‘Do you want a place?’ he asked.
‘I do,’ I said.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘a man was speaking to me down there just now, to see if I could get a secondman [a ploughman’s assistant] for him.’
‘Where’s he at?’ I asked.
‘Beside Loch Tummel.’
‘Is it a good place?’
‘It is indeed,’ he said. ‘I spent three years working for him.’
Well, you could only get a year’s engagement [at Aberfeldy that Michaelmas], engagements of six months weren’t going at all.
‘Oh well, if you spent three years there,’ I said, ‘I think I might spend one. Is he a good master?’
‘Oh yes, indeed. Come along, then, I’ve only just left the boss here.’
We went along; the farmer met us just at the square.
‘Here’s a lad for you,’ said the Uistman, ‘who hasn’t found a place yet.’
‘Oh, very good,’ said the farmer – Thomas MacDonald was his name – ‘very good. Are you working here already?’
‘I am,’ I said. ‘I’m working at Tirinie.’
‘Oh aye. Is it there you are?’
‘It is,’ I said.
‘How long is it since you came there?’
‘It’s more than two years,’ I said.
‘Oh indeed then, it’s likely you’ll be fit enough for me. It’s a secondman I’m needing. What wages do you want?’
‘I’ll need to get sixteen pounds or fifteen pounds [for six months] anyway,’ I said.
‘Ah, well,’ he said, ‘wages are down this year. No one’s getting more than fifteen pounds. But I’ll give you thirteen.’
‘Oh, that won’t do,’ I said.
‘Oh, well there isn’t so much work to do for me as there is at Tirinie at all. I know Tirinie very well.’
‘Well, I’m sure it isn’t to be taking my ease that you want me for. How many acres have you in every break?’
‘About twenty.’
‘And you’ve only two pairs of horses?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, I’m sure there’ll be plenty of work there itself . . .’
‘Well,’ said Thomas, ‘you’ll get fourteen pounds, then, and your lodging free above that.’
‘Oh, very good,’ I said.
He went and put his hand in his pocket then and gave me a crown as airles money. Then he went to see Robert Menzies, my boss.
‘I’ve just engaged one of your lads,’ he said to him.
‘Oh, have you?’ said Robert. ‘Which one of them have you got?’
‘Angus MacLellan.’
‘Aye? I didn’t think that fellow was going to engage today at all . . .’
The next day Robert Menzies came where I was working.
‘So,’ he said, ‘did you engage at the fair?’
‘Well, I did, but I didn’t expect to at all when I left the house.’
‘Well, then,’ he said, ‘it’s best for you to stay where you are, and I’ll send him – what did he give you as airles money?’
‘He gave me a crown.’
‘I’ll send it to him myself, then, if you’ll stay where you are.’
‘Do you want to send me to prison?’ I asked.
‘He won’t do anything to you if you stay where you are,’ he said. ‘But if you engaged elsewhere, he could go for you.’
‘How would you like it yourself ?’ I said. ‘Indeed, however bad he is, I’ll spend a year there anyway.’
‘I’m sure you will. Ah well, then, see you don’t engage at Pitlochry fair next year until I’ve seen you there.’
‘Indeed I won’t.’
After numerous such Byzantine negotiations at hiring fairs, by the age of 40 Neil MacPhee was bilingual. He had to be. In 1901 he was living in Ruchazie to the east of Glasgow. At the beginning of the twentieth century Ruchazie was a discrete rural village. The dormitory suburbs of the city of Glasgow were quickly advancing, but Ruchazie and its neighbours, Hoggansfield and Millerston, were in 1901 still bucolic settlements within the north Lanarkshire parish of Barony. Neil lodged with a Ruchazie farmer and his family and worked as a ploughman. At home and on the farm, he was of course surrounded by English speakers.
Steam ploughing by heavy traction engines had been known in Britain for half a century. But in 1901 (which was also the year of the first recorded use of the word ‘tractor’), and for another 50 years, most farmers and almost all small farmers still used horses. In the dale of the Clyde, farmers used Clydesdales. Nobody in Scotland, possibly nobody in Britain, was in 1901 better qualified in the use and care of draught horses than a man from the western machair of the Uists. Breaking open the ground for sowing crops was largely winter work, so it is possible that Neil MacPhee was able to get back from Lanarkshire to South Uist to help with the Hebridean summer chores. But his income was earned in the Forth–Clyde valley, and there at last Neil found a wife.
