in The Scotsman newspaper , immediately after  The MacCrimmon Legend or the Madness of Angus MacKay, was  published on July 24, 1980. Even here it was impossible to establish his or her sex from the given and misleading signature.

On Saturday July 26, the Edinburgh newspaper published the entire last chapter of the book, omitting the following paragraph which appeared on the final text page:

“To be true, drunkenness, promiscuity and adultery are not unknown in the piping world, even today.  One prominent performer was discovered not long ago by an outraged father to be in bed with his under-age daughter during a summer school abroad, while actually a guest in the house concerned.  The piper, who is now forbidden the house, preserves a spectacular front of respectability to his employers, his wife and family, as Angus MacKay must have done.”

I have always refused to disclose the identity of the paedophile, and the paragraph was inserted in the book as a warning to him, indicating that although the outrage had been hushed up to protect the identity of his victim, who had received counselling from a concerned  Christian couple, it was known about and should not be repeated.

 On Monday 28 July, Lieut. (ex-RSM)  John MacLellan, roaring with fury, phoned the newspaper’s feature editor and bellowed his demands for equal space to reply.  “It was,” the features editor said, warning me that an attack was on the way, “the rudest phone call I have ever received in my journalistic career.”  MacLellan was finally calmed down and told that a reasonable response by him would be published, to which he eventually agreed.

It never materialised.  Perhaps he wasn’t thought up to it.

Instead, in a letter also dated 28 July, G.A. Dixon initiated the scurrilous correspondence, giving his or her address as 55 Kersland Street, Glasgow; an expert, one might think, to have replied so hurriedly.   The  problem was  no-one in the field known to me knew who on earth  he or she was.

By another coincidence, the former literature director of the Scottish Arts Council was in the National Library of Scotland  two days later (July 30) and wrote to me:  “Opposite sat a youngish bearded fellow, very serious, reading your book and several documents – alongside him was a fat file which read MacCrimmon.  I was intrigued, but he gave away no secrets.”

It could not have been Dixon who graduated from Aberdeen University in 1957, was clean-shaven and must then have been almost fifty.

I replied that “ for convenience I shall take G.A. Dixon’s sex to be male – why people who write to newspapers do not identify themselves, I cannot imagine...and I can only wonder where he works, who his friends and colleagues are, and whether he has been set-up as some kind of inky hitman of the Fourth Remove by persons who lack the courage to undertake their own contracts.”

The piping community was also in the dark, at least the ones I spoke to, and the Scottish historians were equally mystified, although everyone in their closely-knit community knew everyone else.  “We’ve even searched the Scottish polytechnics,” they chorused, “and still we can’t find Dixon.” 

Later a senior history lecturer at Glasgow University, now a professor, told me he had investigated every Scottish university and college without finding hint nor hair of him.  When his investigator had enquired at his own university’s archives department , he was sharply asked: “Who wants to know?”  All information was refused.

We were ostensibly helped  by a letter dated October 11, by a Dr Ian Grant (equally unknown) who purported to put us right, but only after a symptomatic attack on me, alleging:  “In a manner reminiscent of the late and unlamented Senator McCarthy Mr  Campsie demands to know where Mr Dixon ‘works, who his friends are...’”etc. then proceeded not to tell us, although he too claimed to be a historian.  (All I’d said was:  “I wonder...”)

He insisted: “Mr Dixon is an honours graduate of the Universities of Aberdeen and Edinburgh and a professional archivist, whose knowledge of the printed and manuscript sources for the history of Highland Scotland in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is matched by few indeed.”  Grant ended his letter with such uncontrolled abuse that I dismissed him by stating:  “I fear his final remarks are so repulsive they do not merit a reply.” 

I was later informed that Grant may have worked in “the hatches, matches and dispatches” section of the Scottish Records Office, but he never reappeared to tell us.

The address from which Dixon wrote, 55 Kersland Street, Glasgow, in the bed-sit  land of Glasgow University, where by yet another coincidence Seumas MacNeill  had worked almost continuously since he graduated from there around 1938.  Enquiries  were  answered by “a foreign-looking gentleman” who said Dixon had  “a bed-sitting room at the front but was not often there.”  The property was described as a  “main-door flat frequented by hippies and strangely dressed persons.”

The enigma

In early 1982 I was talking to Professor Tommy Dunn, head of English studies at Stirling University, who had lent me an office in his department to complete work on the first revise of the MacCrimmon book.  We had  been between homes, and I was bringing him up-to-date on  all that had been done to the book and me.

We were sitting in his garden at Bridge of Allan, looking over the Carse of Stirling to the “Braveheart” Castle.  To its west was the tough housing scheme called The Raploch.

Tommy Dunn mentioned The Scotsman letters and said in the old Scots way:  “Faith, ye’re a bonny fechter.”  Some compliment, coming from a man of his stature.

“Did you ever find out who Dixon was?” he asked, and I said no.  We were unaware   we were almost staring over the tough council-house scheme where Dixon lived. 

