Whisky, Wars, Riots and Murder

by Malcolm Archibald

The sheriff officer gathered together his fifty-strong escort and returned to Skye. When they neared the Braes, the sheriff officer slipped to the back so he could direct their pounce. In the dark pre-dawn a cold, wet and rainy 19 April, they took the crofters by surprise, arrested their suspects and were hastily retreating before the Braes crofters were properly awake. However, once the warning was given, the crofters dashed out of their houses and fell on the rearguard of the police with sticks and stones and yells of wild rage. There were around 100 people involved in the attack on the police, from grey-bearded men who remembered the old days when clearance was commonplace, to women, and young children who knew nothing of the political disputes of the past. There was a bloody clash; sticks and stones against the truncheons and discipline of the stalwart policemen, with broken heads among the crofters, men and women. Seven women were reported as being injured.

  Idyllic views of the Kinloch gold fields in Sutherland

  © Author’s Collection

  The police, however, did not escape injuries either, and had to baton charge the crowd to escape, taking ten or so limping casualties with them. They made a fighting retreat to Portree with their prisoners. A poet described the incident slightly differently:

  A wet and dismal morning dawned

  As from Portree they rode;

  the men of Braes were up in time

  and met them on the road.

  Today there is a plaque marking the spot, with an inscription in Gaelic and English that reads: ‘Near this cairn on 19 April 1882 ended the battle fought by the people of Braes on behalf of the crofters of Gaeldom.’

  The Battle of the Braes was the opening round in a long campaign for better crofters’ rights throughout the Highlands and Islands. It encouraged resistance to other examples of landlord abuse and brought the attention of the press to living conditions in the far reaches of the country. For the arrested men it meant a trial in Inverness, but there were other strings to the factors’ bows other than straightforward eviction. Caithness Archive Centre holds a petition that was sent by fifteen residents of Portree to Sheriff Ivory some time after the battle. The petition asked that a force of police should be stationed in the village as the ‘much agitated’ Braes crofters had threatened ‘to come to Portree in a body and destroy or burn several houses’. The police were to remain in the village ‘until the present excitement abates’.

  Sheriff Ivory wanted more than a mere increase in the number of police. In September 1882 he requested 100 troops to be sent to Skye to deal with the crofters, for there had been mutinous growling in other parts of the island as well.

  Once more MacDonald’s anger broke.

  ‘Invade the Isle of Skye!

  Two thousand soldiers, boats and guns

  The people must comply!’

  By the end of that year the Inverness-shire Police had more than doubled their numbers from forty-four to ninety-four, but the crofters still continued their campaign for better rights. The five men from Braes appeared at court in Inverness and were fined between £1 and £2 and 10 shillings. They returned to Braes in time to help drive the cattle onto Ben Lee, in defiance of Lord MacDonald, his factor, the sheriff officers, the Glasgow Police and Uncle Tom Cobley and all.

  The factor obtained a Court of Session order to take their cattle elsewhere, but when Alexander MacDonald, the messenger at arms and his escort arrived with the document, the womenfolk of Braes sent him packing. The men were at the east coast fishing at the time.

  The poet put it in simpler terms:

  ‘Oh, if we send one million men’

  In London they declared,

  ‘We’ll never clear the Isle of Skye.

  The people are not scared.’

  The people were certainly determined and resistance continued. On 23 October the messenger at arms, this time backed by a ground officer – an assistant factor – named Norman Beaton, again tried to deliver his Court of Session order. MacDonald asked the crofters to fetch the ‘principal tenants’ who he thought were hiding in the hills, but the crofters refused to comply and again forced the factor’s men to retreat.

  The People Are Mightier Than a Lord

  The Battle of the Braes was only the foretaste of unrest that spread all across the Highlands. There was further trouble in Glendale, near Dunvegan, at the north-west of Skye and at nearby Husabost. At Husabost the landowner, Dr Nicol Martin, demanded ten days’ annual unpaid labour from his tenants, with a fine for those who disobeyed. Donald MacDonald, the factor on the Glendale estate, ordered the crofters to stop collecting driftwood and said they could not own dogs. There was a meeting to discuss resistance and men began to fight back.

