The story of the
Brown tartan has an unexpected connection to John Brown, the famous Deeside ghillie who served Queen Victoria but deliberately never claimed a clan tartan of his own. On 27 March 1883, the Queen of Great Britain and Ireland, Empress of India, was told that her servant had died, and for a time she could do nothing at all.
She was sixty-three. She had been a widow for twenty-one years. And for eighteen of those years the man who had held her horse, carried her shawl, handed her into her carriage, poured her whisky and told her, in front of her own family, when she was being foolish, had been a Deeside ghillie named John Brown. She wrote that his death was a loss so great she could not describe it. She ordered a statue of him for Balmoral, and a brass plaque for his room, and she wore a ring he had given her, and when she died she left instructions that a lock of his hair and his photograph were to be put in her coffin. They were.
The court had hated him for two decades. The Prince of Wales could not be in the same room as him. Society called her Mrs Brown. Nobody, then or since, has been able to say exactly what they were to each other, and it hardly matters. What is certain is that a crofter's son from Crathie, who wore a kilt to work and spoke to the Queen as though she were a neighbour, was for most of her reign the person she trusted above all others.
The ghillie
John Brown was born in 1826 at Crathienaird, a farm on the north bank of the Dee within sight of where Balmoral now stands. He went to work on the estate as a stable lad and then as a ghillie, the man who leads the ponies on the hill and attends the gentry at the shooting. When the Queen and Prince Albert bought Balmoral in the 1850s he was one of the men who led the Queen's pony, and by 1858 he was her regular attendant on her Highland expeditions.
After Albert's death in 1861 she retreated from public life and sank into a grief that frightened her ministers. In 1864, hoping to get her out of doors, they sent for Brown and her pony from Scotland. It worked. Within a year he was her Highland Servant, paid a salary, in attendance everywhere she went, and given a licence to speak to her that no minister had. He called her "wumman." He told her to hold her chin up when she was being drawn. He was often drunk, and she pretended not to notice. When a would-be assassin pointed a pistol at her carriage in 1872, Brown was the one who seized him.
He wore Highland dress every day of his working life, and this is where the tartan comes in. Brown never claimed a clan tartan. He was a Highlander, from an old Deeside family, and he could have found one to borrow. He did not. The tartan archives record that he usually wore a kilt of tweed, saying that although he was of Highland origin he had no claim to any specific tartan. There are photographs of him at the Queen's bridle in exactly that: a plain grey tweed kilt, a tweed jacket, and a bonnet. In an age when half of Scotland was inventing pedigrees, John Brown, who had more influence than any duke, refused to invent one. It was of a piece with the man. He would not flatter the Queen, and he would not flatter himself.
The name gets a tartan after all
He would have been amused, or annoyed, to learn what happened next.
Brown, or Broun, is one of the commonest names in Scotland, and it has a chiefly family: the Brouns of Colstoun, baronets in East Lothian, who claim descent from the royal house of France and hold, among their treasures, a pear said to have been enchanted by a thirteenth-century wizard. Around the turn of the twentieth century a tartan appeared under the name. The archives record that a catalogue issued by the London outfitters Scott Adie in the early 1900s showed a tie in this Brown tartan, and it entered the trade from there. In 2009 the chief, Sir Wayne Broun of Colstoun, wrote to the tartan authorities asking that the clan tartan be recorded with a very light blue in place of the medium blue that had become conventional.
It is a well-balanced, quietly handsome sett. The ground is blue, paler now by the chief's wish, crossed by a broad band of black and one of red, with fine red lines through the blue and a narrow stripe of green. It reads as cool and calm, with the red as the only heat in it.
Those looking for Brown tartan will find it listed under both spellings, Broun and Brown, offered made to order as kilts, skirts, sashes, scarves and ties, or by the yard, in Modern and Ancient colours. The ghillie of Balmoral would have had a claim to it at last, if he had wanted one. He would probably have stuck to his tweed.
Ballater, a Wednesday in July
Ballater is the village five miles down the Dee from Balmoral, where the royal train used to stop and where half the shops still have a royal warrant over the door. It has a tennis club with four courts beside the river, and on a July evening the courts are full.
Erin Brown is seventeen. Her father is a ghillie on one of the Deeside estates, as his father was, and the family joke, told at every wedding, is that they are the other Browns, the ones who never got the statue. Erin has heard the John Brown story so often that she can do her father's voice telling it.
She plays for the club's junior team, and this summer she is playing in the family tartan.
The idea was her mother's. There had been a wedding in May, and a sash in the Brown tartan, and afterwards her mother had said that a girl who was on a court three evenings a week might as well be on it in something of her own. What she found at Scottish Kilt, where the sash had come from, was a range built for exactly that: the
plaid tennis skirt collection, pleated skirts with a flat waistband and sharp knife pleats that open with movement, in more than five thousand setts, cut to the customer's own waist and length.
Erin chose the box-pleated one, because the deeper folds looked, she said, like a kilt and not like a netball skirt. There were knife-pleated versions and wrap-arounds too, and a mini kilt in the same cloth for people who wanted the tartan without the sport, but the box pleats had a weight to them she liked. Pale blue, black, a band of red. Her waist was measured where the skirt would sit, and the length from waist to hem, standing in her trainers, and it came in three weeks. The pleats are stitched down from the waistband to the hip, so the skirt lies flat over the hips like a kilt and only opens below. It is a washable yarn. Her mother, who has done the laundry of a ghillie for twenty years, checked that first.
On court she wears it with a plain white polo shirt, white socks and trainers, because the rule with a tartan skirt is that nothing else has a pattern. The pleats lie flat while she waits for a serve and open like a fan when she runs. The pale blue looks, in the long Deeside evening light, almost like sky.
Her father comes down from the hill at eight, in his tweed, and leans on the fence.
"That's the Brown."
"Broun, Dad. There's a chief. He's got a magic pear."
"Aye, well. John Brown never wore it."
"John Brown never had it. It wasn't invented till he was dead." She serves, overarm, and wins the point. "I've got it and he didn't. That's the other Browns getting one over the statue, for once."
Her father, who has led ponies past that statue for thirty years, considers this, and finds he has no objection.
Plain grey tweed
John Brown was the most famous Highlander of his century, and he spent it in a tweed kilt because he would not pretend to a tartan he did not think was his. It is a kind of honesty that tartan history, full of invented pedigrees, does not often show.
The tartan that arrived under his name a generation later is a good one, and in the pale blue the chief asked for it is a lovely thing on a tennis court in July, with the Dee running behind it and the hills going dark. A ghillie's daughter has as good a right to it as anyone. Better, perhaps, than the baronet with the pear.