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Dixon remained an enigma for many years despite repeated attempts to discover his background.  The first public clue came when Dixon wrote to The Sunday Standard on 17 May, 1981, claiming that “the ‘Highland Clearances stand revealed as the modern Marxist myth that they really are.’”  His address  was now  26 Hazelbank Gardens , Raploch, Stirling.         

The following year  he was chosen to give the first lecture in a new series called “Alternative Views of History” on 25 March 1982 in the home of Glasgow University’s archivist, Michael S. Moss.  Dixon was presumably ready to take his first public bow.

Invitation to an Alternative View of History

The invitation, on Glasgow University headed notepaper, described George Dixon as “assistant archivist of the Central Region” and he was to claim that the Highland Clearances were caused by bad weather, and not the lairds at all.  His theme so enraged Scottish historians they threatened to barrack Dixon into silence.  Coffee was to be provided but those “wishing stronger refreshment are welcome to bring their own.” 

The event was cancelled, possibly to safeguard the family furniture.  Moss was said to have written certain historical notes for Grants whisky promotions, but at least we now knew where Dixon worked.  It was all the more surprising as we had a strong family connection with Stirling and thought we might have been informed by newspaper friends who knew of the G.A. Dixon letters, which had assumed an international notoriety. He was apparently known in Stirling as George Dixon.

To confirm the situation I wrote to the principal of Glasgow University, Dr Alwyn Williams, asking when Dixon had been employed there, explaining why.  Dr Williams replied on 10 May 1982 he had asked  his  personnel department.  “The answer which I received was that a G.A. Dixon had a temporary research appointment in our Archives which terminated on 18 July 1981.”  I was therefore led to believe that Dixon had written his odious Scotsman letters when he was employed at Glasgow University.

Surprisingly for someone so important he was never mentioned in Who’s Who in Scotland, had never published a book, but had contributed two letters to Piping Times, edited by Seumas MacNeill, who referred to him and Grant as “historians”.  MacNeill retired from Glasgow University in 1982.

The sparse details I have managed to ascertain about Dixon are now given.  

George Andrew Dixon was born at Grantown-on-Spey, Moray, at 4 a.m. on Tuesday 12 May 1936.  His father, Hamish, was described as a master painter who lived at Heath Cottage in the small town with his wife, Beatrice, who came from Birse on Deeside.

George Dixon took a  master of arts degree with 2^nd class honours at Aberdeen University, graduating in 1957, and in his  final year, according to the university,  studied mediaeval European history, mediaeval British history and imperial history (taken to be the history of the former British empire).  Scottish history was not mentioned.

Forty years later, in March 1997, Dixon told  the Stirling Observer, a  Scottish weekly newspaper, that he was “originally a history teacher in Aberdeenshire and Edinburgh”.  I asked an old colleague who had been a former education convener in the city to check but he found it impossible to discover where Dixon had taught. No-one then in educational administration there remembered him.

However, Edinburgh University searched its records and confirmed that a George Andrew Dixon, of Heath Cottage, Grantown-on-Spey, took a  BSc in psychology  with 2^nd class honours at Edinburgh  in 1967, although what relevance such a degree has to Scottish history is unclear. Why I Grant stressed the existence of the degree without disclosing the subject studied is equally unknown.

Dixon also told  the Stirling Observer on 19 March 1997, that he “trained as a archivist at Glasgow University before joining Stirling Council archive service in 1980.” (When Dixon retired a year later he corrected the date to 1981).  But a Glasgow University spokesperson stated on 18 May 2004 that “no formal qualification like a diploma in archival studies then existed. There was no Scottish course,” she said. “Training was done in-house.”

It is now known that Dixon was working at Glasgow University archives by February 1979, when a woman supervisor took a six-month contract there, helping G.A. Dixon to sort out thousands of engineering drawings of steam locomotives from N.B. Locomotives and another firm in Kilmarnock.

“The store was like a giant Post Office sorting office... we catalogued business collections, answered enquiries and looked after the readers. It was invaluable practical training... one diversion to stop us going mad with the tedium was to find the funniest title of a drawing.  Our puerile minds found the suggestive sounding drawing of a ‘6-way reversible cock’ hilarious.”  Dixon later became “researcher” for the Sir Robert McAlpine history.”  He was a prominent house builder in Scotland.

Later we decided to check out Dixon’s employment record at Stirling, and a series of Freedom of Information requests were made to Stirling Council in early 2005, revealing more and more peculiar facts. 

It turned out that although the Glasgow University principal stated that Dixon had worked there till 18 July 1981, the post of assistant archivist for Central Region had been advertised a year earlier, in April/May 1980, and interviews took place on 11 June 1980.  The job description stipulated:  “Some clerical work is involved...ability to type would be an advantage.”  Salary was in the scale £4,356 - £4,713.

Dixon took up his appointment as assistant archivist on 21 July 1980.  He was subject to one month’s notice at Glasgow University, according to the principal, which would have had to be given by 21 June 1980.  Stirling Council checked its records and confirmed Dixon’s starting date, but could not give his then home address, which would have solved everyone’s problem.

Dixon’s  first letter to The Scotsman was dated July 28, 1980, only a week after he took up his new post, a decided promotion for him, and was published on 2 August, 1980, when he gave his address as 55 Kersland Street.  Dixon was appointed to the plum job of  archivist in 1986 and remained there until he retired in 1998.

