Scotland correspondent
Dr Alan Borthwick, softly spoken in his blazer and tie, looks every bit the typical historian.
But this archivist has spent the past 30 years solving a mystery.
How did thousands of historical documents that belong in Scotland’s national archives end up across the Atlantic Ocean in Canada?
The answer is that they were stolen. By one man. With a particular interest in stamps.
Dr Borthwick explains that “panic” first set in when a National Records of Scotland (NRS) employee attended an auction in London in 1994.
They discovered that 200 of the items up for sale belonged to NRS.
These should have been safely in Scotland’s archives, not being offloaded to the highest bidder via a bang of the auctioneer’s gavel.
NRS can date back all their archive users to 1847. After some cross referencing, Dr Borthwick and his team realised that the auction items all linked back to one person – Prof David Stirling Macmillan.
Prof Macmillan was born in 1925 and was from Girvan, Ayrshire. He served in the Royal Navy during World War Two and studied history at the University of Glasgow.
His right to use the national archives had been revoked in 1980 when he was caught removing a document. Staff assumed this was a one-off.
But the truth was that Prof Macmillan had been helping himself since 1949.
The 200 items that turned up in the London auction were the tip of the iceberg.
Now National Records of Scotland are revealing the scale of his thefts. And the odd nature of them.
Prof Macmillan wasn’t pinching documents that were worth a lot of money, or even those that were particularly historically significant.
The archives include letters from Robert Burns and Mary Queen of Scots. But these weren’t his targets.
The contents of many of the letters he took are mundane, perhaps even boring.
But a lifelong interest in stamps and postmarks seem to have led to him taking letters that caught his eye. Including documents dating back to 1637.
One example was a letter from a Scot who’d moved to the island of Madeira, off the north west coast of Africa. In 1813 they wrote to a friend with some news and gossip. Not exactly explosive stuff.
And yet Prof Macmillan ripped it out of the book it was stored in and pocketed it.
We can’t be certain about the motivations involved, but the interesting postmark and wax seal on the document are thought to be what tempted the professor.
The thief went to great lengths to cover his tracks.
He would remove reference numbers from documents and sometimes replace what he had taken with forgeries.
Ironically, Prof Macmillan was himself a professional archivist. He held that role at the University of Sydney and even placed an appeal for historical papers in the university newspaper.
The man who spent years stealing documents stressed they would be “properly looked after” and bemoaned the fact the so much of history had been “destroyed or lost”.
The academic moved to Trent University in Canada in 1968 and spent 20 years teaching history, though he still seems to have made annual visits to Scotland’s archives. He died in 1987, leaving no immediate family.
Much of his collection then found its way into the archives of Trent University, where they remained for some time. They were catalogued and descriptions were put online.
In 2012. Dr Alan Borthwick was still trying to track down what had been taken. He realised that thousands of the Trent University items rightly belonged to NRS and other UK institutions.
Dr Borthwick was dispatched to North America to investigate.
He says he was amazed by the “sheer quantity of documents” he found that had been stolen by Prof Macmillan.
The chief executive of NRS, Alison Byrne, echoes this. She described the scale of Prof Macmillan’s thefts as “unprecedented”.
She only took up her role six months ago, and was appalled when she was filled in on the situation.
Securing the return of these documents was one thing. But finding their rightful home was arguably the bigger task.
For decades, Dr Borthwick and his team have been “piecing together the jigsaw”, undertaking the painstaking process of finding the correct place for all of these stolen items.
For context, National Records of Scotland are the custodians of 38 million documents.
They have 80 kilometres of shelving – enough to stretch from Edinburgh to Glasgow.
Their archives are all about precision – every document has an exact home that makes locating it straightforward.
‘Sense of satisfaction’
The team wanted to get each item that Prof Macmillan had taken brought back to its rightful place.
Fortunately, NRS “daybooks” show what he was signing out of the archives. But his attempts to cover his tracks and remove identifying marks complicated the challenge.
Now National Records of Scotland say they have got almost everything back where it should be, ready to be pored over by a new generation of historians.
But, for Dr Borthwick, how does it feel to know that a fellow archivist so egregiously abused the trust that was put in him?
The historian labels it “a kick in the teeth”. He’s been trying to undo the damage done by Prof Macmillan for almost all of his working life.
That time could have been spent on other historical projects.
But Dr Borthwick reflects that there’s a “sense of satisfaction” in solving the mystery of the missing documents.
Documents that, these days, are kept under the watchful eye of CCTV.
