On The Make - How The Scots Took Over London

David Stenhouse’s On The Make: How the Scots Took Over London is about that long and suspiciously successful habit of Scots heading south, looking at London with a mixture of contempt, opportunity and weather-related relief, and then quietly inserting themselves into its politics, finance, journalism, law, medicine, literature, crime, clubs, pubs, offices and arguments. The title suggests invasion, but of the most practical kind: no bagpipes at dawn, just ambition, education, nerve, and someone suddenly running the place.

London has always claimed to be the centre of everything, which is exactly the sort of claim that attracts Scots with notebooks, schemes and a healthy willingness to contradict. Stenhouse follows the generations who came down from Scotland and made themselves inconveniently important: professionals, entrepreneurs, intellectuals, rogues, reformers, grandees, journalists, publishers, politicians and operators. The capital may have imagined it was absorbing them. The Scots, judging by the evidence, appear to have been taking minutes.

There is a fine irony in the phrase “took over London,” because London is less a city than a machine for pretending it invented everyone who succeeds there. Arrive poor, clever, sharp-elbowed or overqualified; survive the rent; acquire contacts; speak firmly; and eventually the city will say you were one of its own all along. The Scots, having long experience of being both inside and outside Britain’s power structures, were unusually well equipped for this little dance. They could belong and not belong at the same time, which is practically a London superpower.

This is a book about migration within the same kingdom, which means all the usual themes arrive wearing better tailoring: class, accent, education, patronage, prejudice, hustle, networks, reinvention and the ancient metropolitan fear that someone from elsewhere might be better at the game. London offers scale and money; Scotland supplies brains, restlessness, grievance, Presbyterian stamina and a talent for making themselves impossible to ignore. Between them, they produce careers, institutions and the occasional national sulk.

Stenhouse’s subject is not merely success but the performance of success. “On the make” has that lovely double edge: ambition as energy, ambition as suspicion. A Scot in London may be admired as industrious, mocked as pushy, envied as competent, or accused of taking over simply by having the bad manners to do well. The phrase carries the whole comedy of British class life: everyone worships advancement, provided it happens with the correct accent and no one is too obvious about wanting it.

For readers of Scottish history, London history, social mobility, British politics, journalism, biography-by-theme, or the national sport of wondering who is really running the country, this is a lively and pointed volume. It belongs on the shelf where identity, ambition and geography are allowed to argue in public.

Very Good copy, as sold by Crappy Old Books. A smart survivor of a book about Scots going south and making themselves at home in the capital, which is to say: very little damage, considerable intent, and no sign of apologising for its presence.

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