So where did he find time to allegedly  bone up on piping history, for he was no piper, and his appalling blunders on the subject were as grotesque as his insults.  “There’s no piping there,” I was told by a prominent archivist, who had somehow known he lived in a bed-sit. 

Why he ever instigated his infamous correspondence has always eluded me, given his own inadvertent revelations concerning the state of his information about piping and piping history.

And  why had the principal of Glasgow University been deceived into informing me that Dixon was employed there when Stirling Council  provided chapter and verse that he had begun work at the council a year earlier ?  And why were his Scotsman letters  sent from  what appears to have been an accommodation address  at Glasgow when he was employed by the Central Regional Council at Stirling?

The scurrilous letters

Dixon’s first letter, dated  July 28, 1980, began:  “Alistair Campsie may think the MacCrimmons were a myth.  Historians know better.”   Not merely that, but his sources of piping history were far superior to mine (did N.B. Locos make bagpipes?).  He simultaneously mucked it up by asserting that my “fixation on Angus MacKay is just a tartan herring...  The book was worth no more than an article in a piping magazine.” (I hope he didn’t mean Piping Times, to which he was known to contribute).

The book had in fact dismantled the MacCrimmon legend, showing  for the first time the MacCrimmons were rarely at Borreraig during the 300 years of its alleged existence as a piping college. 

The Lovat indenture, as it was known, was enshrined in the MacCrimmon fantasy.  The document was claimed in 1979  to be safe in the “muniment room” of Dunvegan Castle, supposedly proving beyond any doubt that pupils were sent to the alleged college of piping.

My book had instead shown, from the version published in Fred T. MacLeod’s  title,  The MacCrimmons of Skye,  that only one piper, described as a body servant to Lord Lovat, had been sent to Skye in the run-up to the 1745 Civil War for a period of 73 days, less the time taken to walk the 200 miles from the Lovat estates outside Inverness to Skye and back to be “perfected as a Highland pyper.”

The book also shattered the Piob. Society confidence trick that Angus MacKay had handed on unchanged the music taught to his famous father, John MacKay, by the last MacCrimmons.  I showed that John MacKay could never have been taught by them at all, as he was only five or six at most when the last of the phantom family left the island and shut down their college.  The only evidence John MacKay was trained by the MacCrimmons was on a sheet of paper written by Angus MacKay in Bedlam after he was certified insane.

Despite all this evidence, Dixon claimed, according to his blanket smear - all the more difficult to answer because of the space needed -, the book had only questioned “the sources of some well-known pibrochs”,  adding  the inevitable tribal insults without which he seemed incapable of proceeding.

Yet the book had also shown for the first time  that almost all the so-called “MacCrimmon tunes” had earlier and different names, indicating they had been stolen and renamed to prop up a fructified legend.

Even the near-sacred Lament for Culloden had been stolen and relabelled as a buttress of the legend, while the emigrants’ lament  I Shall Return No More, had been thieved by Walter Scott to  rewrite it in 1818 as the overblown theme song for the scam, Mackrimmon’s Lament, now entitled MacCrimmon Will Never Return.

I developed the theme and investigated not “some well-known pibrochs”, as Dixon had further wrongly sneered, but the provenance of around 100 examples of the unique musical form.  

In chapter 5, called Lament for an old song, five famous alleged “MacCrimmon” pibrochs were shown to have earlier and different names and histories, indicating they had been stolen and renamed as the foundation stones of the emergent “legend”.

In chapter 6, called The Book of Secrets, 24 pibrochs alleged to have a “MacCrimmon” origin were contrasted with the names given in the oldest record, The Campbell Canntaireachd  (CC), which Colin Campbell began to copy out in 1797 from the earlier manuscripts of his father, Donald, who had fought on the Jacobite side at Culloden in 1746.

Now, Dixon’s smear was spurious enough, but far worse was concealed.   In Appendix 3, the names of 75 pibrochs which appeared in the CC were contrasted with the names by which the same tunes were much later labelled in Angus MaKay’s published  and manuscript books.

And in Appendix 4, the so-called “MacCrimmon” tunes totalling 31, were compared with the names given in the oldest record, the CC, “if at all there”.   In fact, only 19 alleged “MacCrimmon” tunes were there and all their original CC names had been altered  to dub the tunes with a latter-day “MacCrimmon” origin.

                                                                                                               *

Dixon was meanwhile outraged that I had omitted the single word “Lovat” at the end of the document and remarked from the description had not even signed it.   Deliberate suppression,  howled Dixon, accusing me of pique for mentioning the facts and for not knowing what the document looked like.  He gave a detailed description of it and also asserted  its full text is printed in F.T. MacLeod’s book, published in 1933, and my “deliberate suppression” of Lovat’s name “to suit his own ends is in itself enough to damn his book as a serious contribution to historical writing about the Highlands.”

But I had already asked the clan historian, Isabel Grant, for sight of the document and she literally gobbled with rage that its full text was in the same book and the document was at Dunvegan Castle and slammed the phone down.

