From the October 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
Cold War history has tended to favour the large canvas and the broad sweep: understandably, given the global and potentially lethal stakes of the half-century nuclear stand-off. History, at this scale, is geopolitics: a succession of proxy wars and regional crises playing out across and between nations whose names have come to stand for periods of heightened global tension – Hungary, Cuba, Vietnam, Afghanistan. In comparison with these well-known flashpoints, an exhibition assembling artefacts and oral testimony recounting Scotland’s place in the conflict might risk seeming parochial, even quaint. It is anything but. Though modest in scale, ‘Cold War Scotland’ marshals a cleverly chosen array of objects and media to show how the Cold War left its traces in the Scottish landscape, in Scottish culture and in the lives of ordinary people: primarily Scots themselves, but also, on occasion, visitors from both the United States and the USSR.
The exhibition opens with a brief, scene-setting video introduction which offers a condensed history of the Cold War’s origins, from the development of nuclear weapons, through the creation of NATO and the Warsaw Pact, to the tense stasis of deterrence that hung over the second half of the 20th century and has set the terms of conflict ever since. There follows a dutiful gesture to the peaceful uses of atomic power, with sketches by Basil Spence and William Crosbie for the Exhibition of Industrial Power held at Glasgow’s Kelvin Hall in 1951 and various artefacts relating to civil nuclear power in Scotland. Objects in this section – including instruments used by nuclear power workers and a groovy set of space-age tableware – set the scene and the national context. They belong to the period, the heyday of atomic boosterism, even if they seem slightly tangential to the specific Cold War context that dominates the rest of the room.
A demonstration against the decision to allow US Polaris submarines and missiles to be based at Holy Loch, near Dunoon, in February 1961. Photo: Trinity Mirror/Mirrorpix/Alamy Stock Photo
From here, the show finds a tighter focus. Documents donated by former Women’s Royal Army Corps personnel stationed in West Germany are used to present a personal view of Berlin, the divided capital of Cold War diplomacy and espionage, as seen by the ground-level staff who manned telephone switchboards and called in sightings of cars bearing Soviet diplomatic plates. Diplomacy and espionage are evoked again in a display of language teaching materials from the Joint Services School for Linguists, based between 1956 and 1960 on a Second World War airfield near Crail, on the picturesque Fife coast, where a few hundred national servicemen were sent each year to be drilled in the basics of the Russian language.
The threat of open conflict is never very far away, however: a Soviet military map of East Lothian serves as a stark reminder that Scotland, with its array of vital military and communications infrastructures, was very much on the minds of strategists in Moscow. There is a substantial collection of printed material relating to civil defence – the disturbing 1980 booklet Protect and Survive, culmination of a nationwide public information campaign designed to prepare the public for nuclear war, shares a case with samples of satirical counter-propaganda generated by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament – as well as a full British Army hazmat suit with respirator, a Civil Defence Corps uniform and motorcycle, and a complete set of radiation and blast monitoring equipment preserved from the underground posts of the Royal Observer Corps.
An annotated map produced by the Scottish Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in the 1980s. Photo: © National Museums Scotland
By the early 1960s, we are told, Scotland had become ‘the most important forward operating base for the US Navy in Europe’, with a controversial installation at Holy Loch, a stone’s throw from both the UK’s own submarine base at Faslane and Europe’s largest nuclear weapons stockpile at Coulport. Much of the latter part of the exhibition is dedicated to exploring the tensions, both political and personal, that accompanied the arrival of thousands of American military personnel and their families, and the establishment of US-controlled naval bases, surveillance posts, missile arsenals and airfields on Scottish soil. The exhibition works hard here for nuance, with video testimony offering insight into the conflicting attitudes within local communities – between, for instance, those who regarded the American presence as an imposition and those who valued the economic boost to otherwise neglected communities – as well as the louder and more public resistance mounted by anti-nuclear campaigners.
These protesters are well represented both in the form of flyers and posters and through recordings, with the veteran CND activist Kristin Barrett recounting a trip to the American embassy in London in a borrowed van to deliver a mock-up of a cruise missile made out of cardboard carpet tubes. The anti-nuclear protest movement provides some of the exhibition’s most interesting and entertaining material, including a huge collection of riotously colourful button badges, ranging from the predictable (‘Socialists Against the Bomb’) to the whimsical (‘Anagram Lovers Both Sting a Beam’) by way of some admirably terrible wordplay (‘Gardeners for a Nuclear Free Fuchsia!’). There is a measure of curatorial wit, too, in the decision to display these symbols of protest scattered haphazardly across a pin-board, face-to-face with six neat regimental ties in different tartans commissioned by various US military units stationed in Scotland.
A protest rattle made from a laundry detergent bottle used on the Peace March that took place in Scotland in 1982. Photo: © National Museums Scotland
Meanwhile, ordinary Scots and Soviet citizens continued to meet from time to time on friendly terms. One end of the gallery is dominated by a giant hammer and sickle presented to a Shetlander by the crew of a Soviet fishing factory ship; another case displays an array of Sputnik-themed tourist memorabilia, travel itineraries from Intourist (the Soviet state travel bureau) and a remarkable 1960s evening dress made from silk brought home by a British tourist from a visit to Samarkand, in present-day Uzbekistan, then the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic. Exhibits such as these serve as evidence that, even under the shadow of mutual assured destruction and the surveillance of their respective governments, people continued to travel, trade and forge lasting connections across the Iron Curtain.
‘Cold War Scotland’ is at the National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh, until 26 January 2025.
From the October 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.