  At Glendale the crofters, led by a man named John MacPherson of Milovaig, drove their animals onto disputed land and they were, if anything, even more militant. There were reports of crofters preparing to repel the police with scythe blades tied to poles. A shepherd at Glendale was attacked and driven away. When the police tried to establish a permanent presence in the area, a lookout saw them approaching and blew his horn to gather the crofters in support. Around 500 crofters knocked the police to the ground and drove them to Dunvegan. The crofters armed themselves with scythes, sticks and whatever else they could find, marched on Dunvegan and cleared the area of the police, sheriff officers and any other symbol of eviction and oppression. Because of these and other demonstrations elsewhere in the Highlands, in 1883 the government set up a commission, the Napier Commission, to investigate crofters’ grievances.

  The Napier Commission was a start, but it was weak. It was a step forward, but only a small one. However, clearing the forces of authority in Skye was an impressive victory for a class of tenants which had been subjected to oppression and eviction for over a century. With the factor and the majesty of the police set at defiance, Lord MacDonald and the Sheriff of Inverness were left seemingly impotent, but there were further developments in Skye.

  In autumn 1884 the crofters of Kilmuir and Glendale areas moved their stock into a number of sheep farms. By that time the crofters were well organised and a group calling itself HLLRA (Highland Land Law Reform Association) had united all the scattered communities under a single banner. The HLLRA was also known as the Highland Land League and their slogan was: ‘The people are mightier than a lord.’ As usual in such cases, there were a few men who went too far and intimidated crofters who did not want to join, with hayricks of those who refused being burned and livestock mutilated. Rightly or wrongly, the authorities believed that the crofters of Kilmuir were particularly guilty of intimidation and sent a superintendent and ten constables to restore order to the area. The crofters drove them off with stones and sticks and hard words.

  The situation worsened as rumours grew: the police on Skye were said to be armed with revolvers; the crofters at Kilmuir were waiting with rifles. Anything could happen, from a massacre of civilians by frightened police to a full-scale battle. There were stories of some Glendale crofters advocating the use of real violence in the Irish manner unless their situation was taken seriously.

  The troubles were not confined to Skye. Tiree and South Uist also witnessed the crofters seizing back land they had previously occupied, while crofters on Barra, North Uist and Lewis had similar designs. Throughout the Hebrides, crofters cut the wire fences of sheep farms, withheld their rent and occasionally burned the hayrick or mutilated the livestock of a man who failed to support the Land Leaguers. Most newspapers supported the landlords; The Scotsman called the actions of the Land Leaguers ‘terrorism’.

  Instead of sending nervous police into the hotbed of volatile and angry crofters, the authorities sent for the marines. In November 1884, in accordance with British gunboat diplomacy in other parts of the world a Royal Navy gunboat, Jackal, a troopship with 300 Royal Marines and one of MacBrayne’s steamers, Lochiel, arrived off the island. Lochiel did not have her original crew, who had refused to sail against the crofters, but it seemed the authorities were determined to finally squash the land dis
putes on Skye.

  Sheriff Ivory ordered that 250 redcoated Royal Marines should parade around Trotternish, the area of Skye most disaffected. They did so, carrying packs, rifles, bayonets and ammunition. The crofters had no ill will toward the Royal Marines, so they gathered to enjoy this free military tattoo. The marines were, however, used to back up the sheriff officers when they arrested various crofters. The Marines remained for months; the crofters still withheld their rents and when the election came in late 1885, large numbers of the crofters voted for the HLLRA.

  Troubles at Uig

  In May 1885 there was trouble at Uig in Lewis. The pattern was the same: the crofters had taken possession of land they needed. A sheriff officer and a party of his men entered the area to hand over warrants to remove their livestock. The crofters refused to accept the warrants and instead de-forced the sheriff officers.

  On 5 March 1886 eight of the crofters accused of de-forcements appeared before the Inverness Circuit Court. They were all young men and appeared quiet and respectable in court: Peter Macdonald was a baker, Donald Smith was a blacksmith, Angus McLeod and Allan Morrison were crofters, Norman McIver and Murdoch MacLeod, William Macdonald and Donald MacLennan were fishermen. They were charged with assault and breach of the peace, but pleaded guilty only to the latter.

