Scottish Jokes

Highland hospitality sometimes requires the rule of ‘family
hold back’ to be invoked. In the house of Campbell of
Ardnave there was an elderly servant, whose name was
John. There were family guests in the house, and more
guests to dinner. One of the family guests, a young lady,
asked John if he could help her to another potato from the dish. John paid no attention to the request. Again she asked, and this time he stooped to her ear, and said, in a voice all too audible round the table: ‘There’s just the two potatoes left in the dish, and they maun be kept for the strangers.’

Professor J.S. Blackie was a great enthusiast for Highland
ways and a staunch defender of the traditional ways of the Highlands. Not a native Gaelic speaker, he had taught
himself the language. One day he took a friend, the geologist Sir Archibald Geikie, on a trip from his house near Oban to the nearby Isle of Kerrera. On the island, they called on a farmer’s wife whom the Professor knew well. He greeted her in Gaelic, and spoke on in that language for some time, but at last, to Geikie’s amusement, the lady broke in on him: ‘Oh, Professor,’ she said, ‘if only you would speak English, I would understand what you are saying.’

The mother of the laird of Glenmoriston, having entertained a rather tedious visitor for several days, who showed no sign of planning to depart, said to him one morning: ‘Be sure and eat a good breakfast now, for it’s not here you will be taking your dinner.’

The house of Forbes of Culloden was famous in the
Highlands for its hospitality, particularly in the matter of
wine. The visitor Edmund Burt remarked that: ‘Few go
away sober at any time; and for the greatest part of his
guests, in the conclusion, they cannot go home at all.’
The dining chairs at Culloden House had slots fitted for
short poles so that, sedan-chair like, their slumped
occupants could be carried out by the servants. On one
occasion, an English officer had been acting more drunk
than he really was, and when the servants came up pro-
posing to bear him away, he objected, standing up on his
feet and telling them there was no need for their assistance, ‘whereupon one of them, with sang-froid and a serious air, said, “No matter, sir, we shall have you by and by.”

The eighteenth-century novelist Henry Mackenzie knew of at least one house where, at the dinners, a boy was employed to crawl under the table to undo the neckcloths of diners who slumped to the floor, to prevent them from choking to death. Fifty years later, Dean Ramsay recalled the complaint of an elderly retainer of the Laird of Grant, bemoaning modern moderation: ‘It’s sair changed times at Castle Grant when gentlemen can get to their bed on their own feet.‘

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