The Duchess and the Shilling: How the Gordon Highlanders Were Raised with a Kiss

In the spring of 1794, at the cattle fairs and feeing markets of Aberdeenshire and Banffshire, farm servants who had come to find a season’s work found something else.

A lady had ridden into the market on a grey horse. She was wearing a scarlet regimental jacket with yellow facings and a tall Highland bonnet trimmed with black feathers. She was in her middle forties and had been, in her youth, the most celebrated beauty in Scotland, and she was still very much worth looking at. Behind her came pipers. She was Jane, Duchess of Gordon, and she had come to recruit soldiers. The regiment she raised would later give its name to the distinctive Gordon Weathered tartan, a softer, aged-looking version of the military cloth chosen for the Gordon Highlanders.

Britain was at war with revolutionary France, and the Duke of Gordon had been given a commission to raise a new regiment of Highlanders from his vast estates. The trouble was that the north-east had been recruited bare by earlier wars, and men were not coming forward. A recruit was enlisted by accepting a shilling from the King’s representative. So the Duchess, the story goes, took the shilling, placed it between her lips, and let it be known that any man who wanted it would have to come and get it.

Bydand

The tale has been told in Scotland ever since, and like all good stories it has improved with keeping. One version has a young blacksmith, the handsomest man in the district, who had turned down every recruiting sergeant in the county. He stepped up, took the coin from the Duchess’s lips with a kiss, and then tossed the shilling into the crowd, to show everyone that it was the kiss he had enlisted for. He is said to have been killed in the regiment’s first battle.

 

Whatever the exact truth of the method, the result is a matter of record. The regiment was embodied at Aberdeen in June 1794, close to a thousand strong, as the 100th Regiment of Foot. It was renumbered the 92nd a few years later, and the army came to know it as the Gordon Highlanders.

 

The woman who raised it was as remarkable as the legend. Jane Maxwell was the daughter of an impoverished baronet and grew up half wild in an Edinburgh tenement. It was said that as a girl she had been seen riding down the High Street on the back of a pig. She married the Duke of Gordon at about eighteen, and made herself the leading political hostess in London, the confidante of Prime Minister Pitt, and a patron of Robert Burns. She married three of her daughters to dukes. She had a broad Scots tongue, a wicked sense of humour and no fear of anyone.

 

The family she married into had been the great power of the north-east since the fourteenth century. The Gordon chiefs held Strathbogie, around the town of Huntly, and their authority ran so wide that the head of the house was known throughout Scotland as the Cock o’ the North. The title belongs today to the Marquess of Huntly. The clan’s crest is a stag’s head rising from a coronet, its plant badge is ivy, and its motto is one blunt Scots word: Bydand. Abiding. Steadfast.

One stripe, two or three

The new regiment needed a tartan, and how it got one is recorded in a letter.

 

In 1793 the Duke applied to William Forsyth, a clothier in Huntly, for patterns. Forsyth’s reply survives. He proposed taking the dark tartan of the 42nd, the Black Watch, which every Highland regiment used as a base, and adding a stripe of yellow to distinguish it, since yellow was the colour of the regiment’s facings. He sent three samples: one with a single yellow stripe, one with two and one with three. “I imagine the yellow stripes will appear very lively,” he wrote.

 

The Duke chose the single stripe. Tradition adds that he then invited the heads of the cadet branches of his family to take their pick of the others, which is said to be how certain Gordon families came to wear the two- and three-line versions.

 

So the Gordon tartan is the Black Watch with one fine yellow line running through the green: navy, bottle green and black, with a thread of gold. It is about the best-documented tartan origin there is. The regiment wore it for two hundred years, through the Peninsula and Waterloo, through the North-West Frontier, where Piper Findlater won the Victoria Cross at Dargai in 1897 by playing on with both ankles shot through, and through both World Wars. The Gordons were amalgamated in 1994. Their museum in Aberdeen is one of the finest regimental museums in the country. And the clan, having supplied the regiment, adopted the regiment’s tartan as its own.

Old gold

In its Modern colours the Gordon is a dark, military cloth, and looks best under a black jacket. But the mills also weave it in what they call weathered or reproduction colours, and in those it becomes something else.

