Proud Nation

Monday, Dec. 20, 1954
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For centuries the Scots have been forced to be proud of their disadvantages —they have so many of them. There is their climate, whose rains make stone walls sweat with cold damp, and whose glinting sunlight fleetingly transforms forbidding rocks into some of the world's loveliest scenery. There are the English, who keep trying to treat Scotland as a conquered province instead of a proud nation. There is the grudging Scottish soil, whose bleak austerity breeds, by sheer force of survival, hardy sheep bearing wool that makes the world's finest tweeds. There is the Scottish economy, founded on ships and coal and heavy machinery, which, when depression hit, crashed with the thundering completeness of a toppling crane.

But last week Scots were perky. For Scotland is enjoying a prosperity so bounteous that the canny Scots regard it almost with suspicion. Dollarwise, Scots boast that Scotland, with a population (5,000,000) smaller than London's, has been practically supporting England since the war. If Scotland were not tied to the English economy, they suggest, it could have been reveling in dollar prosperity all during the postwar years of austerity.

Boom on the Clyde. Industrial production is at an alltime high, up 10% in the past two years alone. From John o'Groat's to the Mull of Galloway, unemployment is almost unknown. Glasgow, whose Clyde-side shipyards make it the world's biggest builder of ships, is booming. More important, through energetic promotion Scots have succeeded in diversifying their industry against a new time of trouble; in the past five years, 500 firms have established new factories or made major expansions in Scotland. Where, before, its prosperity was almost wholly dependent on shipyards, foundries and blast furnaces, Scotland now makes 90% of Britain's sewing machines, a third of all Britain's watches and clocks, typewriters, office machines and carpets. "Today, everything is made in Scotland," was the theme of this fall's Scottish Industries Exhibition. In the past three years, money in circulation has more than quadrupled.

Scots at first tested their new prosperity as cautiously as thin ice. They had been prosperous before. In the late 19th century, coal and iron built Glasgow into Britain's second largest city (a rank now contested by Birmingham), and Scots flocked down from their hill farms until a third of the whole population lived within 20 miles of Glasgow. When depression came in the 1930s, heavy industry closed down, and one of every three working Scots was unemployed. A group of Scottish businessmen resolved it should never happen again, and formed the Scottish Development Council to launch "industrial estates." On these they built factories, furnished power and water, built homes for workers, and invited manufacturers to move in. Some 360 have, making products from plastics to electronics, from pharmaceuticals to refrigerators.

Put to the test, diversification proved sound. When Britain's industrial production sagged in a 1952 recession, Scotland's dropped a trifling 1%.