Torrance Nicola Sturgeon

A Political Life
1. Auflage 2016
ISBN: 978-0-85790-846-9
Verlag: Birlinn
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 216 Seiten

How did working-class girl from Ayrshire become one of Scotland and the UK's most prominent politicians?Identified as a rising star by the SNP leadership shortly after she joined the party as a teenager, when the Nationalists formed their first Scottish Government in 2007 Nicola Sturgeon swiftly became one of its most successful ministers. By the time Alex Salmond resigned as First Minister after the No vote in the Scottish independence referendum, she was viewed as his natural successor, leading her party to its remarkable success at the 2015 general election. In this book, David Torrance traces the life and career of a remarkable woman.

David Torrance was a journalist and broadcaster as well as the author and editor of more than a dozen books on Scottish politics and history. He completed a PhD in history and political science in 2017. Like all good Scotsmen, he lives in London, where he is a constitutional specialist at the House of Commons Library.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Torrance, David

Leseproben

Chapter 2

‘A working-class girl from Ayrshire’

Nicola Sturgeon was born on 19 July 1970 at Ayrshire Central Hospital in Irvine. Her parents were Robert (known as Robin), an electrician, and Joan, a dental nurse (Joan’s maiden name of Ferguson would become their new daughter’s middle name). At that time the couple lived at 17 Newdykes Road in the coastal town of Prestwick.

Robin and Joan had only married on Boxing Day the previous year, aged 21 and 17 respectively. In those days, unmarried parents were still a relative rarity, although the relationship must have had a solid – and loving – basis, for the couple remained happily married more than four decades later when their daughter became First Minister of Scotland. ‘They were really young when I was born,’ reflected Sturgeon in 2015. ‘I guess their own life experiences at that time must have been fairly limited.’1

A sister, Gillian, followed in 1975, by which point the Sturgeons had moved to a terraced council house in Dreghorn, where they remain to this day (they moved when Nicola was one). Joan hailed from Prestwick, the daughter of a ‘process foreman’, while, at the time of his marriage, Robin lived at a ‘tied’ cottage called ‘The Croft’ in Dunure. This was actually quite modern, having recently replaced the previous derelict gardener’s cottage.

Robin’s father, also christened Robert, was a gardener for the local estate house, and his mother was Margaret, the daughter of a shipwright called Joseph Mill. She died in 2001 aged 80, although more than a decade later her grand-daughter frequently referred to her during the long independence debate, citing her ‘English granny’ (also an SNP voter) as proof that Scottish Nationalism was not Anglophobic. ‘My granny was English,’ said Sturgeon in late 2014, ‘and if she had been alive during the referendum she would have voted Yes.’2

That ‘English granny’, Margaret Mill, was actually partly Scottish, and her family tree illustrated internal migration between Scotland and England common then as now. Her mother’s parents, William and Mary Jane Wilcock (or Willcock – the spelling was not consistent), were a shoemaker and confectioner originally from Leeds in Yorkshire who spent at least a few years in Galashiels in the early 1880s, while her father Joseph Mill was from an Anglo-Scottish family – his father Robert, a hairdresser’s assistant, had been born in Arbroath but moved with his first wife Christian Mill and two children to Durham in the late 1860s or early 1870s. Robert’s second wife Alma was Margaret’s grandmother, and she was from Sunderland.3

Margaret had been born in Ryhope’s Arthur Street (which was not far from Scotland Street) in 1920. Once home to shipyard workers and miners, the area shared an industrial heritage similar to parts of Scotland. In 1943, she married Robert Sturgeon, Nicola’s paternal grandfather, at St Paul’s Parish Church, not far from where she grew up. Eventually, they moved back to the south-west of Scotland.4 (Sturgeon later recalled spending ‘many childhood summers’ in Ryhope, and even felt ‘a little part’ of her belonged to the English village.)5

Writing in The Sunday Times shortly after the 2007 Scottish Parliament election, Sturgeon had clear memories of frequent visits to see Margaret and her husband in Dunure, which was about 30 miles away from her childhood home. She remembered, ‘For me, the whole place was just one big adventure playground. The place had hens, cats and dogs, as well as a burn running through it, so you can imagine what it was like being a child in such an environment. It was such a great place to play. Out the back of the new cottage, through a gate and across a field, was a beach and the sea. It was fantastic. The property may have been small, but as a kid it felt huge.’

