March

Scotland voted in favour of an independent parliament on the first day of March 1979, but a technicality meant the country would be denied its own chamber until a second vote, many years later, asked effectively the same question. It was also the month in which a clear majority of Scotland’s MPs and Members of the European Parliament signed the Claim of Right, declaring the sovereignty of the people of Scotland.

Several notable inventors or inventions appeared in the news in March. A Scottish pioneer of the process of fingerprinting died in Japan, x-ray researcher John Spence was ‘martyred’, and Alexander Fleming, who discovered penicillin, died. Alexander Graham Bell had success in getting his telephone to work, the electric toaster was invented by a man who was actually working to improve electric lighting, and a pioneer of flushing toilets died. His legacy was the S-bend, which helps keep noxious smells out of our homes.

March is the month in which we remember several Scots who helped improve our understanding of the world. Explorer David Livingstone, who set out to find the source of the Nile, was born, and so was the man who gave Antarctica its name. John Murray, considered the father of modern oceanography, died in a car crash, and was buried in Dean Cemetery.