The Kilt Kops

[Peter Crowe]

I wonder whether this has more to do with the highland/lowland divide than anything else

It seems to me that those who would keep the kilt to themselves are highlanders. Those who would share it around are lowlanders. And the highlanders equally seem to suggest that they would prefer lowlanders not to wear the kilt either

Historically lowlanders did not really wear tartan or kilts so it might be a bit of a "parochial" thing going on here. Not serious enough to start a war though

It may well be be David, but it also overlooks the fact that at the time the kilt was reinvented as Scotland's national dress in the early nineteenth century many folk from the Highlands chose not to emigrate overseas but migrated to the Industrial urban centres of Lowland Scotland.

Moreover, some historians argue (most notably T.M. Devine) very plausibly that the Establishment welcomed and encouraged the development of what we now call Traditional Highland (Civilian) Dress as a politically safe expression of Scottish identity when the eighteenth century project of replacing Scottish identity with a North British identity reached its limits. This also coincided with the discovery that an inclusive dual Scottish-British patriotic identity could be promoted from the reflected glory of the kilted Highland regiments during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars.

Where I grew up in west-central Scotland (suburbs of Glasgow) in the 1960's and 1970's the wearing of Civilian Highland Dress was a very middle class way to express one's Scottishness. It was perceived if you wore the kilt that you were 'one of the toffs/snobs who lived in the big private houses' as opposed to someone who was a council tenant. A generalisation I know, but not without quite a lot of truth behind it. The same phenomena held true for my father growing up in the 1940's and 50's. In the past 15-20 years this class aspect of kilt wearing has begun to change (at least among the folk I know and observe) with a new found confidence in Scottish identity.

There has been a lot said about Glaswegian attitudes to the kilt for example, which portrays Glasgow people as entirely homogenous in their culture and ignorant of the Scottish Highlands, both assumptions which are (IMHO) incorrect. It is also worth remarking that there is a lot of variation within the Highlands and to take one example Caithness and Sutherland are different from each other and both are very different to Argyll. I don't have access to the figures to be exact about numbers over time, but there is plenty of empirical evidence that very many Highland families migrated to Glasgow between the late 18th and early 20th centuries. Moreover, of Scotland's four major cities Glasgow is not only the one furthest south, it is also furthest west and most physically proximate to the Highland geological boundary (about 10 or so miles away). I should also point out when I say Glasgow, I am also including the contiguous urban and suburban area not merely the City council area. Furthermore, while I was studying at Glasgow University (1996-2000) undergraduate and (2002/03) as a post-graduate, it was often claimed the city had a larger resident population of native Gaelic speakers than the entire population of the Western Isles. Although it should also be pointed out the figures for Punjabi and Urdu speakers were even higher.