Dixon’s associate,  I.Grant, then claimed I had “misprinted the document, but when published elsewhere there is nothing to arouse suspicion.” 

Instead I asked Dixon three times for a photo-copy of the document, but he refused to provide even one, instead smearing compulsive insults over the missing word and swamping the real truth that the document disproved the legend from the start. 

I was then vilified because I had not mentioned a document by an Aeneas MacKintosh, who proved the MacCrimmon college was still in existence and training pipers when he wrote.  I was next accused  of ignoring the clan historian’s documentation about the MacCrimmons being principal pipers to the MacLeods, which was simply untrue.  Then Dixon returned to the  MacKintosh account and mightily huffed and puffed that he had dated the document correctly “exactly two hundred years ago”.  That would be around 1780.

The truth was that when Johnson and Boswell visited Skye in 1772 they were told the last MacCrimmon had left more than a year earlier, demonstrating the MacKintosh account was worthless, presumably the reason why the MacLeod historian and another had dismissed the account in a single paragraph.  No retraction from Dixon, of course, and certainly no apology.

 Dixon then tried his technique of  omission by accusing me of not knowing of the existence of a petition by Alexander MacArthur  “written in the closing days of the eighteenth century and addressed to Col. Alexander Macdonald of Lyndale, asking his help in becoming a pupil of Donald MacCrimmon who, as MacArthur stated, was willing to bestow his utmost attention on teaching him.”

Dixon went on:  “Campsie is  also handicapped in other ways,  not least by the wealth of surviving primary source material proving beyond any rational questioning that the ‘legendary’ MacCrimmons were no legend. There is, for instance, no valid way one can deny the existence in the Scottish Record Office (terra incognita to Campsie) of such contemporary MS references  to them as that in the Alexander MacArthur petition,” written in the closing days of the eighteenth century and addressed to Col. Macdonald of Lyndale asking his help in becoming a pupil of Donald MacCrimmon who, MacArthur stated, was willing to bestow his utmost attention on teaching him.  proving apparently that I apparently had three techniques to counter the incontrovertible.  The first of which was “simply to ignore ‘awkward documents’”, an allegation to treasure.

My Scottish Record Office card

To rebut Dixon’s latest false accusation, I merely produced a Scottish Record Office card in my name valid until 31^st December 1968, when Dixon was presumably was still studying for his B.Sc in pyschology at Edinburgh University.  What on earth did they teach him?  

No apology, of course. Dixon stuffily explained in his next letter:  “There is, incidentally, not a single mention of any MS source in the S.R.O. among the six pages of Campsie’s references – hence the terra incognita parenthesis.”  All I can say is that a false allegation is false whether it is in brackets or not.

The truth is that Dixon falsely dated the petition and accompanying letter which he pretended were written in the closing days of the eighteenth century.  No, they weren’t.  The petition was dated December 22 , 1800 and the letter January 5, 1801, somehow proving the Borreraig college was still open in the nineteenth century, a novel extension, unforeseen by Sir Aeneas, and the petition didn’t ask Col. Macdonald’s help in becoming a pupil of Donald MacCrimmon.  What it did instead ask was Col. Macdonald’s help in getting a job as Lord Macdonald’s piper and, if successful, the lease of ground at Hunglater.

What Dixon also suppressed was the cataclysmic information that Alexander MacArthur had stated he was “son to Charles MacArthur late Pyper to the family of Macdonald and whose unequalled abilities in that Capacity are even still unforgotten.”   

That was when Alexander lobbed in the piping bombshell by saying it was his  father who had in fact taught Donald MacCrimmon, the so-called last MacCrimmon, who had either forgotten all his tunes or had probably never been taught them in the first place, and had to be sent to the MacArthurs for training.

I t was literally the day the Borreraig roof collapsed on Dixon’s head, which fizzing dangerously away, had extracted a quote from my book about Angus MacKay and tried to use it against me.  It read:  “The worst thing that can happen to a person who is concocting history is for someone to publish, in his own lifetime, incontrovertible facts which prove the first work suspect.”

But Dixon modestly omitted to mention his flaws and insisted that I had misused evidence from his saintly Isabel F. Grant and was guilty of “further instance of his unscrupulous manipulation of his sources.”

To back up this remarkable slab of defamation Dixon purported that I had written and the extract is indented to give his exact punctuation:-

                                                     Campsie, whose case is “that Borreraig is a hoax,” asserts, however, that

                                         Dr Grant “reveals” that the person in question is certainly not a MacCrimmon.”

This is untrue. Dixon had  inserted the final quotation marks. Here is what the book stated, with the paragraph again indented to give the exact punctuation:-

Dr Grant next reveals that when Patrick (Og) was living at Galtrigil, and being paid there, a piper was living at Borreraig, unnamed,

but certainly not a MacCrimmon who was paid a sum of £13 in 1710. 

I didn’t claim that Dr Isabel Grant had asserted the un-named piper at Borreraig was not a MacCrimmon.  She had omitted that  particular gem and I merely helped her out for  very good reasons, of which Dixon once more appeared in ignorance.

