Stirling Green

This is an account of by far the most hurtful experience of my life. It took place on 11-9-1997 when I went to Stirling to photograph a pageant to commemorate the Battle of Stirling Bridge in 1297. I went by bus from Cumbernauld on a dour wet day and I had on me 5 cameras including a Zenith which was to land me in court. I also had an auxiliary lens that when attached to the Zenith gives an effective focal length of about 18mm, and spare films and HIKER’S COMPASS attached to an Agfa Silette’s ever ready case.

My goal was to take a comprehensive set of the pageant so as to create work for people with mental problems. Masterprints of people in period costume would be recopied by the workforce and the images attached to a wide range of goods sold at a stall in Stirling and that would provide TRAINING IN SHOPKEEPING for people with mental problems. I am bound to declare that I discovered that the target beneficiaries of my shoestring philanthropy lacked the intelligence to perform tasks I had accomplished in primary school. They had no motivation to improve themselves.

Stirling Green between the bridges is where in former times the people of Stirling gathered for sadistic entertainments. The King’s enemies – chiefly religious dissidents known as the Covenanters – were hurled off the old Bridge to drown and the public hurled missiles called stirls – dead cats, manure, rotten vegetables – at the drowning victims. This is how Stirling got its name but Roman geographers named it Mangiodunum.

It was about 5pm and the light was poor, the o only dry spot at Stirling Green was next to the New Bridge. There I had to rewind the Zenith inside a Changing bag. Now readers the Zenith was the bottom-of-the-range Single Lens reflex and I believe that it is still in production. It was often a 21st birthday gift for young men. Despite its design faults it can yield photographs of exemplary quality. The rewind mechanism on this one was inoperative so the procedure STILL IS to put the camera inside the Changing bag and zip up the bag and undo the back and wind the film into the cassette by hand twiddling. I had done this very often with any number of cameras in such very public places as outside Westminster Abbey and in aircraft and in trains and in a taxi and even in Red Square Moscow and in the shade of the Parthenon’s columns. As I undid the back there was a commotion from behind and I was surrounded by police personnel. I said that I was rewinding a film inside the changing bag. A policewoman picked up the £50 auxiliary lens and threw it in the air and it landed in the mud. I can’t exactly remember what I said but I had the tone of an irate schoolmaster.

I was dressed in a pair of smart home made Gripperbreeks that hold the false leg on securely a white shirt and a tweed jacket. I was NO TRAMP but looked like a well dressed Edwardian landowner. I carried a rucksack with food and other impedimenta just as I do when abroad at some historic site.

I stood my ground I was doing nothing unlawful whatsoever. The operation of rewinding a camera inside a changing bag cannot under any circumstances harm anybody. I wanted to reload the Zenith and photograph the pageant before the light faded. I was seized from behind and fell over. The arresting constables laughed as my false leg became detached inside and I rolled in the mud screaming with pain. I was called a paedophile to my face and dragged into a police van in front of a huge crowd. Then driven to the police HQ in the Glasgow Road where a man at the desk recognised me as the amputee hillwalker from Cumbernauld.

On the journey the 2 policewomen who had played with my equipment made lucid smutty jokes which did not connect, then I was asked which mental hospital I had absconded from! My tormenters jabbered away in a Low German dialect larded with unspellable noises, which passes for English in Stirling and nearby towns. I had my spectacles confiscated and I was dragged into an office where splodges poked instruments at me. After that I was DEBAGGED and thrown into a cell. I lost track of time and eventually had my clothes returned but all my impedimenta was confiscated. I dressed and put on my glasses and managed to get the very last bus of all to Cumbernauld. My return ticket was NOT honoured because it was another company’s bus. I remember telling a senior policeman that I suffered from PHOBOGENY which is Greek for Born with Fear (It is MY neologism!) and being questioned at great length over the Hikers Compass and the Auxiliary lens which they thought was a TELEPHOTO lens but if any of them had the sense to look through its back they would have seen an upside down view equivalent to 18mm – exactly the opposite of a telephoto lens and it is clearly marked “X 0.42 Supersize Converter Lens”. I had caused the very utmost offence by describing every item of photographic equipment as an auctioneer or camera sales man would. I got the impression that the Stirling police have the intelligence of 10 year olds and that was underscored on other occasions when they made howlers that caused me to gasp like mislocating Balquhidder in the Borders and transposing DUNS with DOUNE and above all else calling me Mr CHRISTOPHER after my derelict middle forename.

Following a sleepless night I went straight to the Charlie Reid Centre in Glasgow where the manger was very helpful and put me in touch with a solicitor. I was later charged with MASTURBATION IN PUBLIC. I frequently thought of suicide before successive court appearances and repeated adjournments. I particularly remember how I decided to walk myself to death in the Cairngorms. I was too ashamed to talk about the affair to even my sister until quite later and my brother predictably made cruel crassly dismissive remarks when I eventually told him what had happened.

The solicitor had also been given a Zenith on his 21st birthday and was very au fait with the Zenith’s foibles. I had submitted a letter of explanation to the Procurator Fiscal and enclosed at least a dozen Zenith views of the old Bridge taken through the auxiliary lens at an effective focal length of about 8mm which show the bridge grotesquely banana shaped. These I believed would be sufficient proof of my good faith and innocence but these photographs were NEVER RETURNED.

