The Shepherd’s Kilt: How a Trade-Show Display Gave Nova Scotia Its Tartan

In the spring of 1953, the president of the Halifax Weavers’ Guild had a small diplomatic problem.

Her name was Bessie Murray. The guild had been asked to put together a display for an agricultural exhibition, on the theme of sheep rearing in Nova Scotia, and Mrs Murray had designed a large woven panel showing the life of the province: hills, sea, a flock, and in the foreground a shepherd. Since this was New Scotland, the shepherd would naturally be wearing a kilt, and the cloth chosen for him would eventually become known as the Nova Scotia tartan.

And there the difficulty began. A kilt has to be in some tartan or other. Nova Scotia is one of the most Scottish places on earth outside Scotland. Half the people who would walk past that display were MacDonalds, MacLeods, Frasers, Camerons and MacNeils, and every one of them would notice which clan the guild had chosen to honour, and which it had not.

Bessie Murray’s solution was the solution of a sensible woman with a loom. She would not use anybody’s tartan. She would make up a new one that belonged to nobody, and therefore to everybody. She wove a few square inches of it for the shepherd, and thought no more about it.

What she put in it

She did not choose her colours at random. She looked out of the window.

Blue, in a broad band, for the sea that surrounds the province on nearly every side, and for the sky over it. Dark green and light green, for the two kinds of forest that cover the land, the spruce and fir and the hardwoods that turn in the autumn. A line of white, for the granite of the coast and the surf breaking on it. A line of gold, for the Royal Charter of 1621 by which King James granted the territory to Sir William Alexander and first called it Nova Scotia. And a fine line of red, for the lion rampant on the shield of the provincial arms.

The panel went on show. People stopped in front of it, as people do, and what they looked at was not the sheep. It was the shepherd’s kilt. Where could they get that tartan?

Within a short time Mrs Murray and a partner had set up a small company to weave it. In the mid-1950s the design was registered with the Court of the Lord Lyon in Edinburgh. In 1963 the legislature passed the Nova Scotia Tartan Act and made it official. It was the first provincial tartan in Canada. Every other province and territory now has one, and the fashion spread from there to American states, Australian cities, universities, regiments and airlines. The Scottish tartan registers, which record all this, observe that the oldest of them all “was designed in 1953 almost by accident.”

New Scotland

The accident could only have happened there.

The name was a piece of paper for a century and a half. The real New Scotland began on 15 September 1773, when a leaky old Dutch-built ship called the Hector dropped anchor in Pictou harbour after eleven weeks at sea with nearly two hundred Highlanders aboard, most of them from Loch Broom in Wester Ross. Smallpox and dysentery had killed eighteen children on the crossing. The tradition is that a piper came ashore first, and that the settlers followed him in their plaids, which the law then forbade them to wear at home.

After the Hector came tens of thousands more, pushed out by the clearances: to Pictou and Antigonish, and above all to Cape Breton Island, where Gaelic was the everyday language of whole counties well into the twentieth century and is still taught. There is a Gaelic College at St Ann’s. There are Highland games at Antigonish that have been held since 1863. The fiddle music of Cape Breton preserves a style of Scottish playing that died out in Scotland itself.

This is why a Halifax weaver could not put a shepherd in a Fraser kilt without hearing about it from the Camerons, and why her answer was embraced so quickly. A province full of rival clans had been handed something they could all wear.

Today Nova Scotia tartan is a district tartan in the proper sense. It belongs to a place. Anyone born there, living there, descended from there or simply fond of it may wear it without asking. Retailers offer it made to order as kilts, skirts, sashes, scarves and ties, and by the yard, and there is a dress version with the blue opened out onto a white ground.

It has travelled, too. Nova Scotians are great leavers. They go to Toronto, to Alberta, to Boston, which their grandparents simply called the Boston States, and a good many of them take the tartan along. It turns up at weddings in Calgary and at Burns suppers in Massachusetts, worn by people who want to say where they are from and whose surnames may be French, Mi’kmaq, German, Lebanese or Black Loyalist as easily as Scottish. That was the whole point of it.

Halifax, a Saturday in November

The hospital foundation’s winter ball is black tie, and Callum Boudreau has a problem of his own.

He is thirty-four, a marine engineer, and his surname is Acadian French. His mother was a MacIsaac from Inverness County, but he has never felt entitled to her clan’s tartan, and his father’s people were in Nova Scotia well over a century before the Hector. The provincial tartan is the only one that covers both halves of him. He had a kilt made in it two years ago for his sister’s wedding, and wore it that day with a tweed jacket. Tonight he has to take the same kilt to the top of the formal scale, and he has been reading up.

What he has learned is that a formal kilt is not a different kilt. It is the same kilt with different things above it, and the piece that decides everything is the one most men think about last: the shirt.

The evening jacket is the Prince Charlie, short, black, cut away at the front, with satin lapels and silver buttons, worn over a low three-button waistcoat. It is the Highland equivalent of a dinner jacket, and like a dinner jacket it wants a bow tie. A bow tie wants a wing collar, or at the least a proper dress collar, and a plain or pleated front. The ordinary office shirt he wore with the tweed would look limp under it.

There is a second point that nobody had told him. A kilt sits much higher than trousers, right up at the navel, and its waistband is thick. A normal shirt, cut full in the body to tuck into low-slung trousers, bunches up over a kilt and makes the wearer look a stone heavier round the middle. A shirt made for Highland wear is cut closer through the body for exactly that reason.

He found what he needed at Scottish Kilt, the outfitter that had made the kilt. Their formal shirts are described as cut for Highland wear: wing collars for a bow tie and a Prince Charlie, turndown collars for an Argyll jacket, and cut close for a high kilt waistband. Two shirts, in other words, cover the whole formal range. The wing collar for black tie. The turndown collar with a long tie for the Argyll, the slightly less formal black jacket he would wear to a daytime wedding. He ordered the wing collar.

The rest followed from it. Black bow tie, tied by hand, because he is that sort of man. Prince Charlie and waistcoat. A dress sporran with a chrome cantle. Hose in the dark blue of the tartan, with flashes in the gold. Black ghillie brogues. Every piece of metal in the same bright finish.

On the night, in the mirror, the blue and green of the kilt look richer under the black than they ever did under tweed. The fine gold line, which he had hardly noticed before, picks up the buttons. The white line picks up the shirt front. He had not expected that. Bessie Murray, he thinks, knew what she was doing.

At the ball he is one of perhaps forty men in kilts, in thirty different tartans, and a retired judge in MacDonald of Clanranald asks him what his is.

“Nova Scotia.”

“Ah,” says the judge. “The shepherd’s kilt. My mother knew Mrs Murray. She always said she never meant to start anything.”

Almost by accident

Most tartans have origin stories full of battles and chiefs, and most of those stories are later inventions. This one has a weavers’ guild, a display about sheep, and a woman trying not to give offence. It is entirely true, and it is more typical of how traditions actually begin than any number of legends.

Bessie Murray needed a few inches of cloth for a figure in the corner of a picture. She gave a province a way of dressing for its grandest occasions, and gave the rest of the world an idea it has been copying ever since. The shepherd, presumably, is still standing in his panel somewhere, watching his flock in the first kilt ever made in that tartan.