Dr Isabel Grant had been wildly speculating on whether Patrick Og MacCrimmon, who was living at Galtrigil, had also been simultaneously paid for being at Borreraig, to prove he was there except when he wasn’t.

Once more Dixon demonstrated how little he knew of the legend which implacably stated that in 1710 Patrick Og was principal of the piping college at Borreraig, when the same legend stressed  he was the sole surviving son of Patrick Mor MacCrimmon and had no brothers nor sisters.  He however had two sons, Malcolm, who was born in 1704 and was thus six, and Donald who was not born until 1710, meaning he was still an infant. 

It should therefore have been obvious to even a piping pea-brain that the “unnamed” piper at Borreraig was “certainly not a MacCrimmon”, because there simply wasn’t another piping MacCrimmon around, unless it is now claimed that Malcolm MacCrimmon was giving his lessons at the age of six, presumably standing on a box, while his baby brother, Donald, directed operations from his crib. 

Dixon’s letter was incidentally headed: “A glass house dweller who threw stones”.  Under the circumstances one wonders to whom it referred, especially when it began:  “Having been caught cooking the evidence about the MacCrimmons...”

 More of Dixon’s symptomatic abuse emerged, and he defended his mentor, “Dr Isabel Grant...(whose name he consistently misspells although she happens to be the ‘greatest living Highland historian...’”) insinuating I had constantly mis-spelled her name throughout the book.

Dixon refused to admit that her forename had been given only twice.  In the first I had been forced to take her name from the copyright mark on her book “© Isabel Frances Grant 1959”, the only full spelling of her name I could find.  According to the original typescript I had given the name correctly (I was hardly likely to have mis-spelled it after going to all that trouble) but someone had changed it.  It certainly wasn’t me.

When Dixon’s crony, I Grant, spelled their joint  mentor’s name Isobel, Dixon did not abuse him at all, which was too slipshod for words.  Why him and not me?  On and on it weirdly went, with Dixon now claiming I was guilty of the “most irrational contradictions” for allegedly stating: “even the most dedicated partisan must admit that Aeneas (sic)  MacKay’s published book (of 1838) contained the basis of the modern MacCrimmon legend (p.154)’”.

Now this was irrational all right, but not in the way Dixon intended. Beneath the dedication of my book I had quoted from the speech by  Sir Reginald MacLeod of MacLeod, the 27^th chief of the clan, at the unveiling of the MacCrimmon cairn in 1933, which had been slightly paraphrased by Fred. T. MacLeod in his MacCrimmons of Skye:-

 “Those of us who, today, rejoice in the preservation of the MacCrimmon music, illustrated by modern masters of the Art, acknowledge with gratitude the patriotism, enthusiasm, and practical generosity of The Highland Society of London, which in the closing years of the 18^th century stimulated interest in bagpipe playing by the holding of periodic competitions, and which in 1838 was largely responsible for the publication of Angus MacKay’s Collection of Ancient Piobaireachd or Highland Pipe music, the introduction to which contains the earliest categorical account of the MacCrimmons and is the source and foundation of all subsequently written accounts of the family.”

Had Dixon not even read the dedication?  Or was it that the dedication did not appear in the copy of the book he read?  You could hardly miss it.

What exactly had been going on here?  When I checked my personal carbon copy of the typescript, which had never been anywhere near Edinburgh, the dedication  had not been there.  It must have been added with the appendices after they were completed, long after I had sent two copies of the original typescript  to Canongate, who then forwarded one copy to the Scottish Arts Council to back up a publisher’s grant application, and gave the other to the book editor an Isobeal MacLeod, who lived in Edinburgh and worked for the Scottish National Dictionary.

All that was left for Dixon to rake up was that “the main reason for dismissing his book as largely worthless is not that it is slipshod – which it is (in transcribing a snippet from Queen Victoria’s published Journal for instance, he makes eight mistakes in six lines)”.

What it additionally meant, although Dixon did not admit it, was that he had ostensibly found time from his new job to scrutinise every quotation in the book and check it with the original in the hope of uncovering these “mistakes”.  The letter concerned was Dixon’s third letter dated August 22, 1980, and published on August 27. 

The book itself had been published on July 25, 1980.  Dixon’s first letter had been dated  July 28, 1980, and published on August 2, 1980.  He had only had  three days in which to check the entire book.

Here then is the “snippet” as it appeared in my original typescript:-

“There were seven pipers playing together, Mackay leading – and they received us with the usual salute and three cheers, and ‘Nis! nis! nis!’ (pronounced: ‘Neesh! neesh! neesh!’ the Highland ‘Hip! hip! hip!’) and again cheers; after which came a most animated reel.  There were above sixty people, exclusive of the Highlanders, of whom there were also sixty;”  All of which is word perfect.

In my book the passage was printed like this:-

“There were seven pipers playing together, MacKay leading – and they received us with the usual salute and three cheers and Nis! nis! nis! (pronounced: Neesh! neesh! neesh! the Highland Hip! hip! hip!) and again cheers; after which came a most animated reel.  There were above sixty people, exclusive of the Highlanders, of whom there were also sixty.”   (Queen Victoria had mistakenly given the piper’s name as “Mackay” which had been apparently corrected).  Again all of the transcript is word perfect.

