They hit at first upon the possibility of sending him to a care home in the town of Stornoway on the island of Lewis. To an eastern-Highland mentality, that was justified on a couple of levels. Like South Uist, Lewis was a Hebridean island full of Gaelic speakers, where an elderly Gaelic-speaking Hebridean would presumably feel at home.
By the 1990s Stornoway had also become the headquarters of the local islands’ Health Board, which covered the Uists. When Angus MacPhee was admitted to Inverness District Asylum on the last day of 1946, South Uist was part of Inverness-shire. People from the Uists were therefore subjects of the county seat in Inverness. In 1975 that ceased to be the case. A new Western Isles local authority was created to administer the 11 populated islands between Lewis and Barra Head, including the Uists. Subsequently a Western Isles Health Board was also formed, to administer the National Health Service in the same chain of islands. By the early 1990s Angus MacPhee of Balgarva in South Uist, whose health had in 1946 been indisputably the responsibility of Inverness, was technically a dependant of Stornoway.
Those bureaucratic niceties failed to take account of the fact that to almost any Uist man or woman of Angus MacPhee’s generation, Stornoway was a foreign place. Their fishermen might have occasionally put in there, but everybody else in Uist looked east to Skye or south to the mainland. They did not look north to Lewis. Stornoway itself was as different from Iochdar as any other industrious Protestant Scottish burgh was from the placid Roman Catholic croftlands of South Uist. His sister Peigi, his nephew Iain and his niece Eilidh wrote to Craig Dunain protesting vehemently against any proposal to post their brother and uncle to Lewis.
Their appeal was successful. A place was found for Angus MacPhee at Uist House in Daliburgh.
The small township of Daliburgh was 20 miles due south of Iochdar, but it was in South Uist. It was the seat of the first hospital to be raised in the island. The Hospital of the Sacred Heart was funded by the Marquess of Bute and was built in the early 1890s by Iain ‘Clachair’ Campbell, the Uist stonemason whom Margaret Fay Shaw had photographed 40 years later in his retirement, expertly weaving coils of heather rope outside his cottage door. The old four-square premises built by Iain ‘Clachair’ was still standing firm in the 1990s. Operated for almost a century by nuns, it had been adopted, modernised and extended by the National Health Service and included a small care home for two dozen elderly people, that was named Uist House.
Early in 1996, in his 81st year and after half a century in Craig Dunain Hospital, Angus MacPhee was driven through Inverness to Dalcross Airport ten miles east of the town.
When he had arrived from the west 50 years earlier, Inverness was a sleepy country burgh with some 25,000 people huddled together on the hillsides and floodplain east and west of its broad eponymous river. In 1996 the town’s population was greater than 40,000, and its sprawling new suburbs contained as many people again. In 1946 Craig Dunain was some distance from the western boundaries of Inverness; by 1996 Angus MacPhee could see new housing estates crawling relentlessly across the farm’s green fields towards the old asylum on the mount. Inverness in the 1990s was as raucous and neon-lit as any town in late-twentieth-century Britain. It had become home to a huge new hospital at Raigmore and the offices of a regional development agency. In 1946 Inverness and the Uists shared a similar atmosphere. By 1996 it had evaporated.
There was no civilian airport at Dalcross in 1946, only a Royal Air Force base which opened for civil purposes in 1947. By 1996 there were scheduled services from Inverness to the airport at Balivanich in Benbecula, just across the white strand from Balgarva.
Although he had left the hospital grounds on many occasions in the previous 50 years – for medical appointments in Inverness, for outings, and for an occasional seven-day vacation with other patients at Butlins Holiday Camp in Ayrshire – this was Angus MacPhee’s first flight in an aeroplane. A few days before he was due to leave, an aircraft flew low over Craig Dunain. A nurse pointed to it and said, ‘Soon it will be us up there. Do you feel frightened by the thought of flying?’
Angus looked at the aeroplane. Then he trembled like a circus clown. Then he laughed heartily, and strode off into the rhododendron bushes with his hands clasped behind his back.
On Monday 12 February 1996 Iain and Bella Campbell drove over the South Ford to meet him at Balivanich Airport, to take him to Uist House, and to reunite Angus MacPhee with Balgarva. ‘The first day after he came back we let him go out to the garden, and he was pulling out grass,’ said Iain Campbell.
And we couldn’t get him in, he wouldn’t come in. He started working on grass, and he wouldn’t come in at all. He was out there for three or four hours. The weather was bad at the time. It was in the winter he came over.
So I pulled a lot of grass out myself and put it in a fish-box, which I used to take in every day when he came. And he just worked away with that. He would just make the plaited ropes . . . by this time he was quite blind, so he couldn’t really see what he was doing, but he could feel, and he made a pair of shoes. But they didn’t look very much like shoes because he was so blind, he couldn’t see what he was doing, he was just feeling what he was doing.