At the end of January 1912 Neil MacPhee married Ellen McHendry in St Joseph’s Roman Catholic Chapel at Sheddens, five miles south of Glasgow city centre. He was 51 years old and she was a tall, pretty 33-year-old spinster and orphan.
Like Neil MacPhee, Ellen McHendry was an economic migrant. She had travelled to Scotland from County Antrim in the north of Ireland. She found a job as a housekeeper on the Castle Farm at Newton Mearns in Renfrewshire, two miles from St Joseph’s Chapel. Neil met her while he was working a term at the Castle Farm.
Ellen MacPhee gave her husband four children before, when she was still in middle age, she went back to Ireland to die. During her short married life, during Ellen’s ten years as a wife and mother, her new family followed Neil’s employment from one hiring fair to the next, through the farming terms of rural Lanarkshire. Mary Ellen was born in 1913 in the parish of Eastwood. When Angus Joseph was born on 16 January 1915, almost exactly three years after their wedding, they were living in the hamlet of Nettlehole on the outskirts of the municipal burgh of Airdrie. The First World War had broken out six months earlier, but at the age of 54 Neil MacPhee was too old for military service.
Two more sisters followed Angus Joseph MacPhee. In 1917 Patricia was born in Palacerigg, just outside the busy old town of Cumbernauld in the rolling countryside five miles north of Nettlehole. And in August 1919, Ellen gave birth to Margaret – Peigi – MacPhee in Turnlaw Farm Cottages just south of Cambuslang. All of those places, all of those farms, were within half a day’s walk of each other, and were very little further from Glasgow city centre.
When baby Peigi was born in 1919, Neil MacPhee was 58 years old. Ellen was 18 years younger, but a sick woman. For a number of reasons, Neil nursed the ambition to take his young family to South Uist. Ellen visited the Hebrides just once. The MacPhee cottage in Balgarva was too small for her whole family, so she lodged with friends elsewhere in Iochdar. She never returned there. In piecemeal fashion, for at first Mary Ellen stayed with her mother, Neil took their four children back to South Uist. They would never see their mother again. Ellen MacPhee, née McHendry, died and was buried in Northern Ireland at the age of 43 in 1922.
Neil was then able to return to Iochdar because his brother Francis was by the early 1920s an elderly man, still single and still childless. Since before the death of their father Angus at a grand if indeterminate old age – he was somewhere between 83 and 93 – in 1898, Francis and his younger sister Anna had been working the croft together. As a girl Anna Bheag had worked as a fish-gutter in several west-coast ports before returning to keep house for her father and brother in Iochdar. She was also unmarried and also childless. Between them the two siblings had kept in Balgarva a typically open and generous household.
One of Anna Bheag’s older sisters, who was not unusually also called Ann and due to her seniority was known as Anna Mhor, had married a Uist man named John Bowie and settled on a nearby croft at Carnan.
In 1882 and 1884 John and Ann Bowie had a boy named Archibald and a girl named Mary. In September 1885 Ann died in childbirth
of puerperal peritonitis in her Carnan crofthouse, in the presence of her husband John. She was 35 years old. Her baby, who would be christened Angus, survived.
The grieving John Bowie kept Archibald and Mary, his two older children, hiring a local woman to keep house and care for them. The newborn, motherless infant Angus was sent two miles down the coast to Balgarva, to be raised there by his dead mother’s younger sister Anna and her older brother Francis.
Angus Bowie became the son that Anna MacPhee never had, and probably also Francis MacPhee’s surrogate heir. They raised him into a healthy young man. They saw him through school. He became the first member of their family in Uist to speak English as well as Gaelic. As Francis reached his late sixties and Anna her late fifties, Angus passed his age of majority at home in Balgarva, caring for the croft and the animals and the seasonal round of rural responsibilities.
