Stone of Destiny

Westminster Abbey is a ghostly place by night. Timbers creak and pigeons and sparrows make fluttering noises high in the clerestory as the watchman makes his rounds.

On Christmas morning, Night Watchman Andrew Hislop, long used to such sounds, came upon a startling sight: there were marks on the carpet indicating that a heavy object had been dragged down the altar steps, through the transept, past the memorial to Dryden and the graves of Robert Browning and Lord Tennyson, to a side door near the Poets' Corner. Hislop rushed to a phone, called the police. "The Stone is gone," he cried, "the coronation Stone!"

The Royal Seat. A rectangular chunk of yellow sandstone was missing from the base of a 654-year-old chair in which 27 British monarchs had sat for coronation. Edward I had brought the Stone to London in 1296 to celebrate his 21-day campaign against Scotland, had the coronation chair built around it and crowned himself King of England and Scotland. Edward had swiped the Stone from the Perthshire Abbey of Scone (rhymes in Scotland with boon, in England with lone), where it had formed the base of another chair in which the Kings of Scotland had been crowned for the previous 453 years. Before that, the Stone had rested at Dunstaffnage, Argyllshire, headquarters of even earlier Scots chieftains. Tradition says that the Stone had been brought from Ireland and was originally one of the stones upon which Jacob had rested his head (Genesis 28:18) when he dreamed of Israel. Scots call it Lia Fail (Stone of Destiny), but geologists insist that it is an ordinary piece of Scottish sandstone (worth about 35-c-).

British police soon guessed that the theft was the work of Scottish nationalists. At the scene, they found a short crowbar and a wrist watch. Freshly carved on the coronation chair were the initials J.F.S., meaning possibly Justice for Scotland. Archdeacon S. J. Marriott thought that the theft was an elaborately planned job. Said he: "Early that morning I heard a crowd of drunks singing loudly outside. They might have been covering up for the noises inside." A policeman reported having questioned a man and a woman in a small, English-built Ford parked by the Abbey that night; he received a reply in unmistakable Scottish accents.

As the hunt spread over Britain, the border between Scotland and England was closed for the first time in 400 years, and all northbound cars, railroad vans, ships, airplanes were searched. On a telephone tip, police dragged the Serpentine lake in London's Hyde Park. At week's end London's Sunday Chronicle reported that 8,000 policemen had been involved in the hunt. At one point, the police pursuit was costing Britain's taxpayers -L-2,000 an hour. The Dean of Westminster, Dundee-born Dr. Alan Campbell Don, was distracted. Said he in a radio appeal: "It is the most precious relic we have ... I will go to the ends of the earth to recover it."

Scots Who Ha'e. Scottish nationalists appeared as puzzled as the police. In the last year, 1,700,000 Scots who believe that Scotland suffers from the centralization of government in London have put their signatures to the Scottish Covenant, a petition asking for a Scottish parliament. But serious nationalists are few. One of them, Aberdeen Engineer Gordon Murray, leader of the tiny Scottish Republican Party, which had once boasted that it had designs on the Stone, said: "We would certainly like to take the credit, but I'm afraid we properly can't." Bouncy, kilt-wearing Mrs. Wendy ("Wee Wendy") Wood, leader of the Scottish Patriots' Association, who in 1932 roused her followers to tear down the British flag from Stirling Castle, said: "It's the best news I have heard in years. The Stone was retrieved, not stolen." Her group did not take it, she hastened to add.

Then someone drew attention to a novel called The North Wind of Love, written in 1944 by Scottish Nationalist Compton Mackenzie, onetime rector of Glasgow University, in which he describes a group of Scottish college graduates who conspire to liberate the Stone, but are exposed at the last moment. Said jubilant Author Mackenzie last week: "I hope I may have given good advice to the young men who carried out this successful effort and shown them what to avoid ... No patriotic Scot could help having a feeling of elation." Mysterious stickers appeared on Glasgow shop fronts: "Would you keep stolen property in YOUR church?"

Destiny's Ransom. At week's end the Glasgow Daily Record published a petition, addressed to King George, which it had received through the mail. The petitioners, who did not sign their names, boasted that they had taken the Stone of Destiny, offered proof by giving unpublished but accurate details of the wrist watch left behind in the Abbey. They petitioned that the Stone be kept in Scotland henceforth, and taken to London only for the coronation of the King's successors.

The Times had called the theft "a coarse and vulgar crime," and the BBC had banned all jokes mentioning the Stone, including the remark that no Scot could have taken the Stone because no Scot would have left a wrist watch behind. Said the Manchester Guardian: "Need we English be much wounded by the loss of the Stone, if it is never recovered? We have a far better and more respectable one of our own, the King's Stone, now at Kingston-on-Thames, on which the Saxon Kings were crowned."

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