I was asking Peigi where he would have learned the grass-weaving from, and she reckoned they used to do the horse’s halters from marram grass, and they would weave that, and that’s the only thing Peigi could think he got it from. That’s the only thing she could think of that they would be making.
He knew where he was. He knew he was back home. He recognised the house further down. He said ‘Tigh Niall Ruadh!’ – that was the people who lived there when he was here. And he went over to the old house over there, the old thatched house where he was brought up, and stood by it and kept tapping the wall, and the thatch. I’d put a bit of rope around to hold the thatch down rather than stones, some heavy rope from the shore, and he was very fascinated with that, kept touching it all the time, wondering what it was.
I used to bring him down here to Balgarva every second weekend from Uist House in Daliburgh. I used to work every other weekend, so the weekend I was off I used to take him down, to see myself and my wife and Peigi, who had moved back up here from England after her husband died.
He was definitely happy, being back in Uist. I visited him a couple of times in Craig Dunain, and he was very much quieter there. He wouldn’t say much in Craig Dunain. But if you mentioned people that lived in Balgarva, you could tell that he . . . he started smiling when you mentioned their names. But very little else. But back in Uist . . .
I went to collect him from Uist House one day and one of the nurses said to him in Gaelic, ‘Where are you going, Angus?’ And he said, in Gaelic, ‘To a proper place . . .’ meaning he was coming here, to Balgarva!
Yes, he was all right. Very quiet. He wouldn’t make a conversation with you at all – he would answer questions, in Gaelic mostly. He was all right with English too though . . . But he wouldn’t make much of a conversation. He would just answer your question, and that would be it. But even as a youngster he was very quiet.
Angus MacPhee had deposited a lot of goodwill and affection in 50 years on the high hill outside Inverness. Five days after his return to Uist a nurse from Craig Dunain telephoned to ask how he was. ‘Staff [at Uist House] are beginning to see an improvement in Angus over last two days,’ she noted. ‘Is forming relationships with two other residents who knew him as a young man. Staff have suggested I prepare a cassette tape for Angus instead of sending him a letter.’
Four days after that she telephoned Uist again. ‘Angus is settling well,’ she reported happily, ‘and finding his way around the home. Continues his friendship with fellow residents Ronald and Alastair.’
While she was living in England, Peigi Cross, née MacPhee, had regularly visited her sister’s family on the croft at 52 Balgarva. She continued the visits after Patricia’s death, and eventually retired to an annex at the back of Iain and Bella Campbell’s modern bungalow, the latest addition to the c
luster of several generations of housing by the sea at the foot of the croft.
‘We had a phone call saying they was going to bring Angus home,’ Peigi told the film-maker Nick Higgins in 2004. ‘We never thought that he would outlive Pat. She was two-and-a-half years younger, Patricia, you know, his sister.’
‘How was it when he came back here at the end, then?’ asked Higgins.
‘He was wonderfully well.’
‘Did he talk to you at all?’
‘Not a lot. Not a lot, no,’ said Peigi. ‘You couldn’t make a lot of conversation with him. But his life had been so remote and so different . . . now you’ll have me crying and I’m not a big crier. You’ll have me crying next.’ She laughed lightly, sadly.
In 1996, during Angus MacPhee’s first year back in South Uist, Joyce Laing planned a major touring exhibition of her Art Extraordinary collection. ‘The art people were becoming very interested in outsider art,’ she said.
The tour was scheduled to travel to Aberdeen, Skye, Mull, Peebles, and to a small four-year-old museum and arts centre called Taigh Chearsabhagh at Lochmaddy in North Uist. In September it would open and run for five weeks at the Talbot Rice Gallery, the University of Edinburgh’s public art gallery.
It featured most of the work which had first appeared as Art Extraordinary at the Glasgow Print Studio in 1978. Once again, the highlights were Adam Christie’s enigmatic stone human faces and torsos, and the showpiece, signature garments of Angus MacPhee’s surviving repertoire: the tunic, the boots, the trousers.
They were transported north-west to Uist in the spring of 1996, to be shown at Taigh Chearsabhagh. It would be the first time that Angus MacPhee’s Hebridean work had breathed the Hebridean air, and the first time that the people of the Western Isles, who by then once again included Angus MacPhee, had the chance to see the celebrated expressions of an eccentric native son.
‘He wouldn’t go,’ said Iain Campbell. ‘I asked him if he would like to go over to Taigh Chearsabhagh when it was showing. He just laughed. He thought it was very, very funny that anybody would want to see his work. He couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about. After all, he used to help them burn his things in the bonfires in Inverness . . . Or it would turn into compost outside in the bushes . . .’
Before the exhibitions opened, in the early summer of 1996 Joyce Laing travelled to Daliburgh with the writer and photographer Tim Neat to visit Angus MacPhee in Uist House. She took him a variety of different wools, ‘and he eagerly felt each strand with his fingers.’ She told him of the planned Talbot Rice and Taigh Chearsabhagh exhibitions. ‘Angus was a man who had come home,’ she wrote later, ‘and his whole being reflected his happiness.’
