‘Abbotsford to Zion, The Story of Scottish Place Names Around The World’, Elspeth Wills (Birlinn)
Reading Elspeth Wills’s book reminded me of a reaction I had to something I’d recently been writing myself. At one point in a chapter about Glasgow University’s library in the 18th century, I mentioned that two students – Will Forrester and John McKechnie – had confessed to stealing books from the library and been expelled from the university. Suddenly I was struck by the fact that by mentioning their nefarious behaviour I was rescuing them from the oblivion of history.
To my mind the best thing about ‘Abbotsford to Zion’ is that it describes the lives and achievements of a vast number of Scotsmen – and yes, with only one exception, they are all men – who do indeed deserve to be recognised and remembered.
The men in question, for over two centuries at least, were crucial contributors to the acquisition, organisation, and administration of what became the British Empire. The story is the same wherever they went: British North America, the West Indies, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand (and one might well include both the Arctic and Antarctica). The number of Scots involved in the history of all these regions is quite phenomenal. In every case there were Scottish explorers, surveyors, soldiers, missionaries, botanists, naturalists, traders, whalers, ranchers, and immigrants of every kind. What this book demonstrates is that when it came to naming the mountains, rivers, lakes, bays – and the new settlements, towns and cities they were helping to create – they over and over again fell back on the geography and topography of the Scotland they’d left behind.
Elspeth Wills is a professional author and historian. She writes for general readers who enjoy learning something new. Thus she has written books about the building of the original Forth Bridge, about Scottish inventors, about the Cunard Queen liners, about the history of Edinburgh – not to mention the Blue Guide to Scotland. Near the beginning of this book she concedes she was not entirely sure there was a book in the subject of Scottish place names worldwide. Well, I have to say she was right to be hesitant.
The comprehensiveness of the material collected here is certainly impressive. And there are lots of fascinating, incidental details. In the pre-imperial period, for example, 17th-century Poland boasted no fewer than 400 Scottish settlements, and in that country, as well as in parts of Sweden and Denmark, the word for ‘pedlar’ was a version of the word for ‘Scot’. Then in 1750 one third of the white population of Jamaica was Scottish, while in the mid-1800s over half of the population of Prince Edward Island in Canada were Scottish immigrants. In the same period three-quarters of overseas investment in US ranching came from Scotland. Most readers I have no doubt will come upon other facts they find of special interest.
All the same there is something unsatisfactory about the book. As it goes on the wealth of detail – all of it of an identical kind – becomes too great. Just too much more of the same. The author seems reluctant to find any kind of theoretical structure, or wider meaning, in the body of material she has assembled. She proves in detail that Scottish place names do occur around the world – bizarrely even in the naming of trenches in the battle of the Somme. She quotes Mark Twain on the Scots in New Zealand – ‘they stopped here on their way to heaven, thinking they had arrived’—and explains that the novelist John Galt had chosen the name ‘Guelph’ for his new town in Canada, ‘to honour George IV, whose Hanoverian Guelph family lineage stretched back for over a thousand years’ – but normally she makes little or no attempt to interpret, or find any larger meaning in the mass of details she provides. The result is a less than exciting book.
By Andrew Hook | 1 September 2016