The Hearings all took place in the Sheriff Court and I bumped into a reporter there and I called myself a successor to Franz Kafka with every good reason. Eventually the charges were thrown out but I had a hefty legal bull which I contested and I don’t want to dwell on the ultimate outcome. Later I tried to piece together why my innocent behaviour brought on the affair. Two people from High Wycombe were said to have complained about my act. NOBODY EVER MADE AN ISSUE about Changing-Bags in London, Moscow, Athens and in trains and aircraft in full view of many bystanders.

I had corresponded with one John Dow, manager of the Stirling university bookshop who was once in charge of the Stirling Model Railway Club. I had sent him monochrome enlargements of my unique model rains with my name and address on each, but they were never returned. In 1997 he and others were charged with offences to do with boys and a teenage boy who was a male prostitute was caught with Dow in central Stirling. Round Britain model railway clubs were raided and a whole ring of culprits were brought in justice. The hobby became so besmirched by this affair that anybody professing an interest was liable to be tarred with a very dirty brush indeed. I can surmise that when the police raided Dow’s home they found my photographs and of course they could no more make sense of the Lorn and Lochaber Railway’s engines with their Hornby couplings than understand how an aeroplane files.

I had been a frequent participant in CND marches all round Britain. Dressed in my smart Gripperbreeks I would be at the head of marches taking photographs and been FILMED so would have been readily identified by my costume and role as a photographer. A reliable source stated that a NUCLEAR WEAPONS CONVOY was due to pass over the New Bridge bound for an army camp near Comrie. It had been delayed on the Great North Road but would have reached Stirling at precisely the time I was arrested... i.e. somewhere near St Ninian’s Roundabout as the reliable witness had tracked its movements and it in fact crossed the New Bridge and took the byway that branches from Dunblane North Junction onto the road through the Military Restricted Zone north of Braco. It was seen at Greenloaning by another observer. In the fading light it would have been technically possible for me to photograph the Convoy at 1/30 sec at f2.

We read of political activists being falsely incriminated for such offences as shoplifting to banish them from polite society and all too often this comes to light when their NAMESAKES are excluded from employment. Now what better way of discrediting any strident activist than to get him convicted for masturbation in public! There would be my likeness on footage of almost every march since the one in Lewes/Sussex in 1981. I dropped out of CND after suffering FOOD POISONING at the Faslane Peace Camp. I have every good reason to believe that somewhere there is a file about me that describes me as a Threat to Society! Since there have been equally scandalous reports on recent years about the so called subversive activities of now deceased artists and musicians and film producers.

There were two previous clashes with the police in Stirling in my student days. Once I was marooned in the town after missing a bus and the police said that they would find something to charge me with after I was found shivering on a seat in the small hours of a March morning. The second occasion was when I had to start my Vega scooter by bump starting after it had shed its kickstart pedal. I freewheeled it down a steep street until the engine burst into life and the headlight lit up. I managed to keep the engine running during the period of detention and so ride back to Glasgow.

I approached the Herald, Stirling Observer, Scotsman and photographic magazines with accounts of the affair but got no joy. The Manager of the Charlie Reid Centre drew my attention to previous crass incompetence in the Stirling Force and of course the terrible tragedy at Dunblane arose entirely because of the CRASS CRIMINAL DERELICTION OF DUTY on the part of the senior policeman who allowed Thomas Hamilton to acquire an arsenal. In the recent past I was harassed by police at Dollar for wearing shabby clothes on a SUNDAY and being in possession of a fixed-focus semi-adjustable camera that can ONLY operate outdoors in daylight. On that occasion I met a couple who disclosed that a female relative had been burdened with a criminal record mark my words after MISSING THE LAST BUS FROM STIRLING and being found sheltering somewhere in the town! They said, there is an anonymous greysuit with MILITARY RANK who overlords the Stirling police force and is the arbiter of “public decency”. He decides what is “offensive” so anybody with noticeable peculiarities is picked upon. After the Dollar incident I am fearful that I shall be arrested anywhere within the Stirling police area stretching from Clacks to Tyndrum and the Trossachs simply for my necessary riding attire and old cameras and oh GOVERNMENT MAPS and a HIKER’S COMPASS.

The Queen’s Peace is a very tattered cloak. Scotland increasingly resembles Nazi-occupied Austria and Czechoslovakia in that our liberties have been stolen from us for flimsy pretexts and we are required to submit to UNWRITTEN LAWS made up by such anonymous people as the Sturmbahnfuhrer in charge of the Stirling police force. The “Amateur Photographer” chronicles police harassment of photographers right across Britain such as of the Austrian father and son flung into prison for photographing London buses! YET the tragedy in Barwell arose because CHILDREN ARE SACRED COWS ABOVE THE LAW and I now read of an elderly lady born in Germany who is burdened with a criminal record merely for TOUCHING her schoolboy tormentor. Now if I describe Stirling as a social cesspool where 2,000 heroin addicts menace innocent people and the residents speak a Low German dialect larded with unspellable noises, then I am sure that there will be uproar but I would do anything in my power to move people with distressing peculiarities RIGHT OUT OF STIRLING and that is the subject of further proposals to set up an Aspie community in Dorset.

As a writer it is my DUTY to describe exceedingly unpleasant events in all their distressing detail so I am submitting stories and perhaps a PLAY based on the most hurtful experience of my life – MY Nine Stroke Eleven of 1997 at Stirling Green.

David Seagrave, Dunfermline Library 2-10-2009