[ISL] "Island mentality: how the Hebrides have shaped British culture"

[rfmcdonald]

Madeleine Bunting's essay at The Guardian arguing that the Hebrides have played an outsize role in the formation of British national identities caught my attention.

For a century, Jura has been an anomaly: remote, but under 100 miles from Glasgow or Edinburgh; sparsely populated, yet associated with periodic influxes of the powerful, wealthy and glamorous in search of space and privacy. Appropriately, one of the most bizarre artistic statements about wealth was made on Jura in 1994, when the two members of the pop group the KLF filmed themselves burning £1m in banknotes in a disused boathouse at Ardfin.

George Orwell heard of Jura from Astor, his editor, who regaled him with stories of its beauty and fishing – irresistible to the enthusiastic angler. Orwell, chafing at the restrictions and privations of wartime London, wrote in his diary in 1940 that he was “thinking always of my island in the Hebrides”. He had to wait until 1946 to make the journey, and it turned out to be a melancholy pilgrimage in the aftermath of the deaths of his mother, wife and a sister within the space of three years. But he was enraptured: “These islands are one of the most beautiful parts of the British Isles and largely uninhabited.” He added: “Of course it rains all the time but if one takes that for granted, it doesn’t seem to matter.”

Britain’s understanding of itself – its identity and its place in the world – is deeply rooted in being an island. Yet Great Britain is not an island; it is made up of at least 5,000 islands, around 130 of which are inhabited. But this geographical reality has often been ignored, because island, in the singular, brings with it the attractive characteristics of inviolability, steadfastness and detachment. As one clergyman put it in a sermon praising the Act of Union with Scotland of 1707: “We are fenced in with a wall which knows no master but God only.”

Even more erroneously, England is sometimes described as an island. Martin Amis wrote a television essay on England in 2014, which began with images of waves pounding chalk cliffs and the quintessential English mistake: “England is an island nation.” England in fact shares its island with other nations – Scotland and Wales – yet the language of sharing, of being part of an archipelago, has not featured in the English nation’s self-image.

British culture has a long-standing love affair with islands. In Utopia, Thomas More wrote how King Utopos created an island from an isthmus by digging a channel 15 miles wide. Britain’s detachment from continental Europe brought a degree of protection from invasion, and was seen as God’s geographical blessing for a chosen, favoured people. Shakespeare bequeathed a trove of vivid images of England in John of Gaunt’s speech in Richard II: “This little world”; “This blessed plot”. But there has also been an English ambivalence about islands; in a comparably famous passage, John Donne warned of the dangers of separation in his Meditation XVII: “No man is an island, entire of itself, every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.”