Glamis Castle (1937) – Great Scott issue

This ninety-second newsreel item comes from British Pathé, the British newsreel company whose archive now publishes its films on YouTube. It was part of a 1937 series on “Great Scots,” made in the year of George VI’s coronation, and it visits Glamis Castle in Angus as the childhood home of the new Queen Elizabeth — the former Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, daughter of the 14th Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne.

Over sweeping shots of the towers and grounds, the narrator describes the core of the house as a fifteenth-century red-stone tower that “breaks into turrets and pinnacles like a flower,” explains how a marriage brought the Bowes name and arms into the family, and quotes the poet Thomas Gray’s description of the castle rising out of thick woods. Pathé’s catalogue notes also record two men knocking at the great wooden door and feeding the estate’s ponies. In the middle comes the ghost story, told quite matter-of-factly: a tower overlooking the courtyard is said to hide a secret chamber where a past Lord Glamis and the Earl of Crawford play a spectral game of cards until the crack of doom.

The card-playing legend is usually told of “Earl Beardie,” a fifteenth-century lord said to have flown into a rage when no one would play cards with him on the Sabbath and sworn he would play with the Devil himself — who duly arrived, and in some versions condemned him to play until doomsday in a sealed room. Later tellers identify Beardie with either Alexander Lyon, 2nd Lord Glamis, or Alexander Lindsay, 4th Earl of Crawford; the newsreel simply seats the two of them at the same table. It is notable that in 1937 a royal-themed newsreel still found room for the story, while saying nothing of the better-known “Monster of Glamis.”

That tale, of a deformed heir hidden away in a secret suite, is attached to a real child: Thomas, first son of Lord Glamis, recorded in the peerage as born and died on October 21, 1821. Rumours that he had survived began to circulate only in the late nineteenth century, and the story took its best-known form in James Wentworth Day’s 1967 book The Queen Mother’s Family Story. Glamis is still the family’s home and opens to visitors in season.