Two decades ago, on a rare hot Scottish summer’s day, an entire Glasgow community came out to say goodbye to a fallen soldier.
Teenagers on bikes, mothers with prams and grannies with their wheeled shopping bags stopped in silence as a hearse slowly edged through Pollok on the city’s south side.
A few weeks earlier, at the end of June 2004, a 19-year-old had been killed by a roadside bomb in Basra, Iraq. The MoD announced his loss with “deep regret”, detailing his full name and rank: Fusilier Gordon Campbell Gentle. Pollok remembered its son more simply: wreaths of white flowers spelt out his nickname, “Gento”.
This was not long after President Bush had declared “mission accomplished in Iraq”. Gentle’s family and community were not just mourning, they were raging. About 800 locals gathered outside St James’ kirk heard Ian Mann, its minister, announce over loudspeakers that he had “just three words of admonishment” for the US leader and Britain’s Sir Tony Blair: “Shame on you.”
Gentle’s mother, Rose, kept telling his story. Humza Yousaf, the former first minister who is also from Pollok, was among those who said her campaign convinced them to support Scottish sovereignty. The dead teenager mattered, politically as much as personally.
He and other high-profile “peace-time soldiers” lost in conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan and Northern Ireland helped change the way Scots felt about the British state and its military. Scotland was once a great recruiting ground for the UK’s armed forces. Not any more.
In 2014, the year of the independence referendum, the British Army reported an official intake of 630 untrained soldiers from Scotland.
• Army numbers fall below government’s 73,000 target for first time
By 2023 that number had dropped to 330, less than one a day. In the past financial year, it was 370. That is a decline of 41 per cent in a decade. It is the same story for the Royal Navy and the RAF, where Scottish recruitment has plunged 37 per cent and 53 per recent respectively since Scotland voted on its constitutional future.
The British Army has been shrinking since the Cold War, winding up entire historic Scottish regiments, severing multigenerational links with communities as it does so. Recruitment has fallen in England too, but by nothing like the scale seen in Scotland. For the army, it is down 13 per cent across the UK.
Do young Scots feel British?
Back in 2014 Scottish recruits accounted for 8 per cent of the total new intake of soldiers, roughly in line with the country’s share of the UK population. Now it is 5.4 per cent.
“Well, this does not seem to bode well, does it?” said Peter Jackson, a professor of global security at Glasgow University who has been closely monitoring Scottish attitudes to the union, self-determination and defence since before the 2014 vote.
“The figures are shocking but if you look at the demographics on support for independence it is not good news for the union side. I would ask if the young people that the army recruiters are trying to reach feel British? Do they have a sense of duty, but more importantly, do they have any enthusiasm for being involved in a UK enterprise? This is all about identity.”
The lastest poll by Norstat for The Sunday Times found 67 per cent of voters aged between 16 and 34 — men and women of fighting age — want independence. That compared with less than 40 per cent among those over 55. The SNP, whose deputy leader, Keith Brown, is a Falklands veteran, is not against young people taking the King’s shilling. But Jackson is not alone in wondering whether young Scots see themselves in a “British” army that no longer has the ostentatiously Scottish regiments of old.
Something has changed in Scotland, so glacially slowly it is almost imperceptible. The proportion of citizens who say they are “Scottish only” in censuses has risen, from 62 per cent in 2011 to 65 per cent in 2022. There has been an even steeper rise in British-only identity, now 14 per cent of the population. The share who think of themselves as British and Scottish — the traditional dual identity of unionism — has collapsed from more than 18 per cent to barely 8 per cent in just over a decade.
Jackson’s colleague Murray Pittock, Glasgow University’s pro-vice principal and an expert in Scottish cultural history, stressed that the army for centuries embodied and embraced those who were proud to be both British and Scottish.
Pittock even remembers speaking to an infantry officer who, remembering the exiled Stuart monarchs, wistfully raised their glass “to the king over the water”. The army was “hugely important” in making Scotland British, Pittock said. It also, he added, helped create a bloc of Scottish-British unionist opinion.
