Clan Dalziel

The name is a place before it is a family. Dalziel in Lanarkshire gave its name to the people who held it, and the Gaelic form of the surname, Dailghileach, belongs with Cadell, Cleghorne and Ochiltree: names made out of ground rather than out of a father. Most Gaelic surnames of the Highlands and the west are patronymic, built on a father's name with Mac or Nic. This one is built on a piece of ground.

What makes it unmistakable is the letter in the middle that is not a letter. The z stands in for yogh, a medieval Scottish character the alphabet lost, which is why the name is said dee-EL and not as it looks on paper. Three spellings came out of that confusion and all three are still in use: Dalzell on the house above the Clyde, Dalziel as the modern surname, Dalyell at the Binns in West Lothian. The motto did not vary with the spelling. It is two words, I Dare, and the family earned it early.

Thomas de Dalziel enters the record at the worst year a Scottish landholder could enter it. In 1296 he swore allegiance to Edward I. What he did afterwards is the part his family kept: he changed sides, and he fought alongside Robert the Bruce at Bannockburn.

Submission and then defiance is the whole motto in one career, and it set the shape of the family that followed. The Dalziels were never king-makers. They were a laird's house that held its ground in Lanarkshire and produced, at long intervals, a soldier the rest of the country had to take account of.

The lands came to the family in the thirteenth century, on the north bank of the Clyde, and the building at the core of what is now Dalzell House is what they raised on them: a tower house of the fifteenth or early sixteenth century, thick-walled and defensible rather than grand.

The titles came late and came fast. Sir Robert Dalzell was created Lord Dalzell in 1628, and his son was raised again in 1639 as Earl of Carnwath. Then, in 1645, the Earl of Carnwath granted the estate to his nephew James Hamilton of Boggs, and the seat left Dalzell hands for good.

The house did not fall down after them. It stayed with the Hamiltons into the twentieth century, was sold out of that family in 1952, and was restored and divided into eighteen private apartments in the 1980s, with the estate around it passing to North Lanarkshire Council. It is protected as a Category A listed building, which means the tower a Dalzell laird built is still standing and still lived in.

General Sir Thomas Dalzell is the bearer the name is known by, and the outline of his life reads like invention until the dates are checked. He fought for Charles I through the Civil War. After the defeat at Worcester in 1651 he was taken and sent to the Tower of London, and in 1652 he escaped.

An escaped Royalist officer had no country left to soldier in, so he found another one. Dalzell went to Russia and took service with the Tsar as a general of cavalry, campaigning against Turks and Poles. He spent those years in the field at the far end of Europe, in an army with no stake at all in the quarrel that had ruined him, and he came back with a reputation and with the name that stuck to him at home: the Muscovite Devil.

He returned in 1666, and Charles II made him Commander-in-Chief in Scotland. It was not a ceremonial appointment: Dalzell became the first Colonel of the Scots Greys, the regiment that broke the Covenanters at Rullion Green.

The government had its order back. The Covenanting tradition kept a different name for him, Bluidy Tam, and it was not given fondly. Rullion Green is his battle under both names, and a family history that claims the soldier has to carry the nickname with him.

The other house of the name is the Binns in West Lothian, seat of the general's family, and in the twentieth century it descended through a woman. Eleanor Isabel Dalyell of the Binns married Captain Gordon Loch of the Royal Engineers, and when the baronetcy and the Binns came to her the Loch line took the Dalyell name along with them. Their only child, Thomas Dalyell Loch, was born at Edinburgh on 9 August 1932.

He was schooled at Eton, and did his National Service from 1950 to 1952 in the Royal Scots Greys, the regiment whose first Colonel had been the general of his own house. He took his MA at King's College, Cambridge, in 1956, and taught modern studies at Bo'ness Academy and at the Edinburgh Academy through the late 1950s. In 1972, on the death of a cousin, he became 11th Baronet of the Binns.

He had won West Lothian at a by-election in June 1962, in his thirtieth year, with a majority of thirteen thousand built on the local mining vote. He served as Parliamentary Private Secretary to Richard Crossman in the first Wilson government from 1964 to 1970, as Vice-Chair of the Parliamentary Labour Party from 1974 to 1976, and on the Select Committee on European Legislation.

In 1977, during the passage of the Callaghan government's Scotland Bill, that first abortive attempt at devolution, he put an asymmetry to the House as a question. If Scottish members at Westminster kept the right to vote on laws affecting England alone, while English members lost the right to vote on matters devolved to a Scottish parliament, what was the constitutional logic of the arrangement? Enoch Powell, in the debate on Dalyell's amendment in November 1977, gave it the name it has carried ever since: the West Lothian Question.

Nobody has answered it. The devolution settlements of 1998 and 1999 left it standing, and the English Votes for English Laws procedure the Commons adopted in 2015 and dropped again in 2021 was an attempt at it. Very few backbenchers get a constitutional problem named after their constituency.

He held the seat, renamed Linlithgow in the boundary changes of 1983, for forty-three years, and he used them on the executive. He pursued the Westland affair, the Pergau Dam affair, and the long campaign for the release of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi on humanitarian grounds. Above all he pursued the sinking of the Belgrano in 1982, a sustained inquiry into where the Argentinian cruiser was and what orders had been given when the torpedoes were fired, which he would not let the Commons put down.

On the fall of Edward Heath in May 2001 he became Father of the House, and held that precedence until he stood down in 2005. He died at the Binns on 26 January 2017, in his eighty-fifth year. Forty-three years on the back benches, a constitutional question named after his constituency, and the Binns kept in the family to the end. I Dare was not a bad motto for any of it.