But bide a wee.  Take out your reading glasses.  In the original Journal the double quotation marks did not, of course, appear around the passage but had to be given in my book to denote the words were lifted.  It also meant that single quotation marks had to replace the double quotation marks around the Gaelic words. Therefore six single quotation marks had been deleted, which made not the least difference to the meaning, plus the semi-colon ending the first section had been replaced with a full stop.  To Dixon this rendered the book worthless and unpublishable.

His problem was that he was in almost total ignorance of the facets of the contrived MacCrimmon legend he was vainly attempting to protect,  by trying to destroy my integrity as an author, exemplified by one of his earliest attempts to belittle the book, another of his constant preoccupations.

It presents another anomaly. Why did Dixon with all his interminable and pernickety scratching through the book not spot the deliberate alterations to Seumas MacNeill’s name?  It is incomprehensible that Dixon would not accord them the same treatment which exemplified his later methods.

It is also true to state that most of these deliberate blunders were written into the bibliography and the references, and the index, which were prepared long after the typescript was sent to the Scottish Arts Council, who never saw them.   

The crux of the matter is clear.   Did the copy on which Dixon based his scurrilous letters not contain the appendices, the references and bibliography, nor the index? 

Secret shut-down

What Dixon and Grant never knew – and are now publicly informed for the first time -- was that the shocking nature of their letters proved their own undoing and they silenced themselves.

A senior Scotsman executive phoned me in confidence after Dixon’s third letter was published and admitted that the editor had become “very worried” (as well he might have been) “by the way the correspondence had gone” and realised it had to be stopped there and then.

He therefore ordered his letters editor, an Andrew Hood, to ask  me if I would write a final letter, shutting the correspondence down, which I eventually agreed to do, simultaneously wondering how the letters had ever been legally passed for publication, far less published.  It was not until 2009 that I discovered The Scotsman then did not “lawyer”  their Letters to the Editor.

The letter, published on 4 September 1980, ended:  “If I had handed back a tithe of the abuse I experienced during the Four-Year Smear, for reasons which are now apparent, the queue of hungry litigants would have stretched from the Court of Session, half way down the Royal Mile.”

On the morning the warning was published, a frightened Scotsman senior executive phoned me and tremulously asked if I intended to sue them?

I kept my own counsel, for the letter had not merely blown the whistle on the scheme to destroy the traditional styles of playing, but I had revealed that the Tartan Triad had declared Omerta, a Mafia-type silence, on the book, although I had been already warned that vicious attacks were on their way.

In my reply, I mentioned that I had already done two radio programmes with a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC)  interviewer, who had then asked me for the names of people who would give the contrary view for a third programme.  As a fair-minded person I had given him the names of the Triad but the CBC journalist later became embarrassed and explained he “could find no-one from the largely self-appointed piping Establishment who would comment publicly on the book, although they were prepared to be vociferous and vindictive in private.”

The CBC man said: “They have decided they would say nothing in public in case it promoted the book in any way.  They hoped it would go away.”  They obviously had a professional publicist in their ranks.

I had then added that I had also been interviewed on Scottish Television (STV) when I opened up about the meeting in Queen Street Station, Glasgow, with the “academic who was sufficiently drunk to be indiscreet when he told me he had been at a meeting at an establishment in the city where it had been decided they were ‘sick of all you pipers playing in different styles and we’re going to make you play in the same style. All of you.’

“The reason is not hard to find.  Two different styles of playing the same tune existed:  the Cameron style and the MacPherson style. The great problem is that both styles were said to have come from the MacCrimmons, which is as nonsensical as the legend has been shown to be, and a total embarrassment to people who have gone irrevocably in to print extolling the genius of the MacCrimmons, as if they had known them personally and had heard them playing.

“Therefore a secret meeting appears to have been convened where it was decided to complete the destruction of two traditional styles of playing this unique and ancient music and supplant it with a plastic style to prop up a false legend, and incidentally save the faces of certain bagpipe-writers who have literally prated about the skills of their idols, whom they could never have assessed in person.

“Little wonder these people have gone to earth, for they have been publicly exposed as being as guilty of cultural genocide as Butcher Cumberland, whose apt and willing pupils the chiefs of clan MacLeod and MacDonald of Skye have been shown to be.”

And I said  I felt very deeply that a public investigation should be carried out “to discover whether a priceless part of our national heritage has been wilfully destroyed, for what reasons, and what can be done to conserve the separate styles before they are completely obliterated.”

They had been found out and now they knew it.

And that was the day that freedom of speech died the death in Scotland, along with its national music which the same people had  fraudulently replaced with the distortions of a covert lunatic, who insisted he was married to Queen Victoria, and were too sub-musical to tell the difference.

The truth about Dixon

Thirteen months later, after my final letter was published, The Scotsman newspaper excitedly dropped a series of historical bombshells.  On its front page on 9 October, 1981, it trumpeted that  the existence of the “celebrated MacCrimmon school or college of piping on Skye… had been put beyond doubt by the discovery of a misplaced document at the Scottish Record Office (SRO) in Edinburgh.”