For a while, Sturgeon’s great-grandmother lived with her grandparents, which necessitated some juggling of rooms. Of all the pieces of furniture, what stuck in her mind was a rocking chair, on which she would sit with her granny. Occasionally Sturgeon would help her granddad with his work which, as she recalled, ‘meant being able to stuff my face with strawberries’. Both grandparents, she admitted, ‘spoiled’ her ‘rotten’, although Robert died when she was seven, meaning Margaret had to move to another house in the village.

Even more than three decades later the place retained a ‘mystique’ for Sturgeon, and she speculated that it was probably at that cottage when she first began to develop a sense of who she was and how she could express herself. ‘It was definitely a place to experiment and have adventures,’ she recalled. ‘Having that space and freedom probably did shape me into becoming an independent person.’6

The name Sturgeon belonged mainly in the shires of Dumfries and Kirkcudbright, although it may not have been native to Ayrshire. Ferguson, Nicola’s middle name and her mother’s maiden name, was also common in the county, derived from Robert I’s gift of land to Fergus, son of Fergus, although it was widely scattered and, like Sturgeon, may not have originated in Ayrshire.

Robin Sturgeon, Nicola’s father, had been born at ‘The Croft’, as had his father before him. Robert Sturgeon, Nicola’s grandfather, and James, her great-grandfather, had been gardeners in Dunure, the latter the son of a farmer also called James. Before that the Sturgeons were ploughmen, while the Fergusons – a Prestwick-based family – worked mainly on the railways, as engineers, porters and lorrymen, although further back one described himself as a ‘waterman’.

So Sturgeon’s family background, paternal and maternal, was, in her own words, ‘a fairly standard, normal, working-class family’,7 as were the village and town that formed the backdrop to her childhood. Dreghorn was a small, quiet village two miles east of Irvine, a much larger North Ayrshire settlement. Both were historic. During the development of new housing, a large prehistoric site was discovered to the north of Dreghorn’s Main Street, making it perhaps the oldest continuously inhabited village in the UK.

Dreghorn’s most famous son (until the appearance of a notable daughter) was John Boyd Dunlop, inventor of the pneumatic tyre, while Irvine could boast the American writer Edgar Allan Poe, who had briefly attended its old grammar school, as well as Jack McConnell, Sturgeon’s predecessor but one as First Minister. Although Irvine had been one of Scotland’s earliest capitals, later it was best known as a New Town, a relic of the post-war consensus dedicated to full employment and good public housing. Although much maligned aesthetically, New Towns such as Irvine actually achieved many of their employment targets (they were intended to attract light manufacturing) while providing thousands of West Coast Scots with comfortable housing for the first time in their lives.

A quango, the Irvine Development Corporation (IDC), would have been a fixture of Sturgeon’s childhood, established, along with four others, to oversee the town’s modernisation. The orthodoxy of the period dictated that this involve the demolition of swathes of the old Irvine, although the Irvine Beach Park and Magnum Leisure Centre (later demolished), proved more enduring and popular – as a teenager Sturgeon would go to Frosty’s ice disco at the Magnum every Saturday night.

The early 1970s was an optimistic time in this part of North Ayrshire. The local press was full of articles about Irvine’s ‘dynamic future’ under the IDC. George Younger, the Ayr MP and newly-appointed undersecretary for development in Edward Heath’s Conservative government, visited shortly after Sturgeon was born, witnessing the first phase of the town centre regeneration to the north of the old Bridgegate. The Queen’s Baton had also just passed through en route to Edinburgh for the 1970 Commonwealth Games.

Politically the area was solid Labour territory. David Lambie was the MP for Central Ayrshire (as he would be until 1983, before serving as the Member for Cunninghame South until 1992), the constituency that included both Dreghorn and Irvine, although there was modest SNP activity. In August 1970, Winnie Ewing had opened the party’s ‘Alba Club’ in Kilwinning, its first social club in the West of Scotland. Jim Sillars had recently become the MP for South Ayrshire following a by-election, although it was to be another decade before he joined the SNP, and even longer before a poster of him would adorn Sturgeon’s teenage bedroom wall. Only much later did she learn that one of her uncles ‘had been a member of the SNP back in the 1960s’,8 although in other accounts it was a grandfather, ‘though’, as she recalled in 2007, she ‘only discovered that after his death’. ‘You think you’re a trail-blazer,’ added Sturgeon, ‘and it turns out it’s been in your genes all along.’9

Despite a bold vision of urban regeneration – Irvine’s new multimillion-pound shopping centre opened in 1975 – by the time Sturgeon began primary school that year the...