 

The weathered palette is a twentieth-century idea, said in the trade to have been developed from a scrap of old tartan that had lain buried in peat, its natural dyes leached into browns and greys. Applied to the Gordon, it turns the navy to a slate blue-grey, the green to a soft olive brown, the black to charcoal. The yellow line fades to the colour of old gold braid on a uniform that has spent a century in a trunk. It is an extraordinarily handsome cloth, and it looks like what it is: a soldier’s tartan that has seen long service.

 

Gordon Weathered tartan is usually listed by retailers with the rest of the clan’s setts, the Modern and Ancient colourings and the white-ground Dress Gordon beloved of Highland dancers, and made to order as kilts, skirts, waistcoats and scarves, or sold by the yard.

 

It does, however, change the rules about what goes with it, and nowhere more than on the feet.

Aboyne, the first Saturday in August

Stuart Gordon is fifty-two, a civil engineer from Melbourne, and he is standing on the green at Aboyne, on Deeside, where the Highland games have been held under the patronage of the Marquess of Huntly since 1867. He is wearing a kilt in the weathered Gordon, which he had made for the trip. And he is looking, with some satisfaction, at his shoes.

 

He nearly got them wrong. His first instinct had been black. Black shoes are the standard advice with a kilt, and he had been searching online for black kilt boots for a fortnight before he understood two things. The first was that what he wanted was not a boot. The traditional shoe for Highland dress is the ghillie brogue: a low, stout leather shoe with no tongue and very long laces, descended from the pierced deerskin shoes that Highlanders wore precisely because they let the water out again. The second thing was that black was wrong for this kilt.

 

A weathered tartan has no true black in it, and no hard colour of any kind. It is all slate, olive, brown and dull gold. Put a pair of shiny black shoes under it and they are the darkest, sharpest thing in the whole outfit, and the eye goes straight to the man’s feet. What the cloth asks for is brown.

 

He bought his kilt boots, as he still privately calls them, from Scottish Kilt, which had made the kilt. Their ghillie brogues come in genuine leather, in black and in brown, with no tongue and long laces that wrap the ankle, in the description’s own words, “so wet ground drains out.” They are sized like ordinary shoes. He took the brown, a deep chestnut.

 

Then he built the rest of the outfit upwards from them. A brown leather day sporran to match, and a brown belt. A tweed jacket and waistcoat in a lovat mixture, greenish brown with a fleck of gold. Hose in a soft olive, with flashes in old gold to bring out the line in the tartan. A kilt pin in antique finish, not bright chrome. Nothing in the whole outfit is black, and nothing in it shines. It looks as if it had grown on him.

 

He keeps a second rule in mind for the evening. If he wears the same kilt tonight under a black Argyll jacket, then black shoes come back, with charcoal hose, and the weathered cloth will look silvery and formal. Brown by day and in the country. Black by night and in town. It is the same rule men have always followed with a suit.

 

And there is a third option, for the pub afterwards. With the jacket off, the sporran swung round to his hip, the hose pushed down and a pair of sturdy brown walking boots in place of the brogues, the same kilt becomes ordinary weekend clothing, which in the north-east of Scotland is exactly what it is.

 

The laces he learned from a video. Pull them tight. Cross them and twist them together three or four times at the front of the ankle. Take the ends round the back, bring them forward again, and tie them off at the front, low, just above the ankle bone. Not up the calf.

 

A pipe band comes onto the field, in the dark Modern Gordon, yellow line bright in the sun. An old man beside him in a Gordon tie nods at Stuart’s kilt.

 

“Weathered,” he says. “That’s a bonny cloth. You ken how the regiment was raised?”

 

“The Duchess,” says Stuart. “With the shilling.”

 

“Aye. My great-great-great-grandfather took it.” The old man pauses. “So he aye said, onyway. Every man in Strathbogie’s grandfather kissed the Duchess, if you believe them. She’d have had lips like a saddle.”

Steadfast

Jane Gordon died in 1812, estranged from her Duke, in a London hotel, and was carried home to be buried beside the Spey. The regiment she raised outlived her by a hundred and eighty years and won a reputation second to none in the British Army. Its tartan, chosen from three samples sent by a Huntly shopkeeper, is now the tartan of the whole clan.

 

In its weathered colours it has the look of something that has been through a great deal and come out quieter and better for it. It wants brown leather, soft tweed and dull gold, and none of the polish of the parade ground. The Duchess, who never in her life cared what was correct and always knew exactly what suited her, would have understood perfectly.

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