But, while awaiting it, the time did not pass without profit. Three letters followed us to Dunvegan, each containing the cheque from one or other of the wholesale newsagent firms which had distributed the Claymore for us. These were final payments, but current comforts; and, through the courtesy of the bank manager at Dunvegan, we had soon a sum of about 30 pounds in hand, which was to carry us far.
Apart from the residents of the village, congenial company appeared in the persons of a honeymoon couple. The bridegroom was James Gordon, a Merchant Navy officer whom I had met four years earlier on St Kilda, a remote part in which to strike up an acquaintance. On that occasion we had sailed with the steamer Hebrides to Loch Eport in North Uist, leaving her there to walk across the island together and pick up another steamer at Lochboisdale. In this way we had come to Dunvegan, and he had produced a car from the garage of his summer house there and run me well down the road towards Sligachan, knocking over a cow on the way. He was in the Indian coast service, with home leave only every fourth year. And here we were again, meeting four years later, he with his bride from Cromarty.
One day he drove all four of us to Portree, demonstrating on the way that he had lost none of his steersman’s dash. He drove the car like a ship’s launch, cornering on the loose stones in a hopping skid, with not the slightest reduction in speed, and hailing: ‘Hold tight, passengers! … If there’s enough water we’ll get you off!’ Seumas and I, in the rear seat, looked over backwards into valley bottoms which we frequently overhung. But Jim Gordon had sailor’s luck, which is the landward equivalent of a soldier’s wind. Not only did we get to Portree and safely back, but we visited the famous school there, and had tea in the Carnegie Hostel for the schoolboys. Fifty of them, likely lads gathered from all the Isles, live here as boarders, in the care of a merry band of teachers and a motherly matron. All the boys but four were native Gaelic speakers, and the four, the sons of incoming professional men of various sorts, were learning fast. As the prototype of a residential seminary for young Scots Highlanders, there is certainly a valuable study to be made of this lively place. We learned what we could, so that we were able later to write an article on the Portree School for a weekly paper. It was a production permanently marred by the fact that the paper clapped on to it the unpardonable heading – ‘The Harrow of the Highlands’.
It was in this hostel that the King and Queen were entertained when they came to Skye on an official visit as Duke and Duchess of York. The luncheon menu, of six or seven courses, was framed on the mantelpiece in the matron’s room. It demonstrates a virtue not yet fully realised by the Highland hotelier: every item, except the coffee, had been produced from the soil or the seas of Skye.
At Dunvegan another lesson in self-sufficiency was going forward, and flourishing before its final collapse. The heiress and chief of all her clan, Mrs MacLeod of MacLeod, had opened a little egg-testing and grading station, and was making headway with a gallant marketing scheme. It set forth, at that time, with great promise. Eggs stamped ‘Dunvegan Tested’ were to be seen in Glasgow shops – often the shops of MacLeods (and why shouldn’t clan links have a commercial significance!). The crofters of the surrounding countryside sent their eggs; the private bus owners had agreed, for a goodwill send-off to the scheme, to collect and deliver the eggs at half the transport charges. When we visited the egg clearing and packing station Mrs MacLeod of MacLeod, clan chief of all the MacLeods, had a damp cloth in her hand and was cleaning the crofters’ eggs one by one.
The scene was set fair for a practical effort in co-operation. And although the bid failed, probably because the mental climate was not yet favourable, it marked a positive advance towards community enterprise. While it lasted, we made ourselves a non-profit-taking publicity arm, capturing paragraphs here and there for ‘Dunvegan Tested’.
Our one good day never came. At night the tin roof of the hostel rattled and lifted in the gale. There was little daylight in the heavy daytime, with the sky, borne down by clouds, the colour of the foaming burns. A decision came in the last week of October. It was time to make another forward move, as clearly as we could see. One day we simply packed up our log and charts, and the trip was over.
Towards that evening the steamer Loch Broom came into Dunvegan pier, southward-bound from Ullapool to the Clyde by way of Tobermory. We carried the canoes aboard her, hoping to be at Calve in the morning. Dunvegan Head was hardly cleared before the weather hit us as if the previous three months had been merely practice. And, big ship as she was, she ran staggering into Loch Pooltiel, to huddle at anchor for two days. In spite of the steerage tickets we had bought, and the fact that we assembled our stoves in sheltered corners of the alley ways and made tea and brose at intervals, the steward permitted us to sleep on the cushions of the smoking-room after the other passengers had gone to their cabins.
There were, however, few passengers. Apart from ourselves, there were only four, all of them men. Three of them were obvious tourists, making a last end-of-season adventurous trip into the wilds. Their garb was aggressively nautical, with peaked caps or berets, reefers, and mighty cable-stitched sweaters. The other was a tall soigné figure, incongruously outfitted in stylish dark tweed overcoat, bowler hat, pointed shoes, and carrying kid gloves and a rolled umbrella. Thus he strolled the deck firmly, with a brisk word here and there and a knowing eye up into the weather. It was a sight rarely to be seen on a cruising and cargo steamer, and his fellow-passengers of the saloon, among themselves, found in him a subject for some hearty seafaring drolleries.
