Skip to main content

Wi' Wallace bled

Two quotes from "Scots Wha Hae" in a single day- what can be the meaning of this?

Lepidus pointed out a story in The Economist about Poles coming to the Highlands in significant numbers, many of whom have names that were originally Scottish.

I think that the story might have come from a comment I made to Edward Lucas about Lech Walesa, whose name has been said, without any confirmation, to be a corruption of Wallace.

Certainly the family is very much part of the area- and may be Kaszub - and of course the City of Gdansk does have two districts: Stare and Nowe Szkoty.
Labels:

Comments

Etzel Pangloss said…
Welch (Wallace/Walesa) and other forms of the word simply meant foreign in Old German.

I suspect that if there is similarities between Sottish and Polish names then Germanics will be responsible. (Unless of course, history has denied me the story of the great Scottish exodus to Poland!)
5:38 pm
Anonymous said…
There has been plenty of movement between Scotland and Central/East Europe. There are settlements of Scots all over the place, ranging from Russia to Poland, from Lithuania to Estonia. There was even a small conference in Aberdeen discussing this.
8:07 pm
herschelian said…
There have been links between Scots and Poles for centuries, this may be of interest:
http://www.electricscotland.com/history/poland/intro-1.htm
9:44 pm
Anonymous said…
The Poles are having the biggest impact on this country of migrants since the Huegenots Cicero. Not just because of the per capita numbers but also because of their widespreadeness. Many other immigrants for part cultural/part commercial reasons have over the last fifty years clustered in London and a few large northern cities. Anecdotal experience chimes with stories from places like Crewe. The Poles will go anywhere. So this immigration is an experience the whole country is feeling not just regions of it as in past.

I can't help but wonder how closely it is tying us to Polande. I'm reminded of that BBC series Cold war where Andreotti was relating a tale of how the American used their Italian community to great effectin the elections of 1948 when the communists were threatening takeover. By that stage there was hardly a family in Italy that didn't have a relative of some descrip in America. The American therefore used their patriotic feeling to get them into a letter writing campaign to family back in Italy urging them not vote for the Communists. Andreotti said its importance couldn't be overplayed. Why mention this, well the influence it gave America. With our influx especially from Poland, should we be seen as similarly influential in "New europ." How should we use this influence is a great question surely Cicero.

Lepidus.
7:45 pm
Anonymous said…
thank you nice sharing

cep program
1:20 pm
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Concert and Blues

Tallinn is full tonight... Big concerts on at the Song field The Weeknd and Bonnie Tyler (!). The place is buzzing and some sixty thousand concert goers have booked every bed for thirty miles around Tallinn. It should be a busy high summer, but it isn´t. Tourism is down sharply overall. Only 70 cruise ships calling this season, versus over 300 before Ukraine. Since no one goes to St Pete, demand has fallen, and of course people think that Estonia is not safe. We are tired. The economy is still under big pressure, and the fall of tourism is a significant part of that. The credit rating for Estonia has been downgraded as the government struggles with spending. The summer has been a little gloomy, and soon the long and slow autumn will drift into the dark of the year. Yesterday I met with more refugees: the usual horrible stories, the usual tears. I try to make myself immune, but I can´t. These people are wounded in spirit, carrying their grief in a terrible cradling. I try to project hop
Post a Comment
Read more

Media misdirection

In the small print of the UK budget we find that the Chancellor of the Exchequer (the British Finance Minister) has allocated a further 15 billion Pounds to the funding for the UK track and trace system. This means that the cost of the UK´s track and trace system is now 37 billion Pounds.  That is approximately €43 billion or US$51 billion, which is to say that it is amount of money greater than the national GDP of over 110 countries, or if you prefer, it is roughly the same number as the combined GDP of the 34 smallest economies of the planet.  As at December 2020, 70% of the contracts for the track and trace system were awarded by the Conservative government without a competitive tender being made . The program is overseen by Dido Harding , who is not only a Conservative Life Peer, but the wife of a Conservative MP, John Penrose, and a contemporary of David Cameron and Boris Johnson at Oxford. Many of these untendered contracts have been given to companies that seem to have no notewo
Post a Comment
Read more

Bournemouth absence

Although I had hoped to get down to the Liberal Democrat conference in Bournemouth this year, simple pressure of work has now made that impossible. I must admit to great disappointment. The last conference before the General Election was always likely to show a few fireworks, and indeed the conference has attracted more headlines than any other over the past three years. Some of these headlines show a significant change of course in terms of economic policy. Scepticism about the size of government expenditure has given way to concern and now it is clear that reducing government expenditure will need to be the most urgent priority of the next government. So far it has been the Liberal Democrats that have made the running, and although the Conservatives are now belatedly recognising that cuts will be required they continue to fail to provide even the slightest detail as to what they think should guide their decisions in this area. This political cowardice means that we are expected to ch
3 comments
Read more