Some Donalds are actually awesome - The Chaff with Scott Stephenson

There is a statue in Lucknow of a man who, strictly speaking, was not from Lucknow. This seems like a minor detail until you start thinking about it, at which point it becomes a surprisingly entertaining question. Donald Dinnie was born in Scotland in 1837, became an internationally famous athlete, travelled extensively to compete, and eventually made his way to Lucknow to take part in the Caledonian Games in 1882. He did not grow up here, establish a business here, raise a family here or spend his retirement years sitting on a porch here wondering why the price of everything had gone up. He came to town, competed, made an impression and went on with his extraordinarily busy life.

 

And yet, more than a century later, Donald Dinnie is still here.

 

There is something delightful about that. Most visitors leave Lucknow with considerably less commitment. They might stop for lunch, look around, buy something, take a photograph and continue down the road. Dinnie apparently had other plans. He arrived in the 19th century and, through the strange machinery of memory, community pride and public art, eventually acquired permanent residency. Not only that, he acquired a very visible form of permanent residency. He is now a fixture of the place, a physical reminder that something happened here involving a man who had come from somewhere else.

 

The interesting part is that nobody needs to pretend Dinnie was from Lucknow. There is no need to rewrite his biography, move his birthplace across the Atlantic or invent a childhood in which a young Donald could be found running around town with a caber tucked under his arm. His connection is much simpler. He came here to compete. He was famous. People remembered that he had been here. His appearance became part of the community’s story, and eventually the community decided that the story was worth giving a permanent shape.

 

There is something almost mischievously logical about this when you consider what a statue actually does. A statue is not really a prize awarded to somebody after an exhaustive test of local citizenship. It is a way of saying that a person, an event or a connection is worth remembering. It puts a little piece of memory into the landscape so that future generations can stumble across it and ask questions.

 

There is also something worth noticing about the distinction between a person’s birthplace and a person’s connection to a place. We tend to treat birthplace as though it were the ultimate credential. If someone was born somewhere, we immediately understand why that place might claim them. But life is considerably messier than that. People move. Families move. Careers move. Fame moves. Sometimes a person’s relationship with a community comes through a parent or grandparent. Sometimes it comes through something they accomplished there. Sometimes it comes through one memorable event that lasted an afternoon but somehow survived for generations.

 

Dinnie belongs to that last category. His connection to Lucknow was not based on spending his entire life here. It was based on what happened.

 

That distinction matters because history has never been particularly interested in following the tidy rules we would like to impose on it. Famous people rarely fit perfectly into the little boxes we prepare for them. Someone can be born in one place, raised in another, become famous in a third and remain forever associated with a fourth. Someone can spend 80 years somewhere and never become particularly interesting to historians, while someone else can pass through town for a day and leave behind a story that people are still telling 140 years later.

 

There is a lovely bit of absurdity in the permanence of it all. Dinnie came to compete in a sporting event. He was a professional athlete who travelled from place to place doing what famous athletes did in those days, which was essentially to arrive somewhere, impress everyone by being exceptionally good at physically difficult things, collect whatever prizes were available and move on to the next town. He could not possibly have known that his appearance in Lucknow would eventually become part of the community’s identity.

 

He certainly could not have known that one day people would be walking past a statue of him while carrying smartphones, drinking coffee and trying to remember whether they had put the recycling out.

 

That is the strange magic of local history. Nobody gets to see the whole story while they are living it.

 

Donald Dinnie didn’t have to be from Lucknow to become part of Lucknow. He just had to matter to Lucknownians. 

 

And now he has a statue to prove it.