We discovered that the man in the bowler was less of a misfit than he appeared. It was the steward who told us that he was one of the senior Clyde pilots, taking a late fortnight of leave, in the outfit which he undoubtedly considered gave him the most contrasting holiday feeling. On one occasion he took off his gloves to play a dapper practical joke upon a passenger who had a fishing line over the stern as we lay at anchor. While the fisher was below, discussing a glass of whisky, the pilot pulled in the line and fixed to the hook the form of a fish which he had cut out in tin, with shears borrowed from the bo’sun. The hauling in of this catch was an enjoyable diversion.
Another of the passengers was a Ministry of Labour official, seeking respite from the sorrows of attempting to settle unemployed city lads on the land, and to persuade them of the difference in working conditions between farms and factories. He told a story, heavy with frustration, of one reluctant recruit, listening to a plea that Saturday and Sunday also brought their farm tasks, who interrupted with: ‘Listen, mister – I wouldnae work on Setturday afternoon for Jesus Christ!’
In two days the weather abated to a normal south-wester, and we heaved down the coast of Skye, and southwards towards Ardnamurchan, which the canoes seemed to have passed so long since. Neither of us was to see these parts again until the following year, when Seumas would complete the first intention of the trip and cross a stormy Minch alone, a tiny and solitary figure. It was to be an effort which seems to me to remain the best single feat of canoeing in British waters.
But now, steamer-borne, we made such a slow wallow round Ardnamurchan Point that the ship felt sick, as if she would be glad to founder and have done with it. In a long time, with Ardmore abeam, we had a little shelter, and at last, there was the end of Calve! – and the bump when we embraced Tobermory pier.
As we paddled over the bay towards the island we came under the familiar stern of the Hebrides, lying at her anchor for a night of shelter. Alastair MacRae, her radio operator, who now radio-operates aircraft round the world, came to the stern and spoke to us in wisdom and relief: ‘God, are you still alive? Go home now and burn these dam’ canoes.’
CHAPTER 16
THE HIGHLAND PROBLEM RESOLVED
Fate to a task has willed us,
(Weaker is Fate than men!)
To-morrow the fear that chilled us
Burns in the fire that filled us
Careless of where and when
To-morrow our
hands shall build us
Power and pride again.
Anyone who is prepared to set down a plan for the solution of the Highland problem must be aware of plenty of past and present competition. There are not enough pigeonholes in Whitehall to accommodate the plans which have been made for the Highlands. It is an old story. Sincere men and committees have been publishing reports and recommendations for 200 years. There was one common flaw in these plans. None of them conceded that Scotland, as a nation and an economic unit, must be the whole basis of the solution.
Our solutions are of a simple if wholehearted character. First, the planning must be conceived and done from Scotland, although the lack of such an authority should not delay their starting. If Holland had remained a Spanish colony, who in Madrid would have cared much about the need for a fight to win back Walcheren from the sea in 1946?
It was a point which we were able to see clearly when we made a tour among the industries of rural Ireland a summer or two later. The urgent need in Ireland had been to create employment outlets for the youth of the large country families who could not all gain a living from the family holding. To achieve this quickly, direction of industry had been put into force on an almost fey scale. Factory enterprises and light industries, many of them inspired from abroad with refugee capital, were ushered into remote comers of the country, often with odd results; like the factory for women’s hats in Galway, claimed to be the most up-to-date in Britain, which overnight launched the daughters of the Claddagh fishermen into the making of Parisian creations under the direction of a Viennese milliner of European reputation. What impressed us about the young men who were administering these schemes was that they were not working in a cemetery of dead reports. They were too busy to find out that the job could not be done.
The key solution to the Highland problem is transport and communications. After that comes the use of the land and its assets, for the first time in a modern and efficient setting. That is the whole story.
Transport and communications throughout the Highlands and the Isles must be geared to the needs of these communities. If one could travel, or transmit goods and information at will, between one West Highland point and another, almost everything that could be desired in development would follow surely after. A system of transport is useless that is conceived as the hinder end of a pattern radiating outwards from the ‘Home Counties’, and designed in the first place to speed north the escaping man of wealth and his gun-dogs. The whole transport plan must be modelled anew to serve the people of the place, and those others who will come, or come back. They must be enabled – especially those on the western seaboard – to move readily among the neighbouring townships, and to shift their goods out and in at a commercial pace. If this is not their right as British citizens – and it has certainly not been so up to now – then it will be their amenity as natives of an area which must be the object of a national investment for the national profit and well-being. Coastal linking by sea, now neglected except for steamers making calls at widely scattered points, must play a large part in this. The coastal activity of Norway, with hundreds of small vessels always on the move, shows something of what can be accomplished when transport is treated as a people’s service and not as an outpost incidental.
The developing of a smooth transport system would at once increase the industry of tourism, to which the Highlands can rightly look as one of its great by-products. It was a mordant joke with Seumas and me, as we worked our strenuous way north, that we had always been conscientious proselytes for a long Highland tourist season; and we so remained throughout our trip, mentioning in our weather-beaten journalism that the area was ideally designed for late and early season holidays. We stuck to the point until the end. Our year was not typical, and there are ample temperature and sunshine records to make the case. July and August tend to be the wet months. May and early June are lovely, and in the back end of the year the mild days run on, forgetful of winter, often until after Christmas.
