In 1940 there were 30,000 Faroese living on 18 of their 20 islands. Three thousand of them resided in Torshavn; the rest were scattered between fishing villages and placid agricultural settlements. Apart from the fact that the Faroes were dry islands with no public bars or other licensed premises – beer and spirits were imported for the troops with their other rations – it was an easy community for Hebrideans and Highlanders to understand. Both the Faroes and the Western Isles of Scotland had once been the homes of eremitic monks from the Celtic Church; both had been part of the Kingdom of Norway (the Western Isles until 1266, the Faroes until 1814); both were accustomed to being governed in modern times from capital cities (London and Copenhagen) which did not speak their languages (Gaelic and a derivation of Old Norse). The Faroese, a sea-faring people, were well aware that their nearest neighbours lived in the Scottish islands, less than 200 miles away, and that the Faroes were considerably closer to Aberdeen, Dundee and Glasgow than to Reykjavik or Copenhagen.
Whatever their historical connections, remote communities develop similar courtesies. By and large the Lovat Scouts were made as welcome in the Faroes as Faroese soldiers in similar circumstances would have been hosted in the Uists. There were tensions during the occupation. There was a minority of German sympathisers among the Faroese. There were also Faroese separatists who resented British cooperation with Danish officials in exile, and the fact that Winston Churchill had announced that when Germany was defeated the Faroe Islands ‘will be handed back to Denmark’. There were Faroese who objected to the steady stream of young women made pregnant by British soldiers. There was occasional robbery from army stores; there were strikes for better pay for Faroese civilians employed by the British military. But on the whole . . .
‘Oh, we had a great reception,’ said Donald John MacPherson. ‘They invited us into their homes. And you know, they had all sorts of things that weren’t in the Western Islands. They had telephones, and electricity – things we didn’t have. And they were friendly, oh, very, very friendly.’
‘The Faroese are hospitable and kindly people,’ reported the British novelist Eric Linklater, who, because of his family’s Shetland connections, was asked by the Ministry of Information in 1941 to prepare a booklet entitled The Northern Garrisons.
Very soon after the occupation they opened their houses to our soldiers, who now, except the incurably shy, have all a modest circle of acquaintances. Their hospitality mollifies one of the routine duties of the Lovat Scouts: the patrolling, that is, of hill-top paths and hidden fjords, of tiny hamlets under a mountainside, and almost inaccessible beaches. Some of their patrols are short, a few hours’ marching, but others are three-day tours, and on these they must make their own bivouacs, do their own field-cooking. But whenever they come to a village, someone is almost sure to ask them in for cakes and coffee.
The Lovat Scouts were in the Faroes to stop the Germans being there. Their duties were concentrated on that mission. The Germans made no serious attempt to invade the islands, by air or by sea, but the Luftwaffe regularly attacked the land bases and military and civilian shipping by strafing, bombs and torpedo-planes.
‘We took over from a detachment of Royal Marines who were guarding the main installations,’ said Donald John MacKenzie.
Radio station, Fort Skansin [a small sixteenth-century redoubt overlooking Torshavn, which became the Royal Navy’s Command Headquarters], pier, marine cable telephone station. We were billeted in the main hall and other halls in the town and the regiment was soon dispersed on the major islands throughout the Faroes – of which there are 17 altogether.
As each squadron was moved about the islands in rotation to provide guards on certain strategic points, we were moved by boat. Sometimes it was on the Suigrill, the regular mail boat which took us especially to the larger islands, which was on her regular route. Other times we went by the Poppy, a 48- to 50-foot Norwegian fishing boat which had come over to Faroe some time earlier to escape the Nazis and was commandeered by the British. The chap in charge of her was John MacIsaac from Benbecula – she was crewed by Scouts and was a very sea-worthy craft.
Many Allied ships were attacked. Faroese fishing boats were obliged to display their national colours so that Allied vessels and aeroplanes knew who they were, and they took the brunt of the German assault. The islands lost almost 200 men at sea during the war, which was slightly more than the number of Faroese women – 151 – who married British soldiers. In the credit column, the Lovat Scouts brought down a German Heinkel bomber with concerted Bren gun fire. Its pilot survived, to confess that he had mistaken the Bren gun fire for anti-aircraft flak. (‘When held firm,’ a Second World War veteran recalled, ‘[a Bren gun] was accurate enough to punch a hole in a brick wall with a single magazine.’)