Scottish army history linked to Empire
There is a lot of history to cover. In 1759, barely a decade and a half after Jacobite rebels were finally defeated at Culloden, Highlanders, with their claymores drawn and their kilts swirling, were storming across the Plains of Abraham to take Quebec, Canada for the still newly minted British state. For a couple of centuries after that Scots were central to the imperial project. Pittock stresses the role of the Highland Division as the rearguard defence at Dunkirk during the Second World War.
Infantrymen from north of the border served in regiments steeped in Scottish martial traditions with names closely tied to easily identifiable places: the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, the Gordon Highlanders, the Black Watch, the King’s Own Scottish Borderers and, like Gentle, the Royal Scots Fusiliers.
Some recruiting posters in the 20th century did not even mention Britain. “Scotland For Ever” read one. This rallying cry, for example, was the title of a painting of a charge by the Royal Scots Greys, a Scottish army cavalry regiment that became part of the British Army after the union, at the Battle of Waterloo.
After the Cold War the old Scots regiments either slowly disappeared or were reduced to mere battalions, or training or ceremonial units. Connections of kin, clan and community were shattered.
The army did not become less Scottish overnight. For years it still tried to appeal north of the border. “In the early years of devolution,” Pittock pointed out, “the army recruitment marketing campaigns used a Saltire. They do not do so anymore.”
All the remaining Scottish infantry units were amalgamated into the single Royal Regiment of Scotland in 2006. In 2021 the first battalion of that regiment, 1 Scots, held its last parade wearing tam O’shanter caps on their heads. The former Royal Scots, a unit that predates the union, and King’s Own Scottish Borderers were turned to Rangers.
It is not just that the army was getting smaller. It was also that it was becoming more specialised, with new formations and units replacing infantry and taking on new threats, such as cyber or drone attacks.
“Scottish soldiers in the British military were visibly distinctive, they were distinctive in their customs and habits and their uniforms and traditions,” Pittock explained. “They formed a very important part of the British international and imperial project.”
Their regiments, moreover, enjoyed political support that crossed Scotland’s unionist-nationalist divide.
“The Scottish regiments had significant appeal in Scotland as markers of Scottish identity within the British Empire, but the trouble is they are very much linked to the British Empire,” added Pittock.
“Now I think the army finds it difficult to present itself as ‘Scottish and British’ in the post-imperial era. And ‘Scottish and British’ as an identity has itself come under pressure.
“The army’s retreat from empire and the downturn in military expenditure after the Cold War led to the need to slim down the Scottish regiments. This sent the message that the era of Scottish martial participation was over, and it was alienating.
“I’m not saying the army is regarded as alien in Scotland, but it’s not an institution that people readily identify with.”
Scotland’s ‘crucial’ defence role today
Scotland still has a military footprint. The navy keeps its nuclear submarines at Faslane in Argyll, accounting for much of the military personnel north of the border. The Royal Marines have an important base at Arbroath in Angus. The RAF flies sorties over the North Atlantic and elsewhere from Lossiemouth in Moray.
The Ministry of Defence did not respond to questions about why recruitment in Scotland was so much lower than elsewhere in the UK. “Scotland is crucial to our armed forces,” said a spokesman.
“This government inherited a recruitment crisis, with targets being missed every year for the past 14 years and is taking decisive action to stop the long-term decline in numbers.
“We are committed to fixing recruitment and have already given personnel the largest pay rise in decades, scrapped 100 outdated recruitment policies, and passed legislation through the Commons to introduce a new armed forces commissioner to improve service life.”
A new private in the army earns £25,000 a year. The starting salary of a lance corporal is more than £31,000. The average salary in Scotland is just more than £28,000. So military watchers do not think the terms and conditions are deterring young Scots; they think a habit has been lost.
Hew Strachan, a historian of the British Army, wonders whether in practical terms young Scots no longer have family or friends in the military and just do not think of it as a career. In Glasgow, home to Fusilier Gentle, there is no meaningful military presence. Local youths, he said, might never see a soldier.
They did in Pollok 21 years ago. And these servicemen were very obviously Scottish. As Gentle was lowered into the ground, his comrades fired shots into the summer sky. Then a piper in a kilt puffed out Flowers of the Forest, the lament for those lost when the old Scots army was routed by the English at Flodden in 1513.
