Whether or not Angus MacPhee understood that he was responsible for the last florescence of an ancient tradition is a valid question to pose. The probability is that in disturbing circumstances he turned to a familiar and comforting exercise. He found solace there. Weaving grass proved to be of immense therapeutic value to him. As his dexterity improved and he mastered the old skill – as much as or more than anybody had ever mastered it – his imagination took flight. He had no reason to make practical working items from grass: the horses on Kinmylies Farm came already equipped with leather halters. So he fed his fantasies, and satisfied his intelligent Uist humour, by making things from grass that no sensible person had ever previously considered making from grass. An innate sense of shape, balance and beauty provided the rest: the fringes and highlights of small wild flowers, the leaves and the changing patterns.
Whether or not Angus MacPhee understood that he was paying homage in its twilight to a millennial talent is irrelevant to any appreciation of his art. He was doing so, and that is enough. It gave his weaving depth as well as mystery and wonder. After hearing traditional unaccompanied polyphonic singing one Christmas Eve in the late 1940s at a chapel in the Corsican mountains, the writer Dorothy Carrington said that it sounded like the music she had waited all her life to hear. ‘I had the impression of hearing a voice from the entrails of the earth,’ she wrote later. ‘Song from the beginning of the world.’ The impact is comparable.
Joyce Laing tried to return to Craig Dunain at least once a year after 1977.
I saw him work. He’d make six-foot long ropes before he started to make the garments, he’d have a lot of six-foot long ropes. They weren’t perfectly round. He would plait. He had no tools, just fingers. So he knitted on his fingers.
His mind must have been, ‘Right, I’m making a jacket.’ So presumably he started from the hem upward, which you would if you were knitting. The interesting thing about the big famous jacket is it’s got a basque, and a big hem in a different stitch. That means he’d worked out that the end’s going to have a slightly different stitch to it, and then when it was the main body bit – you get that in a jumper or sweater – he was on to the plain sort of knitting. And then the cuffs, the huge cuffs, had the same different stitch as the basque. But the neck was a polo neck. It was just very thick. I couldn’t quite see how he did it. His hands were just going like this, so quickly the whole time.
I would think it took him a day or two to make one article. Probably several days. Once I said, ‘I want a hat, Angus. Make me a hat.’ And of course he ignored me as he always did.
I went away and had lunch and so on, went back and he wasn’t there. He’d gone away somewhere in the grounds. But he’d left what he was working on, and there was this Davy Crockett hat . . .
He also made a cat at one point, like a child’s cat. I think he had a wit, he thought it was funny. The cat had a big long tail and whiskers, it was just a funny cat. And I thought the same about the Davy Crockett hat, that there was a wee bit of wickedness about him.
And the staff at Craig Dunain hardly seemed to notice or care, although art people like me were considered a bit nutty anyway. I would take black bags with me when I went to see him in the ’80s. I’d drive my car as near to the ward as possible. And I’d go into the bushes – I knew where he worked – and I would drag things out and put them in a bag. And the staff would stand at the window of a ward and watch me. Never did they say, ‘What are you doing?’ Never did they come out and say, ‘Can we help?’
Angus MacPhee saw the heyday of the Kinmylies Farm adjunct to Craig Dunain Hospital. The asylum’s home farm was at its biggest and busiest in the middle of the twentieth century. After that time its function deteriorated. The overall number of patients continued to increase, but fewer of them had agricultural backgrounds. The nationalised Northern Regional Hospital Board began to buy its food and other provisions out of central funding from wholesalers. From the 1960s onward Kinmylies Farm was steadily reduced. Thirty acres of it were turned into an extension to Inverness Municipal Golf Course. A brand new, 229-bed ‘mental deficiency hospital’ called Craig Phadrig was built on the eastern slopes of the farm and opened in 1969. New housing developments for the rapidly expanding town covered acre after acre of arable and grazing land and steadily engulfed the old agricultural premises.