  Sheriff Black said that the local minister was doing a good job in trying to preach the crofters into keeping the law, and there had not been much agitation in Uig for some time. He fined each man twenty shillings with the alternative of fifteen days in prison. His very next case was similar, as he faced a number of women who were charged with mobbing and rioting. They had banded together to prevent the tacksman James Mackenzie from grazing his stock on lands the crofters claimed at Linshadder, Uig. Sheriff Black fined them five shillings each.

  When the elections came in 1886, four of the Highland Land Leaguers were elected, so becoming the first members of Parliament from the working classes and perhaps the first native speakers of Scottish Gaelic. For once, crimes had resulted in a positive outcome. But while the people of Skye and Lewis were fighting authority, Tiree was also facing its own difficulties.

  Trouble in Tiree

  Today there is an indefinable atmosphere of peace in the Inner Hebrides, something that relaxes the visitor as soon as he or she looks across from the western coast of the mainland to the scattered skerries and mountains that seem to rise straight from the sea. Visitors come year after year to breathe fresh air and some choose to remain and live in a safe and secure environment. However, that was not always the case. Throughout the Dark and Middle Ages these islands were the homeland of some of the most warlike clans in Scotland.

  The island names are evocative: Rhum, Skye, Mull, Eigg, Raasay, Tiree. They carry the music of the Gael and the crash of winter seas. Of them all, Tiree is among the most beautiful and the most welcoming, yet in the 1880s this small island was so troublesome that the British government had to resort to sending in the Royal Navy and Royal Marines to subdue its population. The police just could not cope.

  Tiree is around ten miles long and perhaps five miles at its widest; it sits twenty-two miles west of Ardnamurchan and very close to its neighbour of Coll, yet when the weather is bad it could be cut off for days or weeks at a time, so wild could the sea get. Unlike other Hebridean islands, Tiree is both fertile and low-lying. The highest point is only 462 feet above the surrounding sea, a pimple of a hill. There is little doubt that in the nineteenth century the population of Tiree was too large for the island to accommodate unless there were major economic changes. In 1846 there were around 4,500 people living on the island. Soon after, the landowner, the Duke of Argyll, sent a new factor to the island.

  Folklore remembers him as am Baillidh Mor, the Big Factor, but his real name was Colonel John Campbell and he set about reducing the island’s population. This he did by rent increases and forced evictions, even of blind men, heavily pregnant women and the elderly. The great famine of the later 1840s also encouraged people to emigrate so the population dropped to around 2,700 by the 1880s. That was another bad decade, with an agricultural depression that lowered farming income. Destitution haunted even the fertile fields of Tiree, but the landlord did not lower the rents, as had happened in Skye. All across the Hebrides, crofters faced starvation, but rather than succumb or emigrate, they began to retaliate.

  In 1883 the crofters of Tiree asked the Duke of Argyll for a rent reduction and the return of common pastureland on Ben Hynish that had been taken from them some years before. In 1848 the rents had been raised to pay for some drainage works undertaken by the factor, but that work had been long paid for and the islanders asked that the rent return to its previous level. On 7 August 1883 a Royal Commission under Lord Napier was held on the island to listen to the islanders’ grievances, which included security of tenure and compensation for improvements to the crofts. However, the ground officer declared that the estate did not grant leases on land with an annual rental of less than £100, so there were no secure tenures for the crofters. The Napier Commission did nothing to ease the plight of the Tiree crofters.

  With their hardships increasing, many of the crofters began a rent strike and spoke of re-occupying disputed grazing land on Ben Hynish and Ben Hough. Criminal acts began, with the cutting of wire fences surrounding the sheep farms that had spread over land long used for communal grazing. The crofters, mainly members of the 136-strong Tiree branch of the Highland Land League, also organised a land raid on the farm of Greenhill. This sheep farm had been empty for a number of years but the Duke of Argyll had recently let it to a Jura man named Lachlan MacNeill. There were rumours of underhand dealings, and stories that the Duke had offered MacNeill the farm cheap if he informed on his fellow Land League crofters. The Land League very quickly revoked his membership and gave him and his brother verbal abuse. There were rumours of personal violence on the pattern of the Irish Land League, but they came to nothing.