The houses in Balgarva stood on the very lip of the shore, so close to the high-water mark that occasionally a spring tide would send a ripple of salt water under their doors and across their floors. Low tides revealed a marine estate which stretched for acres before the thatched cottages: a wet desert of white sand, seaweed and rock. Boulders of ancient gneiss nudged from the soil out to the sea across this no-man’s-land of tidal strand. Only their summits were visible, like iceberg tips, and the smooth carapace of those immoveable outcrops had for millennia been polished by the water and the sand.
One day young Angus Bowie went down to a boulder on the foreshore of 52 Balgarva and painstakingly etched his initials in the hard surface. It cannot have been a casual task. Outer Hebridean Lewisian gneiss is among the oldest and most resistant surface stones in the world. It would have been as easy to carve marble. But with a firm instrument and a lot of resolve Angus Bowie left his mark, in the shape of the letters ‘A. B.’, for a further century or two on the rocks in the sea and the sand by the croft that he knew as home. Each letter was two inches high, each had a carefully tutored full-stop, each was deeply incised where the retreating Atlantic tide would reveal it for hours to the sun and the rain, before the incoming sea claimed and covered it again.
On 3 August 1914, some time after that inscription was made and shortly before Angus Bowie’s 29th birthday, Britain declared war on Germany for the first time in the twentieth century. Both Angus and his older brother Archibald immediately joined the 1st Cameron Highlanders. They were sent to the Western Front, where they promptly engaged in the first Battle of Ypres in Belgium. The battle was ultimately successful. The Allies regained Ypres, but at enormous cost to British regular and Territorial Army infantry.
On 22 October 1914 Private Angus Bowie of Iochdar in South Uist died at the first Battle of Ypres. Twenty days later his older brother, Sergeant Archibald Bowie, was also killed in combat. Both men’s names would later be carved in stone on the Menin Gate.
The childless Anna MacPhee had lost a son. The childless Francis MacPhee had lost his able young assistant and the heir presumptive to his croft. Without every one of those three premature deaths, of his sister Ann, of her son Angus, and of his own wife Ellen, Neil MacPhee may never have taken his children back to Balgarva. Angus and his three sisters could have grown up as motherless, English-speaking, Lanarkshire farm urchins, drifting in their teens to the hiring fairs and the coal mines of Lanarkshire or the industries and domestic services of the city of Glasgow. They would never have known the machair, the marram grass, the horses and the hills of Uist.
In 1920 Francis MacPhee was well into his seventies (like his father’s, Francis’s exact age varied from certificate to certificate, but in his case only slightly – Francis was born within a year or two of 1843). Anna was still just 66 (give or take a birthday) and perfectly capable of running the household. But Francis was by then too infirm for croft work. He suffered from palsy, which suggests he may have had a stroke that left him partly paralysed and with involuntary tremors.
Francis died at home in April 1923. The croft at 52 Balgarva in the district of Iochdar was subsequently assigned to his youngest brother. In his 64th year, Neil MacPhee had a piece of land to plough in South Uist.
His children, Mary Ellen, Angus, Patricia and Peigi, experienced in reverse their father’s cultural and linguistic challenge of three decades before. They travelled from an English-speaking household in the Anglophone Lowlands to a place where nothing but Gaelic was heard from one dawn to the next – and where many people, including their Aunt Anna, spoke little else. But they were young, between four and ten years old, and they quickly learned. ‘When they arrived they had no Gaelic,’ Patricia’s daughter Eilidh would say. ‘Within a year or two they had nothing but Gaelic.’
Neil built and thatched a new cottage for himself and his children, a few yards away from the larger old family home. Even by the standards of early-twentieth-century Uist crofthouses, it was small, so small that his youngest daughter Peigi would refer to it as ‘a renovated bird cage’. The three sisters and their brother were frequently left in the care of their Aunt Anna, who was in receipt of a nominal military pension following the death at Ypres of young Angus Bowie. When Neil MacPhee was not working the croft, he often travelled south to raise cash by labouring on Lowland farms.
The children were sustained after the loss of their mother by the kindness of strangers and friends, and by their faith. Like most of the rest of the people of South Uist and Benbecula, the MacPhees were devout Roman Catholics. ‘Religion featured prominently in our family,’ Eilidh would say, ‘and my mother said it was the mainstay in her life when her mother died and left them bereft.’