We shall be looking later at the means by which the Highlander’s temperament might be adjusted to his future. He has a shyness, about what he imagines to be his amenity shortcomings, which has stultified the growth of a holiday-making industry, and has disappointed many would-be tourists and friends. He has persuaded himself that no visitor will stay under a roof which does not shelter a bath with hot and cold running water, or other lavish plumbing for which adequate substitutes are available. It is a grievous error, and in the past it has prevented many young persons from the joy of living in a Highland home. There is some gentle corrective work to be done here. The wayside cottages along the English main roads have done better, with their little cards saying ‘Teas’ or ‘Bed and Breakfast -5/6’. The Highlander has been diverted from the great rewards of a popular holiday industry by the thought of the well-to-do sportsman in the big hotel, hiring his gillies and dressing for dinner.
There are some who see in a tourist industry a danger of a national devotion to flunkeyism. Switzerland is readily quoted as a country largely committed to tourism. It is wholly wrong, however, to imagine that the Swiss have required to become a nation of hotel boots and valets. They have taken, almost as a personal and national challenge, the need to turn their hands, perhaps by way of contrast, to some high craftsmanship. In witness of which they have their superb watch industry, setting itself probably the highest standard of precision tool-work in the world. But in addition, their tourist industry seems to have been so devised as to admit to full opportunity their splendid engineers, with their hydroelectric power, and the endless installations of mountain railways, lifts, lake steamers, for which tourists willingly pay extremely heavy charges.
These Swiss undertakings are the result of a community impulse – a virtue which has not yet inspired many of the Highland tourist efforts. The inward tendency to security still stands in the way of even small efforts to beautify the community. While houses are spotless inside, gardens are rare – although becoming less so. Village efforts towards the creation of some such communal asset as a sports field or a hall have failed more often than they have succeeded. There are signs of a leadership which might well provide the trifling impetus required to break this social diffidence. One minor but essential tidying-up which could touch-off the springs of action in any village I can think of would be a bid to tidy up the place, and stop, for example, using the harbour as a rubbish dump.
The design of a tourist industry must also have a Scottish context. One piece of post-war planning has already been a monstrous witness to the errors of centralisation. The Catering Wages Acts, designed perhaps to protect the staffs of hotels in the West End of London, became a strangling menace when applied to the small family hotels of the Highlands, and presumably of similar districts. Not for the first time, rural Britain carried Mayfair on its back.
But it is to the land that the Highlands must look – this time with promise – for their salvation. In the course of its long evolution the West of Scotland produced for its own needs the system of crofting, based on the most perfect utilisation of the land and sea assets of the district, without modern techniques, which had yet been devised. The basis of crofting is the small family land-holding, providing a food and clothing subsistence, with the head of the family employed seasonally or part time in a cash-earning employment. Any scheme to ‘better’ the present-day Highlander must follow this model, which is founded on the individual, and on control from within the community. Whatever immense changes may come, either to the Highlands or to the cities, it is likely that for a great period forward into our history there will be fringes of community life, around the west, still holding to this ancient way of life.
It will be one of the most exciting social experiments of our times to apply to this pattern and technique of living, the scientific training of our recent years. There is already a considerable outward pressure from the cities, to carry back into the country the technical skills which have been building up in urban industry. Country revolutions,
even social ones, have always derived their leadership from the towns: even from their own kin in the towns, who have shared origins but have shed inhibitions.
This first battalion of town recruits, refreshed by new skills and associations, is ready. Their names are listed in the card indexes of applications for crofts and small holdings filed in the Department of Agriculture offices in Edinburgh. And familiar names they are – hardly a foreign or even a Lowland name among them. It runs to many thousands of able applicants, and it reads like a clan muster-roll for Prestonpans. All of them are seeking back, with a true instinct, to the heartening sources and resources of their own places. It will not, of course, be necessary to have these returning townsmen become crofters on the old pattern. The time has come to allow subsistence crofting to develop into a more efficient and specialist farming, in large or small cultivation units according to the ability of the man and the ground.
It is part of the dramatic expectation of all Highland concerns that this leadership, and this specialism, are already in view. Here and there about the territory already one sees emerging the landowner himself, in the role – not common in recent Scotland – of the laird who is determined to make the land abound. These are young men. Some of them have ancient clan associations with their land. Others are more recently in possession. It is to be remembered that in the whole of broad Scotland one would have difficulty in finding a laird who speaks like a Scotsman. It requires a belief in historic justice to understand the strange divagations which bring them to their present tasks by way of Eton, Oxford, the Guards, and all the rest. It may be that some are attracted to nurture their own lands by heavy post-war taxation and the belief that the firm outlook for British agriculture offers the best commercial proposition of the generation; it may be that some of them feel moved by the stirring which Scotland has been experiencing. But, whatever the motives, here they are, emerging suddenly, with the promise of leadership in the form most fitting to the hour. Under their hands, new soil and crop and cattle-rearing theories are in for a brisk time, and are already showing profit.
The Canoe Boys Page 22