BY BERNARD FERGUSSON T HIRTY years ago the then laird of
Blairquhan got a letter from an eccentric neighbour complaining that Blairquhan's bees were persistently crossing the march and taking honey off his land. Blairquhan replied : 'I don't own any bees; and in fact the only bees I know of in this part of Carrick are the ones in your bonnet.'
The Concise Oxford Dictionary is disappointing in its definition of a crank : 'an eccentric person' is the best it can do. A true crank is one so possessed of an idea that it distorts his judgement about everything else. Certain subjects seem to have the same characteristics of recurring attraction as the waters of the Nile: qui Nilum bibit rursus bibit, which a Lallans crank might render as Aince pree, aye drouthy. (Any- body can do Lallans, really.) By way of example, it seems almost impossible to be any of the following in moderation : anti-vivisectionist, anti-blood sports, pacifist, teetotal, penal reformer or Scottish Nationalist. walked in alone and unannounced. I rose shyly to my feet to explain that women weren't allowed in the mess, but she forestalled me by asking without preamble : 'Do you believe in God?' I said I did. 'Then how can you do the Devil's work?' I looked puzzled, and she went on : 'How can you teach men's hands to war and their fingers to fight?' I explained that I was the latest joined from Sandhurst, and had not yet been en- trusted with any very important job; and that the chap she really ought to see was the Brigadier. I drew a little sketch- map to indicate where his house was, and she went off eagerly to interview him. I never ventured to make any inquiries as to how she had got on with him, but she didn't come back.
It is sad that the word 'pacifist' should have been impounded by the extremists, 'barbarous' though Fowler declares it to be. A more outrageous act of piracy has been perpetrated by the total abstainers on the word 'temperance,' in the teeth of St. Paul's admonition to 'be temperate in all things.' Year by year the majority of the fathers and brethren of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, by an act of total abstention from the one dull meeting of an inspiring fortnight, allows a sincere and enthusiastic rump to pledge the Church to a policy with which most of its members disagree. The abstentionists can say with perfect truth and in all fairness that if they arc indeed in the minority it is the duty of the majority to outvote them. Muddled thinking by all parties on this subject has had some sad results, as when the ministers of a town in Dumfriesshire felt it their duty to oppose the granting of a licence to the local British Legion Club, and the club boycotted the Remembrance Day Service. This was an episode that did no credit to either side; perhaps there were cranks in both camps. • stopping at the Royal Family, suggesting that their children should not be allowed to follow hounds on ponies. Individuals who enjoy blood sports write letters to the papers designed to show that nobody enjoys a really good run half as much as the fox. Penal reformers organise petitions for the reprieve of a murderer not because there arc extenuating circumstances in his particular case but because they disapprove of capital punishment in general. Some missionaries—not good ones— thrust savages into trousers as a first step towards evangelisa- tion. Nationalists foam about a Tay Bridge not so much be- cause it is needed, which nobody seriously disputes, but because the want of it is a grand stick for government-beating. Don't let us be provoked by such people. Rather let us emulate an acquaintance of mine who found picnickers in his policies. They told him that they did not recognise the principle of private ownership of land. The following week he picnicked with his family in the patch of garden which fronted the tres- passers' own house in an Edinburgh suburb; the two parties have been friends ever since.
Cranks claim in defence of their extravagances that all the reformers of history were regarded as cranks by their con- temporaries. That bee won't buzz. The fact that nowadays we carry umbrellas and accept that we have rudimentary tails does not mean that Jonas Hanway and Lord Monboddo were not cranks. The fact that people fly as a matter of course in the twentieth century does not acquit the Friar of Tongland. who broke his neck in the attempt, of being a crank in the fifteenth. It is not a sufficient defence to plead that you arc ahead of your time. But let us be grateful to our cranks. They may be wrong-headed, but they help others to focus their own points of view; and they serve to display the tolerance of their countrymen in an admirable light.
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