A Scottish tour operator has set up a national ‘history police’ forum, allowing the public to report misleading or inaccurate information at museums and local information boards.
iNews reports:
Catriona Stevenson, who runs Clyde Coast Tourism, was inspired to set up the group after becoming annoyed by the number of factual mistakes and ‘sheer bias’ on display at public monuments and other displays around Scotland. However, she insisted that her ‘History Police’ group was not a ‘moaners’ charter’ but a place for people to discuss often disputed aspects of the country’s history with the hope of inspiring them to find out more.
The 31-year-old said one of the most common mistakes was people and organisations referring to King James I and II when they actually meant James VI and VII, claiming this happens ‘all the time’. She told the National Newspaper: ‘I have been going around places all over Scotland for years and finding things that just grated on me. I saw one panel in Glasgow during the Commonwealth Games which said that James Watt was born in Glasgow – I complained that he was born in Greenock and the panel was changed.’
She added that at the Bannockburn battlefield site, one of Scotland’s most famous tourist spots, she spotted a claim that Robert the Bruce murdered John Comyn in Dumfries. She said: ‘The accounts of the actual happening are very dubious. It might just have been a fight or a duel during which Bruce killed Comyn – he definitely fatally wounded him. To say to Scots that one of your greatest heroes is a murderer on holy ground is about making out that the Bruce was somehow a lesser king, and he absolutely was not.’
Last month Ms Stevenson sparked a row with the Isle of Arran Heritage Museum over its display about the Highland Clearances, claiming that it glossed over the fact that they were ‘nothing less than ethnic cleansing’. The museum hit back, claiming that the people who left Arran during the clearances had an ‘element of choice’ and that force was not used to make them leave, as in other parts of Scotland. After a review, it left the display as it was.
Ms Stevenson said she believed some of the inaccuracies were caused by ‘ignorance’ due to the poor teaching of Scottish history in schools. She said: ‘You get taught a very basic history of Scotland. Take the Jacobite uprisings, which are always taught wrongly in my opinion – it’s all about 18th and 19th century British propaganda. I was standing with tourists on Culloden battlefield recently when a woman exclaimed ‘But the Jacobites were terrorists’.’