In terms of casualties the Germans won the Battle of the Faroes. But they never set foot on Faroese soil unless as prisoners, so the home side won the war.
The Lovat Scouts were in the Faroe Islands virtually without relief for two years. They played inter-squadron football matches. They had their pictures taken in full rig at the studio of the Torshavn photographer. The regimental pipe band, which was comprised entirely of Uistmen such as Donald John MacPherson, also practised on the ‘hard grit’ Torshavn football pitch. They ate tinned army rations – featuring the green cans of Maconochie’s Irish beef stew which sustained British troops through both of the major twentieth-century conflicts – relieved occasionally by edible gifts from the Faroese. They received mail from home three weeks or a month after it had been posted.
And they patrolled, and patrolled, and patrolled. One stormy winter’s night Lieutenant Sir Simon Campbell-Orde took a detachment from North Uist on an 18-mile coastal patrol which proved so arduous that on return they were granted a rum ration. Sir Simon raised his tin mug and asked his men who or what they would like to toast. ‘Here’s to . . .’ said a voice from the ranks, ‘we never have to do it again.’
‘B’ Squadron’s commanding officer, said Donald John MacKenzie,
was Major Richard Fleming and he was a fitness fanatic, as they say nowadays. We used to go on long route marches, sometimes in full service marching orders which included our large pack and sometimes in battle order which meant as before with the exception of the big pack.
One day in Tvøroyri he took us on a seven-mile route march round the end of a long fjord, and when we had reached our destination we were made to strip off all our clothes and working in pairs made a package of all our clothes, equipment and rifles, all inside our gas capes. The complete thing was about four feet long and fifteen inches wide and a foot deep.
When tied securely and done properly it floated. We were then ordered into the sea, by this time shivering with cold and apprehension, wondering if our package would really float, leak or sink. He grabbed our package, placed a Bren gun on top and swam a considerable distance to prove it worked.
As most of us could not swim at that time, we did not venture out of our depth but got ourselves wet just the same. After a few minutes the Major came ashore and shouted, ‘Three minutes to dress and line up on the road.’ Our biggest difficulty was to dry our bodies, dry enough to get our clothes on in such a short time, but we need not have worried as some of our packs were not too waterproof, including the Major’s . . .
There is nothing as difficult as trying to get a wet body into dry clothes or even socks. We were lined up on the road and marched off with the Major in front. When we had marched a couple of hundred yards, we were given the order to double and another couple of hundred yards to march and so it went on as a forced march for seven miles back to the billets.
‘It was a great pleasure to see one of their squadrons playing a war game,’ wrote Major Eric Linklater, ‘attacking over a wide valley, for the scouts who first advanced had been stalkers on one of the great deer forests, and they moved with the speed and economy, the expert ease of professionals. And the troopers following them went swiftly and with confidence, for the
y knew that sort of ground very well indeed – rough moorland, peat-bog, and grey boulders – and could find without delay the paths that would take them forward, yet keep them under cover. It was incongruous, of course, but none the less impressive, to see a pair of highly respectable gillies walking-up their game with Tommy-guns.’
Such was the life in 1940, 1941 and 1942 of Donald John MacPherson, Donald John MacKenzie and hundreds of other Lovat Scouts. MacPherson and MacKenzie were relieved on the Faroes by the 12th Cameronians in June 1942. They sailed out of Torshavn fjord on a late, light northern night with their Uist pipe band playing ‘Happy we’ve been a’ thegither’.