In the 1980s the farm was run down to closure. Angus MacPhee was moved ‘up the top’, to the back wards and the gardens of the old asylum.
‘He told me there wasna the same grass up there, at the Craig Dunain hospital,’ said the farm manager Jock MacKay.
‘The farm was closed and he had to move to a ward in the big hospital,’ said Joyce Laing. ‘That’s when he couldn’t get the grass. I don’t know why he couldn’t go back for the grass, but that’s when he started using beech leaves . . .’
Angus MacPhee’s leaf creations were deliberate experiments in a different medium. Whatever he told Jock MacKay, he could and did still obtain and weave grass, despite its comparatively inferior quality. He began to use leaves as well, because he wanted to.
He chiefly deployed the sea-green, diamond-shaped leaves of the native European beech. Using grass as a foundation material, he constructed a workable pony halter from leaves, a series of small horn-shaped pouches, and a pair of large but perfectly functional beech-leaf sandals, with a flat sole and a single grass foot-strap.
‘He took and overlapped the stems of the leaves, leaf by leaf,’ said Joyce Laing. ‘Of course, they’ve gone so brittle with time. You can imagine what they were like – the lovely pale lime of beech leaves, but they’ve gone dull. He made satchels, he made quite a lot of satchels which I suppose people used to take in the peats, or carry tools. When I found them in Craig Dunain, he’d put wild flowers in around the borders. Of course they didn’t last – they didn’t last as long as grass.’
His delicate beech-leaf constructions were almost purely artistic expressions, if it is possible, as Jean Dubuffet proposed, to create art without an artistic ego. There is no tradition of utilitarian leaf-use in the Western Isles of Scotland. Apart from anything else, there are very few trees of any kind in the Uists. When he wove grass, Angus was drawing on centuries of native craft. When he wove leaves and grass together he was striking out on his own into a form which was recreational and decorative. Angus MacPhee did not see his work in that way, but Angus MacPhee was not like other men. He was neither ashamed nor proud of his creations; he merely disregarded them. That did not make his constructions accidental. Everything he fashioned from leaves or grass was as carefully planned and deliberately executed as the work of a professional sculptor. He just perceived it in a different light. Once it was finished, he had no further interest in what he had made. His focus was then wholly transferred to his next project.
It would therefore have been of little interest to Angus MacPhee to learn that when he made flip-flop sandals or mysterious deep pouches from leaves, he was foreshadowing the work of reputable commercial artists. Andy Goldsworthy grew up in the West Riding of Yorkshire. As a teenager in the 1960s he often worked as a farm labourer. Although Goldsworthy studied fine art at Bradford College of Art and Preston Polytechnic, he would later credit such bucolic experiences as picking potatoes with the inspiration for his ‘environmental art’.
Goldsworthy, who moved to live in southern Scotland, specialised in making representative and abstract constructions from natural ingredients. He used mud, pine cones, snow, stone, twigs and thorns. He also used flowers and leaves. This was, he thought, courageous – ‘I think it’s incredibly brave to be working with flowers and leaves and petals. But I have to: I can’t edit the materials I work with. My remit is to work with nature as a whole.’
Andy Goldsworthy’s art-school-trained, studio-built leaf collages of the 1980s and 1990s differ from Angus MacPhee’s wild, outside creations. Goldsworthy had access to different varieties of leaf, such as maple and iris, which were unavailable to MacPhee. And Goldsworthy was intere
sted in a heritable effect; in something which would last as long as possible, whereas MacPhee was not. So Andy Goldsworthy’s gorgeous colours and patterns were often achieved by the judicious use of evergreens and dry, autumnal leaves. Angus MacPhee, living and working in the moment, was interested in the complexion of fresh summer deciduous blossoms, which faded to a uniform brown when the days shortened and the temperature fell – if by that time they had not been raked onto a bonfire and burnt.