  In July 1885, 300 crofters occupied Greenhill Farm, removed the property of the new tenant and brought in their cattle. Once ensconced on the land, they began to divide the land between themselves and the landless cottars. When news came to the Duke of Argyll, he served writs to the squatters, and on 21 July 1886 the steamer Nigel sailed from Oban with what the newspapers grandly named the ‘Tiree Expeditionary Force’, forty policemen and a Messenger-at-Arms to enforce the Duke’s Law. They landed from small boats in the wide Gott Bay in the south-east of Tiree with the legal documents. Guided by a local joiner named McKinnon, the sheriff officers on horseback or in gigs led the Expeditionary Force inland. At Ballyphuil they pushed five summonses under the crofters’ doors in the sneaking hope there would be no resistance, but they were wrong.

  The crofters had assumed the group of dark-clad men was a funeral party, but one of their number realised what was happening and blew a horn as a signal for them to gather together. Other horns echoed in the breezy peace of the Hebridean air, gathering the crofters together as men had once gathered to face the Norse, or on the call of their chief. There were over 200 determined men with sticks that formed around these new invaders. At first they thought the police had come to destroy the houses in the time-honoured manner of Authority during previous Clearances, and they demanded answers.

  Colin Mackay, Chief Constable of Argyll, explained that the police were there to escort the sheriff officers, who were serving interdicts. When the crowd asked what that meant, he explained it was a document that instructed the crofters to remove their cattle from Greenhill. There was no intention to evict anybody. Not impressed, the crofters surrounded the police so they could go no further. They took hold of the bridles of the carriage horses, turned them around and sent the sheriff officers back toward the coast.

  Many of the crofters shouted comments such as: ‘Never come back on such an errand as this,’ and there were threats to throw the gigs and their occupants ‘over a precipice’. One crofter named Hector McDonald attempted to punch a horse. McDonald al
so told the crowd to ‘Go for the man with the papers now,’ meaning the Messenger-at-Arms. A man named McKinnon called out, ‘Stone the bastards!’

  The crowd cheered when one driver flicked his reins and headed back towards the coast. Unable or unwilling to do anything against such numbers, the police returned on the road to Scarinish. Not surprisingly, they were quite keen to enter the local inn and mull over what had happened. However, the crofters were not yet satisfied. They followed the police to the inn and demanded that they leave the island, and then marched in a body to Island House. The crofters told Mr McDiarmid, the factor, and Mr Wylie, the chamberlain, why they had taken over the farm and said they wanted the Land Court to decide a fair rent.

  That night the crofters kept watch over Greenhill Farm and over the police at Scarinish, in case they tried a sudden raid, but the dark hours passed peacefully. In the meantime, as the inn could not hold all the police, some had to spend the night in a barn. Some of the more militant of the crofters demanded that the police hand over McKinnon, the joiner who had acted as their guide and who remained with them inside, or they would pull the barn down among their heads.

  With the weather turning foul, the steamer Nigel had run to Tobermory, leaving the police stranded in Tiree and at the mercy of the crofters. Despite that temporary hitch, the police were allowed to leave unmolested. Nobody had been injured and only the pride of the police and sheriff officers was hurt. Perhaps not surprisingly, the newspapers supported the establishment and the Glasgow Herald of 23 July 1886 said, ‘This foolish rebellious spirit should be repressed.’

  Round one had gone to the rebellious spirit of the Tiree crofters, but the Campbells of Argyll had not created and held their duchy over the centuries without being equally tenacious. The Duke spluttered that the island was ‘under the rule of savagery’ and demanded that something should be done about it. This was the period of gunboat diplomacy in the British Empire, with any challenge to imperial rule being met by force. The government intervened by sending two Portsmouth-based Royal Naval ships backed by Royal Marines from Plymouth, plus the ubiquitous police. The crew of HMS Assistance were called from leave and so urgent was the case considered that some were left behind as the ship sailed for Tiree. This show of force was welcomed in many quarters, but in a meeting in Liverpool. Angus Sutherland, MP for Sutherland, condemned ‘the military expedition to aid the Duke of Argyll in depopulating Tiree, an act of military despotism’.