Back in Scotland they were sent to guard the Royal Family during its six-week summer holiday at Balmoral Castle. They trained in the Grampians and Cairngorms. At the end of 1943 they sailed on the Mauretania from Liverpool to New York, where at least one Uist serviceman enjoyed a cheerful rendezvous with Hebridean emigrants. They travelled from there to the Canadian Rocky Mountains, where they were re-trained once again, this time as a skiing Mountaineer Regiment. In April 1944 the refreshed and newly skilled Lovat Scouts took a train from the Rockies to the North Atlantic port of Halifax, Nova Scotia. In a Halifax barber’s shop an officer of ‘B’ Squadron overheard some local civilians talking in an unfamiliar dialect of his native language. ‘When were you last in the Highlands?’ he asked them, in Gaelic. ‘Three generations ago,’ replied the emigrants, in Gaelic.
In July 1944 they landed in Naples. As the hot and bloody summer turned into autumn and winter, and as 1944 turned into 1945, they fought their way up the Italian peninsula. When Germany surrendered on 4 May 1945, Donald John MacPherson, Donald John MacKenzie and the other Lovat Scouts were still fighting. In the nine-month course of their Italian campaign the regiment took many losses and achieved many victories. They were awarded three Military Crosses, a George Medal, a Distinguished Conduct Medal, seven Military Medals and three British Empire Medals. Thirty-six of their small number were mentioned in despatches. All of them won the Italian Star.
But Angus MacPhee of ‘B’ Squadron, Trooper MacPhee of Iochdar in South Uist, was no longer with them. He had left his friends behind. His health, which had been robust in the eastern Highlands and the English Midlands, collapsed on the Faroe Islands. Thereafter his experiences were in another world.
In the Faroes Angus MacPhee slid helplessly and inexorably into a condition which his comrades and commanding officers would identify only as catatonia. He became uncommunicative, then worse than uncommunicative. Not only would he not obey orders; he would appear not to have heard them. He became incapable of soldierly duties and of everyday self-care. Neither the medic nor the Roman Catholic padre could halt his decline, let alone reverse it. To veterans of the First World War, it would have seemed that Angus MacPhee was afflicted by shell-shock without having been shelled.
It was not easily understood. His officers noted that Trooper MacPhee had been involved in no recorded cases of drunkenness. His military conduct had, before his arrival in the Faroes, been very good. He had the sheet of an honest and sober soldier.
A theatre of war was no place for diagnosis or treatment. On Christmas Eve, 24 December 1940, after exactly seven months in the Faroe Islands, Angus MacPhee was put on a relief vessel and shipped with the outgoing mail to Leith, the port of the city of Edinburgh.
2
TIR A’ MHURAIN
‘The houseman is twisting twigs of heather into ropes to hold down thatch, a neighbour crofter is twining quicken roots into cords to tie cows, while another is plaiting bent grass into baskets to hold meal.’
Angus MacPhee was born in 1915 in Nettlehole, a tiny village in the central belt of Scotland 14 miles due east of Glasgow.
His father worked as a ploughman. Neil MacPhee had left his native South Uist almost three decades earlier to seek employment on the mainland. Neil was born in 1861 in the township of Balgarva in the district of Iochdar.
Neil MacPhee was the youngest child in a large family, whose mother died when he was an infant. His father Angus was 45 years old when Neil was born, and Neil’s oldest brother Francis was 18 years senior to him.
The MacPhees of Balgarva described themselves as tenant farmers for most of the nineteenth century. They were tenants-at-will of the landowner, who was firstly the bankrupt hereditary laird Macdonald of Clanranald, then the wealthy property speculator Colonel John Gordon of Aberdeenshire, then the colonel’s son, and finally the colonel’s son’s widow, Lady Emily Gordon Cathcart of Berkshire. They had no security of tenure until 1886, when the Crofters’ Act made them safe from summary eviction. Thereafter, old Angus MacPhee and his sons called themselves what they had actually been for a hundred years or more: crofters.
Their croft, old Angus’s croft at lot number 52 Balgarva, could be inherited by one man only. That was certain to be Francis, who in middle age was still single and helping his elderly father to work the rough land. So in his twenties Neil MacPhee went south to Lochboisdale and made the long ferry crossing from South Uist to Oban on the western seaboard of Argyllshire in search of work.