By the 1970s most of Angus’s close Uist family had died or dispersed. His oldest sister Mary Ellen and his youngest sister Peigi had both married Englishmen and moved away to live in the south. His Aunt Anna and his father Neil had long been lying in Ardivachar cemetery, at the western edge of the Iochdar machair.
But Patricia remained with her husband and her children on the croft at 52 Balgarva, and Patricia never forgot her brother. As the two middle siblings in four, Patricia and Angus had been close. Her sister Peigi said that Patricia ‘would promise my father that she would bring him home’.
Patricia’s daughter Eilidh Campbell knew nothing about her uncle Angus until her early teens, when a cruel joke by a South Uist schoolmate hinted at his existence.
So I asked my mother, and she told me that Angus had been in the Faroes, and that he wasn’t well after that. I think she wanted to shield us from it.
Later, in the early 1980s, I was living in Inverness, and that’s when I started going to visit him at Craig Dunain. My visits were lovely. I’m not sure he knew who I was. I took along family photographs and introduced myself, and I’d chatter away to him in Gaelic, and sing to him in Gaelic, and he would just occasionally say yes or no, in English. I’d talk to him in Gaelic and he’d reply in English. Perhaps he thought I was an inspector or an official come to spy on him!
Angus was so good physically, and they’d used his energies on the farm. I’d see him at work in the big strawberry patch. He had his own private corners, surrounded by rhododendrons. He had his little tool of bent wire or fence staple, and his leaves and his pile of grass.
And he had horses. There was a beautiful chestnut horse with a white dash on its head that used to hang around the fence. It would sometimes lean over and go for the pile of grass, and Angus would tap it on the nose, as if to say, ‘Get off! That’s my building materials!’
I’d go in to see him, and he could be anywhere in the grounds – they’d say, ‘He’ll be back for his meal, he always comes in for meals.’ I’d take him black bogey tobacco and a copy of the Stornoway Gazette. I never saw him smoke, but somebody once told me that he used the Stornoway Gazette for cigarette papers.
He walked in big strides, stooping slightly, with his hands behind his back. I say this because when my brother Iain went with me to visit Angus, we watched him stride back to his enclosure and Iain said, ‘He walks just like the old men in Balgarva used to walk, when I was young.’
He wore his boots with coils of woven grass around them, which would work themselves loose when he walked. He was in a little enclave of his own, with his knitting and his horse. He was happy.
Angus MacPhee’s sister Patricia did not live to return her brother to South Uist. She died in 1985, and the croft at 52 Balgarva was assigned to her son Iain. He in his turn married a woman from Balgarva, and like so many before them they raised their family looking over the strand to southern Benbecula.
Early in 1985 Angus MacPhee passed his 70th birthday. ‘I went back with the car one time,’ said Joyce Laing, ‘parked my car, and there were vague words with the nurses about him getting awful old – “We think he’s dementing a bit.”
‘I thought, well, old age, not too surprising. But I did wonder if he was dementing, because that would alter the work. So I asked to have lunch with him. We took a table to ourselves. I sat down, had a drink of orange juice or something and watched him.
‘And I thought, he’s not dementing. He’s losing his sight. Because he never spoke, he hadn’t asked for spectacles or anything. They thought, he’s getting muddled and confused. But he was going blind. All the leaf things that I saved were done when he was almost blind.’
In the early 1990s Eilidh Campbell received at home a phone call from Craig Dunain Hospital. ‘They said, “It’s about Angus MacPhee. There’s a note in his file saying his family don’t want to be bothered while he’s still alive. But we’re going to close here, and they’re going out into the community.
‘ “Where do you want Angus?” ’
The note in Angus’s file did not say that his family did not want to be bothered with him while he was alive. It said, ‘In the event of death, it is the wish of his relatives that Angus should be buried in South Uist. These instructions were received on 25.9.85.’
He was still remarkably fit in 1985, still striding independently about the grounds. A swollen leg which threatened to incapacitate him was successfully operated on in 1989. But he was, as Joyce Laing had noticed, losing his sight. By the early 1990s it was noted that he was blind in his right eye and suffered severe glaucoma in his left.
