Stone of Destiny film
Earlier in the year Scots Law News reported on the book launch for the new edition of Ian Hamilton QC’s Stone of Destiny and noted the premiere of the film at the Edinburgh International Film Festival. The film was on general release across Scotland in October and Mr Hamilton offered some elegiac thoughts on the film and the story in his blog on 15th October 2008:
He wrote,
“For me the feast has finished and the lamps have expired. A book I wrote has lasted sixty years and it has been made into a film. In a touching scene in the film, taken from real life, my father says he is proud of me. My real father would have been proud too. He loved books. Now I can turn my back on what I have done.”
He had been interviewed in The Guardian the previous day and said of this,
“Among other things they quoted accurately what I feel about the whole matter:-
“Hamilton is dismayed, however, by the continued fascination with the raid. He volunteered with the RAF during the war, where 55,000 young men died in bomber command alone. “I did something for my country, as they did – and I am remembered and they are forgotten? This was an ancient wrong that had to be righted, I was just the person who did it.”
That is my true feeling. I will be glad of a closure.”
Lest anyone is concerned that Mr Hamilton will be lost to Scottish public life he ends his blog post,
“I set out to wake up my country. Now Scotland is awake and fit to take on all comers. We are alive again. I do not claim it was because of me. I claim only to have been one of the early fighters.
Now I am like a child wondering what skills I have and what to do with them. When Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham wrote his great essay on SUCCESS he knew that success brought its own desolation.
I am an accomplished public speaker. Maybe I’ll take that up.
Does anyone know where I can find an agent?”
Any takers? Scots Law News can confirm the quality of Mr Hamilton's public speaking, having sampled it also at the Bute House launch on 9 September of the republication of the late John MacCormick's classic memoir of Scottish nationalism (first published 1955), The Flag in the Wind.