Obituary: Ian Hamilton, lawyer and activist known for taking the Stone of Destiny

Died: October 3, 2022 

IAN Hamilton, who has died aged 97, was a lawyer and prominent Scottish nationalist who was best known for his role in the audacious plot to take the Stone of Destiny from Westminster Abbey and bring it back to Scotland. 

Concocted with three other students, the original plan was for Hamilton to hide in the Abbey and let his co-conspirators into the building. But when Hamilton was found hiding behind a statue, the night watchman who discovered him believed his story that he had been accidentally locked in and let him go. 

The plotters then acted the next day: Christmas Day 1950. They broke in through a side door of the abbey and prised the stone out from under the Coronation Chair. Having accidentally dropped it and broken it in two, they then took the two pieces away in the back of their cars. 

When the fact that the Stone of Destiny was missing was discovered on Boxing Day, it sparked a nationwide manhunt. Road blocks were set up on the routes into Scotland. Hotels, boarding houses, and restaurants were searched by the CID. Police patrol cars were ordered to be on the look-out for a Ford Anglia saloon and the car’s occupants who were thought to be a man and a woman “said to have Scottish accents”. 

In fact, Hamilton and his comrades – fellow students Gavin Vernon, Kay Matheson, and Alan Stuart – had been clever and hadn’t headed to Scotland at all. Instead, one of the pieces of the stone was hidden in the Midlands, while the other was buried in a field in Kent. Two weeks later the two pieces were reunited in Scotland and a stonemason was employed to repair the break. 

The constitutional, legal, and political implications were obvious straight away. The stone had long been a symbol of Scottish kingship and power and its presence in England a point of controversy for many Scots. The first king of a united Scotland and England, James VI and I, was crowned on it was and Elizabeth was also “set on the Stone” in 1953, just three years after it was taken from the abbey. 

In the immediate aftermath of the theft, a lawyer told the Glasgow Herald that the people who took the stone were guilty of the crime of sacrilege, the “breaking into a place of worship and stealing therefrom”, and that under English law the maximum penalty was a long term of imprisonment. 

However, on April 11, 1951, the stone was returned by its temporary custodians in a highly choreographed event at Arbroath Abbey, where Scotland’s Declaration of Independence was signed on April 6, 1320. They laid the stone at the high altar and placed on it a letter addressed to the king. The letter said that they had intended no indignity or injury to His Majesty and had been inspired by a desire to compel the attention of His Majesty’s ministers to the widely expressed demand of the Scottish people for a measure of self-government. 

The question then was what to do with the instigators. The matter was raised in Cabinet, where there was discussion of whether the foursome should be prosecuted and also whether the stone should be re-housed in Scotland. Attorney General Hartley Shawcross warned against prosecution because it would give the students a chance to be seen as martyrs if they were convicted or heroes if they were acquitted and a decision was made not to prosecute. 

For Hamilton and the others the affair began an association with the stone that would never leave them: all four had been involved in the Scottish Covenant Association, a movement supporting home rule, and in the years that followed, Hamilton would often write and commentate on Scottish politics and independence. After his death, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said that over her years as SNP leader, she had received occasional words of wisdom, encouragement and support from him and had treasured them. 

Ian Robertson Hamilton was born in Paisley, the son of John and Martha Hamilton, and was educated at the John Neilson Institute, a private school in the town. He volunteered to be a pilot with the RAF but was considered too young and later served as a flight mechanic. He said the frustration of his ambitions to be a pilot left him with a positive sense of being “shut out”. 

After the war he studied law at Glasgow University where he became involved in politics. After the Stone of Destiny affair, he published a book about the affair No Stone Unturned. He wrote another book in the 90s, The Taking of the Stone of Destiny, which was turned into the 2008 movie Stone of Destiny, starring Robert Carlyle. 

He was admitted to the bar in 1953 but refused to swear allegiance to Queen Elizabeth II insisting that in Scotland she was Elizabeth I. He later lost a court case that the title was illegitimate in Scotland. 

By the 1960s, Hamilton was working as a prosecutor and was a sheriff in Glasgow for a time in the 80s. He also flirted with other jobs, including farming, and lived for almost two years in Canada before returning to Scotland. 

Although not a member of the SNP when he took the Stone of Destiny, he joined the party in 1992 and in 1994 stood for Strathclyde East for the European elections, coming second to Labour. 

Some 50 years after Hamilton’s plot to take the Stone, it was eventually repatriated to Scotland in the 90s by then prime minister John Major who accepted the moral and legal case for its return. The stone is now in Edinburgh Castle but will be moved to Perth City Hall in 2024. 

Ian Hamilton, who was elected rector of Aberdeen University in 1994, published two volumes of autobiography, A Touch of Treason and A Touch More Treason. 

He was married twice, first to Sheila Fenwick, a teacher, with whom he had three children, then to Jeanette Stewart, with whom he had a son.