In 1994 a nursing report noted that Angus MacPhee ‘spends his days walking around briskly. He pulls the long grass and fashions this into ropes. He no longer makes the complicated items.’
Old age had stolen his talents, but death was cheated of its power to relocate his human frame. It was not death that returned him to South Uist. That was an accomplishment of Care in the Community.
Care in the Community was a controversial mental health policy established by the British Conservative government in its National Health Service and Community Care Act of 1990.
It was at root a cost-saving measure. Care in the Community was predicated on the fact that by the end of the twentieth century, anti-psychotic drugs were so sophisticated and strong that very few people needed to be treated and contained behind locked doors. The massive asylums inherited – in spirit if not in actual premises – from the Victorian era were therefore redundant. They could be closed down, saving the National Health Service a lot of money, and transferring the financial burden to local authorities, who were expected to provide social care and domiciliary services to the incapable.
Care in the Community was supported by the libertarian views of asylums as places of confinement and the suppression of personality and free expression that were formulated in the 1960s and 1970s and found an international audience in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Care in the Community was justified by the widely held belief that ever-expanding residential mental hospitals such as Craig Dunain were not only unnecessary, they were undesirable.
‘Institutional care’ for schizophrenics and others was deemed to have failed on two levels. It had evidently abandoned its mission to cure. In the hundred years between 1864 and 1964, the population of Craig Dunain had risen from 200 to over 1,000 patients, while the population of its catchment area had fallen. And, it was argued, mental health hospitals had contributed to the problems they were supposed to ease by institutionalising men and women to the extent that generations of the afflicted had become entirely dependent on 24-hour, year-round service and attention. That had apparently resulted in the depression of levels of expectation. Mental patients were not all expected to hold down a job for a day, but most of them were expected to be able to boil a kettle and occasionally pull bedsheets into order.
In the words of American advocates of this argument, residential mental hospitals had created ‘dependency, hopelessness’ and their residents had ‘learned helplessness, and other maladaptive behaviors’. ‘Deinstitutional isation’, replacing long-stay psychiatric hospitals with community mental health services, was proposed as the answer.
The opponents of Care in the Community argued that its image of residential mental patients as spoiled little aristocrats who had been taught to depend upon a posse of servants to perform the smallest chore was misleading. They protested that the policy gambled with the lives of vulnerable people. Rather than turn into useful citizens and become respected members of
the community, they said, left to their own devices many severe schizophrenics would forget or refuse to take their medication. They would easily turn to other drugs, would become homeless, would beg, would assault and be assaulted, would steal and be stolen from, and could kill themselves and others.
Those opponents were right. The first years of Care in the Community were marked by a notable increase of homeless people and beggars on the streets of British cities. In a few well-publicised incidents, recently released young schizophrenic men killed strangers. In many more unpublicised incidents, recently released young schizophrenic people killed themselves. Care in the Community, wrote Patrick Cockburn, ‘must be one of the most deceptive and hypocritical phrases ever devised by a government’.
Too few people realised, before the passage of the Community Care Act in 1990, that the abandonment of the vilified Victorian asylums without an effective replacement did not represent progressive reform, but rather signalled a return to pre-Victorian standards of care. ‘Prisonlike many of the old asylums may have been,’ wrote Cockburn, ‘but at least they were a haven for people too mentally ill to find work, food, and shelter for themselves. Inside their walls, life may have been institutionalised, but one could safely behave bizarrely or even madly without derision or persecution.’
But most of the suffering caused by Care in the Community was inflicted on people, particularly younger people, in the urban centres of Britain. An old soldier from South Uist who had spent 50 years in a Highland institution was always likely to be offered alternative care, even if it was not quite ‘care in the community’. In the early 1990s the staff of Craig Dunain Hospital, agitated by approaching closure, looked for a new home for Angus MacPhee.
The Silent Weaver Page 13