Throwback to last glorious Gathering of the Clans almost 60 years ago
The centrepiece of next year’s Homecoming will be a gathering of the clans to be held in Edinburgh’s Holyrood Park in July 2009.
The organisers of the event expect it to be the biggest of its type. However, as The Scotsman’s photographs of the famous 1951 Gathering show, it will have to go some distance to fulfil this expectation.
Taking place between 16 and 19 August, the 1951 Gathering was organised as part of the Festival of Britain and brought together clansmen from all parts of the world. The event was the first official gathering since 1822, including as it did the “March of the Thousand Pipers” through the city centre and the biggest ever Highland Ball, which had 1,200 guests.
It was one of the first events to be televised around the world and was seen by 50 million people on cinema newsreels and television.
At the time, The Scotsman wrote of the gathering in Murrayfield for the Highland Games and world pipe band contest: “Its appeal was greatest for those who had personal connection with the score or so clans officially represented.
“But even to the stranger its splendour might bring to mind the history-book accounts of the sixteenth-century ‘field of the cloth of gold’ at Calais.
“The great banner of the chiefs and their clans floated proudly above the tents, ranged facing each other round a great square, or were planted at their entrance. Each tent bore a name famous in Scottish history, and the various clans vied with each other in their displays.”
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