Reasons for feeling Scottish

Sometimes I say I’m Scottish, a claim often greeted with understandable derision. I was born in England, in Hertfordshire, went to school and university in England and, apart from some spells abroad as a journalist, have always lived and worked in England. I don’t even have much Scottish blood. My mother was English, from the West Country, and three of my four grandparents were English too. I have no trace of a Scottish accent. I don’t even know Scotland very well. I have never had a home there and have never lived there. As far as Alex Salmond is concerned, I might as well be Lithuanian.

And yet, Scotland is very much part of me. Though it may not sound like it, the name Chancellor is Scottish. It may have had its origins in Normandy, but for centuries the Chancellors lived in Lanarkshire near to the little town of Biggar, halfway between Glasgow and Edinburgh. Since the early 15th century at least, they are recorded as having lived in a house called Shieldhill, now a hotel known as ‘Shieldhill Castle’ (which it isn’t) and oddly described on its website as having been ‘established in 1199’.

The last member of my family to live there was my grandfather, Sir John Chancellor, who died in 1952 when I was 12 years old. He had been educated in Scotland, at Blair Lodge at Polmont in Stirlingshire, but afterwards became a soldier in the Royal Engineers, rising to the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel, when he was recruited into the British colonial service, serving as governor of three British colonies before ending his career in the 1930s as High Commissioner in Palestine under the British Mandate, a job he used to describe as the same as that of Pontius Pilate.