The paper went on that the “oft-cited but lost contract alleged to prove the school’s existence.  Now the indenture has been found by Mr G.A. Dixon whose story appears with the transcript on Page 11.”

Bombshell 1. How could the Indenture have been lost and misplaced in Edinburgh?

A Piob. Society grandee, Maj.-Gen. Frank Richardson, had claimed only two years earlier that the indenture was at Dunvegan Castle, Skye, where it had always been, still insisting it proved pipers were sent to Borreraig for seven years’ tuition.

So how did Dixon explain away all this? Answer, he didn’t bother.  Instead he pointed out he had somehow “located” the document in “that treasury of the nation’s past, the Scottish Record Office.” 

Bombshell 2.    He sensationally added:  “None of the authors who have quoted from it during the past 70 years has ever seen the original document.”  

The paper also permitted Dixon and Grant to get away with the disastrous fact that I had  asked three times for a photocopy of the indenture. But they did not once produce one. And they did  not  produce one because they could not produce one.  They had not even known where the Indenture was.

Yet Dixon had asserted the full text was printed in F.T. MacLeod’s book, published in 1933.  Grant had made the same sort of assertion.   “When published elsewhere,” alleged Grant, “there is nothing to arouse suspicion.”   If they had not seen the document, how could they have been so adamant and how could Dixon have given such a detailed description of it?

They had then staged what I had described as “this monstrous charade” against me because I had omitted  “a single name in a 190-page book”  by mistake.

   “Can they even supply me with a photo-copy?  Again – no answer.

 

   “Do they even know the music concerned or play pipes?”  Resoundingly – no answer.

 

That was when I laid a trap to discover if the Dixon/Grant axis knew anything at all about pibroch on which they appeared to have  limitless if  ill-digested  information.  Were they capable for example, I innocently asked,  of publicly discussing “why certain breabach tunes now had an a mach movement added, contrary to traditional teaching?

 

The truth was that the tunes concerned were fosgailte pibrochs and if Dixon had twigged he would on form have hysterically corrected my deliberate error for the next ten  years or so.  Instead he and his associate stayed mute.  They might have been well up on repellent abuse, but  they obviously knew sod all about pibroch.

 

 The truth was that Dixon, no matter how much he pontificated about pibroch, was no more a piper than David Fraser was a body-servant.  As for Grant, we never heard from him again.

 

                                                                                                            *

 

Significantly no outraged disapproval emerged from Dixon nor anyone else when the new Clan MacLeod historian was later forced to disclose that the paragraph of 82 words had been dismissed as “etc”. 

 

All that Dixon confessed was that  Fred MacLeod’s version was now  “an only approximately accurate reproduction of the abridged text  printed on pages 62 and 63 of the selection of Forfeited Estates papers edited by A.H. Miller for the Scottish History Society and published in 1909…” 

 

What it really meant was that Dixon could not even have known of the existence of Miller’s book.   Yet this was the “historian” who alleged that the “main reason for dismissing his (my) book as largely worthless…is not even that it is ignorant, which it is: only someone as profoundly ignorant as Campsie is of the contents of the Scottish Record Office’s vast collection of Highland MSS.”

 

The box concerned in the SRO contained many of the forfeited estates papers, including the original indenture – of which Dixon appeared “profoundly ignorant”, to quote him.  If a junior reporter had even read the preface of A H Miller’s book, he or she  would have taken five minutes to home in on the whereabouts of the allegedly “lost document” because it had been used when David Fraser, “the piper had claimed on the forfeited estate of Lovat.”

 

Dixon took somewhat longer than five minutes, yet this was the “historian”, according to his crony I Grant, “whose knowledge of the printed and manuscript sources for the history of Highland Scotland in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is matched by few others.”  So were his bombshells...

 

Damning slip of paper

 

Bombshell 5 was possibly the most destructive of all for it proved one of the most important props of the legend was false.  It was contained in a “slip of paper” attached by a steel pin to the so-called indenture which showed that David Fraser was no more a body-servant than Dixon was a piper, no matter how much he pontificated about pibroch.

 

The vital truth was that although Dixon boasted of the Indenture, which he had somehow “located in that treasury of the nation’s past”, he concealed the fact that the damning slip of paper was attached to the document at all. It simultaneously destroyed his case and exposed him.  On it was written:  “An Account of David Fraser, tacksman of Tennacanen (?) of what he received from Lord Lovat as follows:  To Echt Bols oat meal in the year on seven hundred and forty years in part payment of his wedges from the above mentioned Lord Lovat.”

 

The slip proved that David Fraser was a tacksman, or sub-landlord, an important man in the clan hierarchy, and had received in 1744 part-payment of his year’s “wedges” in the form of 8 bols of oatmeal, weighing about half-a-ton, worth £4 “starling”. He never was a body- servant.

 

Yet his annual wages stipulated in the Indenture were fifty merks which equalled £2 15s. 6d.  Somehow his wages had almost doubled. It leaves one to wonder how much he was in fact paid per year and for what?

 

According to the Piobaireachd Society’s book 10, 2^nd series, David Fraser in 1745 “was sent by Lord Lovat to Edinburgh in charge of fourteen ‘recruits’ to be delivered to two officers of the rank of Captain”, indicating he himself was a junior officer.

