Hugh MacDiarmid

37

Hugh MacDiarmid : biography

11 August 1892 – 9 September 1978

Politics and later career

In 1928, MacDiarmid helped found the National Party of Scotland. He was also a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain. During the 1930s, he was expelled from the former for being a communist and from the latter for being a nationalist. From 1931, whilst he was in London, until 1943, after he had left the Shetland island of Whalsay for conscripted war work in Glasgow, MacDiarmid was watched by the British Intelligence Services.Scott Lyall, ‘"The Man is a Menace": MacDiarmid and Military Intelligence’, in Scottish Studies Review 8.1, Spring 2007, pp. 37-52. In 1949, George Orwell compiled a list of suspected communist sympathisers for British intelligence. He included MacDiarmid in this list. In 1956, MacDiarmid rejoined the Communist Party.

As Grieve, he stood in the 1950 election in the Glasgow Kelvingrove constituency, as the Scottish National Party candidate, coming last with 639 votes. He also stood against Alec Douglas-Home in Kinross and Western Perthshire for the Communist Party at the 1964 election, taking only 127 votes. MacDiarmid listed Anglophobia amongst his hobbies in his Who’s Who entry. He died, aged 86, in Edinburgh.Bold, Alan. "MacDiarmid". London: Paladin, 1190. p 493.

In 2010, letters were discovered showing that he believed a Nazi invasion of Britain would benefit Scotland. In a letter sent from Whalsay, Shetland, in April 1941, he wrote: “On balance I regard the Axis powers, tho’ more violently evil for the time being, less dangerous than our own government in the long run and indistinguishable in purpose." A year earlier, in June 1940, he wrote: “Although the Germans are appalling enough, they cannot win, but the British and French bourgeoisie can and they are a far greater enemy. If the Germans win they could not hold their gain for long, but if the French and British win it will be infinitely more difficult to get rid of them.” Marc Horne in the Daily Telegraph commented: "MacDiarmid flirted with fascism in his early thirties, when he believed it was a doctrine of the left. In two articles written in 1923, Plea for a Scottish Fascism and Programme for a Scottish Fascism, he appeared to support Mussolini’s regime. By the 1930s however, following Mussolini’s lurch to the right, his position had changed and he castigated Neville Chamberlain over his appeasement of Hitler’s expansionism." Deirdre Grieve, MacDiarmid’s daughter-in-law and literary executor, noted: “I think he entertained almost every ideal it was possible to entertain at one point or another."

Places of interest

MacDiarmid grew up in the Scottish town of Langholm in Dumfries and Galloway. The town is home to a monument in his honour made of cast iron which takes the form of a large open book depicting images from his writings.

MacDiarmid lived in Montrose for a time where he worked for the local newspaper the Montrose Review. Scott Lyall, ‘"Genius in a Provincial Town": MacDiarmid’s Poetry and Politics in Montrose’, in Scottish Studies Review 5.2, Autumn 2004, pp. 41-55.

MacDiarmid also lived on the isle of Whalsay in Shetland, in Sodom (Sudheim)

Hugh MacDiarmid is commemorated in Makars’ Court, outside The Writers’ Museum, Lawnmarket, Edinburgh.

Selections for Makars’ Court are made by The Writers’ Museum, The Saltire Society and The Scottish Poetry Library.