Ian Hamilton and the Stone of Scone

Some symbols are believed unliftable because no one has tried the weight. A throne, a crown, a slab of red sandstone bedded under a wooden chair: each holds its station by the long unanimity of people who agreed not to test it. The act that breaks the spell is rarely a war or a parliament. More often it is four young people in a borrowed car, with a crowbar from a Mayfair garage and a torch in a coat pocket, who decide that the question of whether the thing can be moved is, in the end, a practical one.

THE LONG GRIEVANCE

The slab had lain under the Coronation Chair at Westminster Abbey since the reign of Edward I, who took it from Scone Abbey on the eighth of August 1296 in the course of dismantling the Scottish kingdom. It was the inauguration stone of the kings of Scots, the seat on which Kenneth, Macbeth, Alexander and Robert Bruce had been set. Edward Plantagenet did not destroy it; he placed it under the wooden chair on which thirty-two English and British monarchs were afterwards crowned, so that every coronation in London should rest, literally, on the seat of Scottish kingship. The Declaration of Arbroath, signed in the abbey church of that town in 1320, had asked the Pope to recognise that the Scots would not be ruled by the English so long as a hundred of them remained alive. For six hundred and fifty-four years the slab stayed where Edward had put it. Scotland's nationhood survived in law, in church, in school and in song, but the stone, by common consent, was unliftable.

Ian Hamilton was twenty-four years old in the winter of 1950, son of a Paisley tailor, a second-year law student at the University of Glasgow, with three companions: Gavin Vernon, twenty-four, an engineer, square-shouldered and quiet; Alan Stuart, twenty-four, with the second crowbar; and Kay Matheson, twenty-two, a Gaelic-speaking primary teacher of Inverasdale in Wester Ross. They were not romantics. They had read the legal texts. They believed the slab had been taken from Scotland under no instrument any court would now uphold, and they had decided to demonstrate the point by lifting it.

THE NIGHT IN THE ABBEY

It was Christmas Eve, and London was thin of people. The four had reconnoitred the abbey in the preceding fortnight; Hamilton had hidden himself in the building on a previous night and been discovered by a watchman, talked his way out, and come back. The plan was simple. A Ford Anglia at Old Palace Yard, driven by Matheson. A second car in Lambeth, for the bulk of the stone. The wicket gate at Poets' Corner could be forced. The watchman's round was timed. They went in shortly after four in the morning of the twenty-fifth of December.

The choir was cold and the candle-light from the shielded lantern caught only the lower edge of the Coronation Chair and the iron staples that held the slab into the bay between two pillars. Hamilton, in a navy duffel-coat over a sweater and grey flannels, had taken his shoes off. Vernon and Stuart slid the heavy oak chair forward off the bay until the underside of the lower stretcher cleared the top of the slab. The slab was red Perthshire sandstone, four hundred and thirty-six pounds, bedded on iron. Hamilton pulled it toward him.

THE SECOND IN WHICH IT BROKE

It came away from the staples and, in the pulling, it cracked. The fracture ran two-thirds of the way along its length and went clean through. The smaller piece, ninety pounds of it, came loose in his hands; the larger, the bulk, was still in the bay. He sat down on the stone floor of the ambulatory and looked at what he had done, and for ten seconds the cold of the flags came up through his stockinged feet and the lantern guttered and his ears registered the silence of the choir as a kind of pressure, and the smaller piece, blunt and heavy and tea-coloured, sat on his knees as plain as any object he had ever handled, and the thought that arrived was not the bleak one (I have broken the Stone of Destiny) but the practical one that the stone had been cracked and re-set in iron staples before, by masons who were dead now, and that James Robert Gray of Bath Street, Glasgow, was a mason who was alive, and that the watchman would be back in the south transept in eight minutes, and that Kay was in the Ford Anglia at Old Palace Yard with the engine running and the lights off, and that a thing in two pieces could be carried out in two journeys where a thing in one piece could not be carried out at all, and that the break, which felt at the first instant like catastrophe, was in fact the form in which the slab had agreed to be moved. He stood up. He picked up the smaller piece in a duffel sack with rope handles and walked it through the cloister door, across the night yard of the abbey, out through the wicket gate, onto Old Palace Yard, and put it in the boot of the car.

THE DRIVE SOUTH

Matheson drove. They went south down Whitehall in the dark, past the Cenotaph, across Westminster Bridge, and turned east on the south bank toward Lambeth and the Kent road. They were out of London by half past five. At the Croydon junction Hamilton told her about the break. She was quiet for a long mile. By his own memoir, written forty years later, she said the stone has been broken in two and reset in iron staples for hundreds of years, Ian. They have done this before. We will have it mended. He drove on. Vernon and Stuart came back to the abbey the next morning, lifted the larger piece through the same cloister door, and took it north by Birmingham, parked behind a sweet-shop, on to Yorkshire, and into Glasgow within five days.

THE BACK-SHOP IN BATH STREET

The mason James Robert Gray of Bath Street took the two pieces into his back-shop, drilled a steel pin through the break, bonded the halves with a cement of his own mixing, and was paid two pounds ten shillings for the work. The repair has held to this day. On the eleventh of April 1951, in a covered van driven up to Arbroath, the mended slab was laid on the high altar of Arbroath Abbey, the church in which the Declaration of Arbroath had been signed in 1320, with a Lion Rampant draped over it and a typed petition attached to the Government asking for the Stone to be returned to Scotland in perpetuity.

THE DECISION AT WESTMINSTER

The Government of the day, under Attlee, on the advice of the Lord Advocate Sir John Wheatley and of the Scottish Office, declined to prosecute the four students. The political calculation was plain: a trial would have made the case for the Stone's return in open court, before a Scottish jury, in the year after the Scottish Covenant had gathered two million signatures asking for a Scottish parliament. The slab was taken quietly back to Westminster and replaced under the Chair. The matter was closed for forty-five years. In November 1996, on St Andrew's Day, the Government of John Major formally returned the Stone to Scotland and laid it among the Honours of Scotland in Edinburgh Castle. It was lent south once, for the Coronation of Charles III in May 2023, and was back in Edinburgh inside forty-eight hours.

WHAT THE LIFTING PROVED

Ian Hamilton took silk in 1985, became one of Scotland's leading defence advocates, lived to ninety-five and died in 2022. He held to the end of his life that the four of them had broken the stone but had not stolen it; that an inauguration stone of the Scots, by his lights, could not be stolen by Scots from London. He said, in his old age, that he had done it because Scotland needed to know the Stone was not unliftable. The point was never the slab. The point was the demonstration that a thing the law treated as fixed could be lifted by four young people with a crowbar and a small car, and that what followed from the lifting, the mending, the laying on the altar at Arbroath, the long quiet of the Scottish Office, the return in 1996, was not magic but the ordinary consequence of having shown the weight. The Coronation Chair stands empty of its slab in Westminster Abbey. The Stone lies in the upper hall of the Castle in Edinburgh, the steel pin of James Robert Gray of Bath Street still running through the break, the cement still holding.