Flicking through my 1974 Cub Scout diary I see in scrawled pencil, ‘Mum landed on the Bass Rock’. Why did my mother, Lesley Johnson, want to visit a plug of volcanic rock covered in gannet droppings in Scotland’s Firth of Forth while we were caravanning above the pretty town of North Berwick?
It was down to a passion that culminated in my mother, who never went to university, getting her application to study the Siege of the Bass Rock at Oxford’s Ruskin College more than 30 years later approved as part of the special residential older student ‘Ransacker’ programme .
David Selzer has kindly let me write about Lesley in Other People’s Flowers before, when I told how she was both a Wirral housewife and a local playwright crafting short, funny and poignant plays about Liverpool people under the pen name Lesley Clive. Her work was produced at the Chester Everyman, the Liverpool Playhouse, the Edinburgh Festival and even adapted for local radio and Radio 4.
But while she liked to write contemporary dramas Lesley was also a lover of history – as witnessed in her play about doomed Tudor queen Catherine Howard The Daisy Chain – and that’s why some of her precious holiday time was spent with the seagulls and salty flume on the rock.
Lesley’s fascination with the romantically tragic tale of The Stuart kings led her on this trail. When I was a child, I’d often hear about Charles I’s dashing cavalry commander nephew Prince Rupert of the Rhine and his actions in the English Civil War. Mum was also deeply moved by the stories of Bonnie Prince Charlie, the Jacobite rebellions and the suffering of the Scottish Highland clans for supporting the Stuart cause.
The Siege of The Bass Rock is one of the strangest chapters in the whole story of Jacobite resistance. The tale which so entranced my mother concerned four Scots prisoners on the rock who tricked their guards to take the island’s fortress for the Catholic King James VII.
They formed a small pocket of opposition against William of Orange for three whole years merely a mile off the mainland and within sight of a hostile garrison at Tantallon Castle. Lesley was particularly intrigued by the leader of the rebels, Captain Michael Middleton, and his ‘enterprise and steadfastness’, as she put it in her essay dedication.
While at Ruskin she spent time researching original sources and producing a lengthy, very readable essay on the siege. The icing on the cake was a commission from the magazine history Scotland to produce a digest version of her essay for publication. This was a triumph for her.
It’s an incredible story that should really have any film or TV producer drooling with its ingredients of derring do, self-sacrifice and brutality set among stunning, bleak scenery.
The original essay – including the final, sad fate of Captain Middleton – is now available for online reading below as a PDF.
Lesley sadly now has Alzheimer’s and doesn’t recall the inspiring tale of bravery she documented but I have her old painting of the Bass Rock on my study wall. When I gaze at the picture, it reminds me of the tenacity and determination both she and the subject of her dissertation possessed.
View PDF > The Siege of Bass Rock – Lesley Johnson
By David Selzer
