Scottish fiddling while Rome burns? The RCPsychiS Tartan Competition

Dr Jane Morris, Chair of RCPsych in Scotland encourages members to design a tartan to celebrate 30 years of the College in Scotland.

The inspired suggestions of the Scottish Chair are not always adopted with alacrity by the Royal College of Psychiatrists. So I was pleasantly surprised by the enthusiastic response from staff and fellow members when I suggested last year that we should celebrate our 30th anniversary by creating a College tartan.

In January, looking at the work already planned for the year ahead, the workforce situation and the government’s financial forecast, I apologised for putting such a frivolous item on the agenda. But by then the notion had grown arms and legs and even a sporran. March 22nd is the deadline for submissions, we have already held a live design workshop at Queen Street and a last-minute virtual event is planned. Electronic entries roll in, and a technician is standing by to render the design into an official mix of unique threadcounts, so that it can be formally registered in the great book, alongside Black Watch, Royal Stewart – and Hello Kitty.

Textile design is not an evidence-based treatment for burnout. I do understand you have better things to do in your nominally ‘free’ time – from marathons, mandatory mindfulness, and emergency MDT meetings to job applications and meetings with your pension advisor. I can’t imagine you need me to add to the to-do list. Please accept this blog as a profound apology, accompanied by my musings on the pleasures of exploring and creating tartans in the company of patients, College staff, psychiatrists, and their beautiful children.

The notion of an official tartan arose in conversations about College values, about the distinct character of the College in Scotland, and the need for psychiatry and psychiatrists to cultivate a restored sense of pride. As psychiatrists we haven’t been big on corporate identity – we never really embraced white coats or slung our stethoscopes self-consciously round our shoulders, and personally I don’t on the whole much like uniforms and team colours – they can be regimental, sectarian, divisive and oppositional. I fought battles to keep our mental health nurses from having to wear uniforms, and aren’t we all fed up to the back teeth with scrubs? One size really did not fit all. For me, clothes are ways to keep warm, soothe body image anxieties, and put out style signals. I’m happy to communicate a sense of belonging but not of being an identikit clone.

The nature of tartan is elusive and misunderstood, with paradoxical relationships to Scottish and British identities Looking into the history of tartan I found it was not originally a form of toxic nationalism, not even clannish, but full of delightful conundrums and contradictions. I learned that the first known tartan trews graced the legs of a well preserved 3 thousand year old body in a swamp in what is now North West China. The man was 6 foot tall, a round-eyed Celt with a ginger beard. We have no idea what took him and his family so far from home. Similar DNA - and similar weaving patterns - have also been found on tartan clad bodies from a slightly later period in the Salzburg salt mines.

The earliest known Scottish tartan fabric, a fragment from the 3rd century AD, was found stuffed into a jar of Roman coins in Falkirk – you can see it now in the Chambers Street museum. The cloth was then, as it is now, airy and warm, cheering to body and spirit and unlikely to show the dirt. For millennia, weaving tartans of diverse pattern was a cottage industry. The east of the country was better able to import red cochineal dyes from mainland Europe, so more likely to include reds, in contrast with the cheaper and more readily available blue and green vegetable colours available in the west Highlands. But no special pattern signified a particular clan or gang. In fact, in a dashing foretaste of Vivienne Westwood, people seem to have enjoyed mixing, layering and patching different patterns and designs.

It was, of course, at the time of Bonnie Prince Charlie that tartan, whether Stewart or mongrel in pattern, came to represent Jacobite sympathies. This symbolised such a threat to the English Establishment that in the aftermath of Scottish defeat at Culloden, tartan was subject to the 1746 Dress Act. Even today there is a lingering defiant glamour in wearing something forbidden. Punk culture picked up on this dimension with its ripped and zipped tartan designs.

It's rather a pity that Walter Scott neutered the revolutionary spirit of tartan by inviting George Fourth to a sort of Edinburgh fancy dress party in 1821. By this time tartan – forbidden north of the Forth - had become essentially a Lowlands fashion. It was a recognisable part of regimental uniforms and adopted by officers’ rich wives. Bizarrely, the 19th century went on to develop the widely accepted notion that tartans officially represent individual clans as far back as the dawn of time. The Victorians rewrote history, inventing a fictional back story for tartan, that was pure ‘Balmorality’. Prince Albert, (famous for importing the German Christmas to Osborne and Windsor) particularly enjoyed parading his tartan kilt and enormous sporran around Aberdeenshire.

What do we make of tartan today? During the COVID epidemic Glaswegian Brian Halley designed a ‘Homeless’ tartan to raise funds for Shelter, and the First Minister sported a Homeless tartan mask for her daily Jane Godley impersonations. Last year Mental Health charity SAMH launched a tartan to celebrate their centenary. Can you expect your winning polyester tartan to grace lanyards and keyrings, polyester underpants and Bermuda shorts, hip flasks and shortbread tins, whilst Proclaimers’ hits blare out from the open windows of our Queen Street emporium? Or will we select a dignified and solemn weave like the Royal College of Physicians, whose plaid incorporates colours signifying the four humours of ancient medicine: phlegm, blood, cholera and black bile? Anything would be better than the beige tartan of apathy.

Fear not, the wit and wisdom of the concept is still alive and kicking. Sitting in a café in Morningside I found myself sharing the wifi with a particularly cool hipster dressed in double denim, shades and a tartan turban. And if anyone wants to design an antipsychiatry tartan, you’re very welcome – I’ll look out for it on the barricades outside this summer’s Congress.

Dr Jane Morris, Chair, RCPsych in Scotland