 

The Indenture could also have doubled as a military pass in the run-up to the 1745 Rising, when Lovat was continually conspiring with his cousin, Norman MacLeod of MacLeod, while they tried to entice Prince Charles Edward Stuart to land in the Highlands, and needed a trustworthy courier to carry messages and convey intelligence.  Indentures were commonly used as military passes by the bonded servants or “white slaves” in Pennsylvania around the same time.

 

But that is only part of the story revealed in the slip of paper which Dixon suppressed.  It corroborated that the Indenture had been used as part of a joint claim against the Lovat estates  so that persons who had outstanding unpaid debts against the estate could be paid in full before the Crown dispossessed the estates.  David Fraser was contracted for seven years.

 

It was a Jacobite legal ruse, which had been devised after the 1715 Civil War, to guarantee payment to favoured people in the event of the “War” going wrong.  Which the 1745 Civil War did for Lovat.

 

The pin that held the scam together

And the steel pin which attached the damning slip of paper to the indenture was like a pin holding together a grenade called the MacCrimmon legend.  Pull the pin and the entire fantasy blew to bits.  The Indenture had been nothing more or less than an insurance policy for David Fraser who claimed for the balance of his seven years wages, less the value of the oatmeal.

 

The slip of paper also automorphically found Dixon guilty of his own accusation that “to counter the incontrovertible” I “simply ignored awkward documents.”  Oh dear, he could hardly claim not to have seen the “slip of paper” as it was mentioned in A H Miller’s book, saying it had been “pinned” to the indenture.

 

A fitting requiem

 

I wrote a strong letter  to The Scotsman editor, Eric Mackay,  pointing out he should make a public apology to the SRO staff for publishing two hurtful and false statements about them on his front page.  I told him he should run a story correcting the situation.

 

Mackay refused to do so and I therefore wrote a detailed reply to Dixon’s odious piece and sent it to Mackay, but  The Scotsman editor refused to publish it, effectively endorsing Dixon’s distortions.  Once more I had been silenced and prevented from telling the truth.

 

I later wrote to Mackay informing him what he had done to me: “In a short time I have been altered in the public estimation from being an author and journalist of merit and almost absolute accuracy into a hack who traded in lies, distortions, constant blunders and vituperation.

 

“To say I had been brought to ridicule, hatred and contempt among my fellows and the world in general was to claim the North Wall of the Eiger was no higher than a gnat’s forehead.”

 

I was scandalised by his behaviour, especially when I considered the intellectual worth of my attackers, and on 1 March 1982  I again wrote to  Eric Mackay,:  “It must feel grand to be so dismissive of another’s reputation…As you are responsible for publishing a series of letters about me, in the most pejorative terms, which claimed I had deliberately falsified evidence and that I was a totally inaccurate and ‘ignorant’ writer  who manipulated facts to suit myself and had produced a ‘nasty’ and ‘totally worthless’ book, I cannot accept your professed stance.

 

“I should also stress that in twenty-five years of national journalism I was very rarely accused of inaccuracy; strong possibly, but fair, and specifically factual.  You have taken away this reputation, which I most prized…”

 

Accordingly I contacted a leading firm of lawyers and duly informed MacKay  that I had been advised me in writing:

 

“In the opinion of the writer a prima facie case of defamation presents itself in the letters.” 

 

It meant that anyone who re-published Dixon’s letters, or circulated them, or incited others to read them, were in serious trouble. 

 

The situation has never gone away.

 

In these letters resided the cruel seed of the eventual heart attack into which I was inexorably hounded...but ironically it was the heart attack that saved the guilty persons from the consequences of their own wretched actions.  I was medically warned the next attack could be terminal and I was professionally advised to abandon the fight.

 

When I was forced to return to the letters all these years later to write this account, the outrage was still as intense and I felt physically sick time after time as I read the distortions and untruths written about me.  The reasons are now obvious. 

 

Their savagery, which deeply wounded my wife and young family, was also responsible in part for my decision to abandon writing books in Scotland.  It was literally too dangerous to do so.  From that day to this The Scotsman has not published a single article of mine, nor even a letter, leading to a serious loss of income and our later poverty, which had the most serious effects, for we were made homeless.  

 

The false impression was thus given that I did not answer these libels because I couldn’t. The truth is now seen to be otherwise.

G A Dixon, the enigma

Time after time I was gagged from doing so, and I was also informed by others they had written in my defence but their letters were not published.

 

There is an even more appalling side to it.  People have been incited to read these defamatory letters over the internet and elsewhere, falsely making out they were book reviews, giving the dates of publication, except for Dixon’s final letter, but refusing to admit I had replied to each one, which were never mentioned, nor their dates.  The lack of balance identifies the outrageous behaviour of the perpetrators.

 

They have much to answer for, especially as the UK Human Rights Act 1998 has now incorporated Article 10 of the European Human Rights Convention, which states:-

 

“Everyone has the right to freedom of expression.   This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers”.  Besides, people who publish or incite others to read defamatory letters should consider the consequences of their actions on their own reputations.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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