Is it just sloppiness or something more sinister that the Scots contribution to Britain is being air-brushed out on the wireless? I recently heard a BBC programme about the ground-breaking Somersett court case in which Lord Mansfield ruled in 1772 that slavery could not be enforced in England. The Lord Mansfield on the radio spoke like a stereotypical English judge. But I happen to know Mansfield was born and educated until he was 13 years old in Perthshire. Of course, we have no recording of Lord Mansfield speaking and his time at Westminster School in London and Oxford University may have toned down his accent more than a little. But it turns out, according to one version of his life, that his Scottish accent was so thick when he enrolled at Oxford that the clerk recorded his place of birth as Bath rather than Perth. The alternative version is that his hand-writing was so poor that Perth was misread on the registration document as Bath. Whatever,  I somehow doubt that he sounded like your stereotype English Law Lord. We do have recordings of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle speaking. I was surprised to find that even in the 1930s he still retained a distinct Scottish accent. And yet television and radio almost always have him speaking like Nigel Bruce playing Doctor Watson in the old Sherlock Holmes movies. As I say, sloppy research? Here in Canada I heard a dramatised version of the Seven Oaks Massacre in 1817, on the site of present-day Winnipeg. Most of the main characters involved in the real life event were Scots. But the Canadian actors thought "Brits" and Nigel Bruce as Doctor Watson. I did some checking. Lord Selkirk, who had sent the Highland settlers to what is now Manitoba, was educated in England, so he probably did have an English accent. Ironically, the only Scots accent was a attributed to a character who though of Highland descent was born and raised in the United States. As I say, it is hard to know how someone who lived before technology was capable of recording the human voice actually spoke. But a little research might give some good pointers and avoid the impression that the man who effectively outlawed slavery in England was an English toff.