Latest articles
12/01/21
Mythologies 2: ‘Churchill sent English troops and tanks into George Square, Glasgow, in 1919, to crush a strike / stop a revolution’
About Gordon Barclay
Gordon Barclay started out in archaeology – the prehistory of Scotland – excavating many archaeological sites throughout eastern Scotland, and also in Norway. Over twenty years ago he began to develop expertise in the archaeology of modern defence and its accompanying military history.
Nowadays, he undertakes documentary and field research for his own projects and for local and national government organisations, specialising in the extraction of meaning from large bodies of complex evidence.
Publications
The Cleaven Dyke and Littleour
The Cleaven Dyke is one of the best-preserved Neolithic bank barrows/cursus monuments in Britain. These enigmatic monuments survive most often as cropmarks, but over 1.8km of the Dyke survives as an earthwork. In the 1990s Gordon Maxwell and I investigated the Dyke and the nearby Neolithic timber structure at Littleour. The excavation report is out of print. It awaits rescanning prior to publication on the website of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland. In the meantime a usable scan is provided here.
The Fortification of the Firth of Forth 1880-1977. ‘The most powerful naval fortress in the British Empire’
In 2019, Ron Morris and I published the key results of many years of research on the defence of the great naval anchorage, the Firth of Forth. The handsome volume was published by the Society of Antiquaries and reprinted by them in 2019 because of high demand. That edition is long out of print. Nautilus Books reissued the book in 2024, but that too is now out of print. The Society has made a free digital edition available, a copy of which I am making available here.
Ten years in the life of a factoid: fake history in the Scottish independence debate
On 24 March 2013, the Mail on Sunday, in its print-only Scottish edition, published a story that changed the direction of my life. This article records my own encounter with ‘fake news’ in the ten years between then and March 2023. The newspaper article set loose a myth which has since been deployed and elaborated upon in the online debate about Scottish independence. In summary, it is the accusation that in 1940 General Ironside, Churchill, ‘Westminster’, or ‘the English’ planned to abandon Scotland in the face of a Nazi invasion, or to use the country as some sort of bargaining chip to protect England. It's nonsense, of course, but it's amazing what people will believe if it reinforces their beliefs.
SCOTTISH AFFAIRS PREPRINT: ‘Churchill abandoned the fighting Scots’: the mythology and reality of the surrender of the 51st Highland Division at St Valery-en-Caux, 12 June 1940.
On 12 June 1940 the 51st (Highland) Division surrendered to the Germans at St Valery-en-Caux, Normandy. The force lost was made up not only of Scots, but also English, Welsh, French and French Colonial troops. But in recent decades the division’s loss has been recast as a story of solely Scottish loss, deployed in narratives of grievance and victimhood. This paper contrasts the mythology with the historical reality, in the context of the distribution of ‘fake history’ in the service of nationalist politics. It draws together existing and new scholarship, including more from French perspectives than is common in accounts of events.