They had also a whole new world to explore. The place-names, which before long they understood, are instructive. An t-Iochdar in Gaelic means a low-lying stretch of land, and Baile Gharbhaidh means a human settlement on rough ground. Iochdar is at the northern edge of South Uist, and Balgarva is on the northern shore of Iochdar. (Those Gaelic placenames, corrupted, are echoed elsewhere in Scotland. Yoker is an industrial town on the flat northern bank of the River Clyde, and Garve is a village north-west of Inverness.)
In the 1920s there were few more isolated places in Britain, even in the lonely Highlands and Islands of Scotland. The western Highlands were a daunting journey from the towns and cities of the south and east of the country, along slow, winding, precipitous, rutted, narrow roads. The Western Islands were a long way even from the western Highlands. For that reason and others, they had not been well treated by mainstream Scottish scholars and writers. W.C. MacKenzie, a Gaelic-speaking Lewisman who published a first thorough history of the Western Isles in 1903, lamented
The early historians of Scotland obviously knew very little about the Outer Hebrides, and their information is consequently the reverse of illuminating.
John of Fordun (circa 1380) merely mentions Lewis by name. Uist, he tells us, is thirty miles long, and is an island where ‘whales and other sea-monsters’ abound. He mentions the castle of ‘Benwewyl’ (Benbecula), and says that ‘Hirth’ (St. Kilda) was the best stronghold of all the islands.
He states that the Highlanders and Hebrideans were a savage and untamed nation, rude and independent, given to rapine, ease-loving, of a docile and warm disposition, comely in person but unsightly in dress, hostile to the English people and language (and, owing to diversity of speech, even to their own nation), and exceeding cruel.
Andrew Wyntoun (1426) merely makes a passing reference to ‘the owt ylys in the se’.
John Major (1521) has nothing to say about the Long Island, except that Lewis has a length of thirty leagues. One half of Scotland, he tells us, spoke Irish (Gaelic) in his day, and all these, as well as the Islanders, were reckoned to belong to the ‘wild Scots’. He makes a distinction between those of them who followed agricultural and pastoral pursuits, and those who were addicted to the chase and war, whom he criticises severely for their indolence.
War, he asserts, was their normal condition. Their weapons were bows and arrows, broadswords, and a small halbert, with a sm
all dagger in their belts. Their ordinary dress consisted of a plaid and a saffron-dyed shirt; and in war, coats of mail made of iron rings were worn by all save the common people, who wore a linen garment sewed together in patchwork, well daubed with wax or pitch, with an over-garment of deerskin. The musical instrument of the ‘wild Scots’ was the harp, the strings of which were of brass. Major confirms the statement of Fordun as to their hatred of Lowland Scots and English alike . . .
The principal islands of the Outer Hebrides are not described by Dean Monro (1549) so fully as could be desired . . . North and South Uist, the former with two, and the latter with five, parish kirks, receive scant notice. South Uist is called a fertile country, with high hills and forests on the east or south-east, and well-stocked land on the northwest.
Just over 100 years before John of Fordun wrote his description of ‘a savage and untamed nation’ whose inhabitants hated the mainland Scots and English without distinction, the Western Isles had been a Viking province, a part of the Kingdom of Norway. The same lingering suspicion of the Hebrides as a foreign and untrustworthy region informed the other chroniclers cited by W.C. MacKenzie. It would continue to inform their successors. Despite MacKenzie’s efforts, some of those islands remained more isolated than others from southern Scottish society, language and culture.
In the early twentieth century the only public transport to South Uist was its ferry service, and the ferry to Lochboisdale carried only goods, mail, foot-passengers and livestock. It was infrequent and often took a day or a night to cross an expanse of notoriously stormy water. Lochboisdale pier was closed for repairs for most of 1924 and 1925, cutting off the island almost completely from the mainland. The hiatus caused local irritation and questions in the House of Commons, but little else. The Uists were accustomed to being isolated. In South Uist itself there were hardly any motorised vehicles and just one main road, which had been reluctantly adopted and then half-forgotten by the seat of local government in Inverness, 150 miles away on the other side of Scotland.
The Silent Weaver Page 4