The reasons for his departure were commonplace. In May 1883, when Neil was 22 years old, Father Donald MacColl of Iochdar drew a grim portrait of his district to a government commission which was sitting across the strand in Benbecula. Crofters such as the MacPhees were, said the priest, rack-rented for poor land upon which they had no security of tenure. ‘The best arable and grazing lands are in the hands of the tacksmen [tenants of comparatively large farms], and at a low rent. Crofters have been sent to inferior lands . . .’
Iochdar was also, in the 1880s, overpopulated by poor landless cottars who had moved onto the common grazings and the moorland there ‘from all quarters of the country’ – from elsewhere in South Uist, from North Uist and Benbecula, and even from the distant islands of Tiree and Skye. ‘We are yearly getting poorer,’ said Father MacColl. ‘We are hemmed in on all sides. Deprived of the common, we are confined to our original crofts, and yearly plough the same exhausted and unproductive ground . . .’
In 1891 Neil MacPhee was employed as an agricultural labourer and living in lodgings on Oban’s High Street. His landlord and landlady were Donald and Jessie Currie, an Iochdar couple of his generation who had also emigrated from their ‘exhausted and unproductive ground’ to live and work on the mainland.
At that juncture Neil was 30 years old, single and spoke only Gaelic. His schooling in South Uist had clearly been perfunctory and had equally clearly not fully educated him in English, which was in 1891 already the default language of most of the Oban conurbation. He would have got by. More than half of the population of the town spoke Gaelic as well as English, and in the surrounding countryside – where he would have laboured – the proportion of Gaelic speakers was much higher. But if Neil MacPhee was to travel any further south and east, he would need to acquire an English vocabulary. It is likely that he was helped with this in the house on the High Street. Donald and Jessie Currie and their young sons, all three of whom had been born in Oban, spoke both Gaelic and English.
For the next three decades Neil MacPhee had the life of an itinerant farm labourer on the Scottish mainland. His life was itinerant by definition rather than choice. Farmhands were hired at town fairs at Whitsuntide, seven weeks after Easter, and at Michaelmas in late September. The terms of hire were usually for six months or a year. Deals were struck verbally, and cemented by employers handing over a small downpayment called airles money. Once they had accepted airles money, labourers were legally bound to honour the agreement.
‘A skilled, unmarried farmworker’s wages,’ wrote John Lorne Campbell, ‘were then [in the 1890s] about fourteen to eighteen pounds [roughly £840 to £1,080 in the early twenty-first century] for the half-year, plus lodgings in a bothy, that is, an outside building near the farm, where the accommodation might consist of a bedroom and a kitchen, with no water laid on, and, of course, no indoor sanitation. Oatmeal, milk, potatoes and co
al were provided by the employer, and the workers were expected to do their own cooking . . . pay in the old days was in real gold sovereigns that would keep their value, and tobacco cost only threepence-halfpence [90 pence] an ounce and whisky three and sixpence [£10.50] a bottle . . .’
Agricultural hiring fairs were an almost undiluted legacy of the Middle Ages. But although the employers obviously had the whiphand, and some drove a harsher bargain than others, and the system was often brutal to elderly and infirm labourers, hiring fairs were not exactly slave auctions. In the small world of Scottish regional agriculture, farmers and labourers often knew and even liked and respected each other. Healthy, strong and experienced workers also learned to play the market without sentiment, and to set employers against one another.
Many Western Isles men of Neil MacPhee’s generation crossed the Minch to Scotland for similar work. One of them, Angus MacLellan of Loch Eynort in South Uist, left an account of a hiring fair at Aberfeldy in western Perthshire which probably took place at Michaelmas 1894.
MacLellan had left South Uist, where ‘there was no work to be had’, in 1889, at around the same time as Neil MacPhee. After working a two-year term on the farm at Tirinie, near Blair Atholl, he told his master Robert Menzies that he would not re-engage as he was going home to Uist. Menzies approved of the islander’s domestic instincts and wished him well. The 25-year-old Angus MacLellan walked away from Tirinie and instead of returning to the Hebrides promptly travelled 12 miles south to Aberfeldy fair.
‘There was a lad from Uist out there,’ he remembered almost 70 years later, ‘and he met me in the town, and asked me if I had been hired.’
‘I’ve not,’ I said, ‘I haven’t been hired yet.’
The Silent Weaver Page 3