Tim Neat mentioned the photograph which had been taken in 1939, of Angus on horseback in his Lovat Scouts battledress. Angus MacPhee smiled. ‘Aye,’ he said, ‘he was a fine gelding.’
It was the first time that Joyce Laing had heard him speak. It would be the last time that she heard him speak.
Angus MacPhee died of a heart attack in Uist House shortly before nine o’clock on the morning of Tuesday 11 March 1997. He had passed his 82nd birthday two months earlier. The man who loved Uist to distraction had spent just 24 of those 81 years in the Western Isles.
He would spend eternity in the island. Angus MacPhee was buried two miles from Balgarva behind the low stone walls of Ardivachar cemetery, where a spit of green land nudges into the Atlantic Ocean on the westernmost edge of Iochdar machair. A modest headstone was placed on his grave. It was inscribed: ‘In Loving Memory of Angus Joseph MacPhee, 52 Balgarva. Fois agus Sith. [Rest and Peace.]’
On the dunes beyond the walls of the cemetery clumps of marram grass bent in the wind, the sea crashed on the sand, and the grazed turf muffled the faraway sound of horses’ hooves.
7
ANOTHER AGE
‘They saw in the rainbow the still bent bow of a god thrown down in his negligence; they heard in the thunder the sound of his beaten water-jar, or the tumult of his chariot wheels; and when a sudden flight of wild duck, or of crows, passed over their heads, they thought they were gazing at the dead hastening to their rest.’
‘Inner Necessity’, the Talbot Rice Gallery’s exhibition of the work of Angus MacPhee and other outsider artists, had opened in Edinburgh on 28 September 1996. The title of the display was taken from the Russian abstract artist Wassily Kandinsky’s term for his personal devotion to ‘fervour of spirit and deep spiritual desire’.
‘It is part of the mission of the Talbot Rice Gallery,’ wrote its curator Duncan Macmillan in a courageously British attempt to engage with the Gallic philosophy of Jean Dubuffet,
to endeavour to look at art, not simply as a manifestation of taste, whatever that may be, but in the context of the kind of wider intellectual and imaginative endeavour that a university represents.
This involves asking the question, how does art work? What purpose does it serve? How is it part of the way we know the world? What does it mean to be ‘creative’? This exhibition explores those questions at a point where they are most highly focussed, the experience of those who, through the misfortune of mental illness, live at the edge, or even beyond the edge of the order that most of us take for granted in the world, even if sometimes we have to struggle to maintain it.
Professor Henry Walton, Edinburgh University’s Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry, introduced the exhibition catalogue by asking, ‘Is creativity sometimes liberated by illness and adversity? Can psychic disintegration be kept at bay by art? . . . Dubuffet was the first to say this unofficial art was immediate in a way the “art of the museums” was not. Dull would he be of soul who could stand before the scratched sculpture of Adam the Shetlander, or the grass garments of Angus MacPhee, without renewed respect for the human spirit.’
A reviewer for the Guardian newspaper had earlier visited the ‘Inner Necessity’ exhibition when it was showing in Aberdeen. ‘An exhibition of the work of Angus MacPhee was on display,’ she wrote later. ‘I had never heard of him . . .’
There were boots – fragile, woven in grass; a vest – perfectly netted together with commas of sheep wool, caught on fences, taken and spun by Angus between his fingers. And sandals – a cushion of beech leaves embellished with a strap of twisted grass. There were hats – wide-brimmed sunhats and others in the Davy Crockett style; there were leads and harnesses for ponies, socks, waders and jumpers. All at once they seemed simple, complex, pointless, glorious . . . It is difficult to say what Angus MacPhee’s work showed me, but I am richer for having seen it.
Donnie Munro, the Skye musician and lead singer of the Gaelic rock band Runrig, was an alumnus of Gray’s School of Art in Aberdeen. As a young arts graduate Munro worked in the Royal Edinburgh Psychiatric Hospital and the Andrew Duncan Clinic, which was established in 1965 and named in tribute to an eighteenth-century medical reformer and founder of the Edinburgh Lunatic Asylum.
There, said Munro, ‘I could see at first hand the benefits of enabling expression through a visual medium. I have always felt that the arts offer a level playing field, where all artists, at whatever level of education, training, rawness, naivety or sophistication they operate, work to give full expression to their own individual “special needs”. Therefore the boundaries of art are much more diffuse than we might care to imagine.’
In the early 1990s Donnie Munro was elected Rector of Edinburgh University. ‘At that time,’ he said, ‘I first came into contact with Joyce Laing. I had links with the Talbot Rice Centre, and some knowledge of the art and music therapy work which was taking place through Edinburgh University Settlement – the social action centre that works for disabled and disadvantaged individuals.’
So it was that this famous Gaelic singer first saw Angus MacPhee’s work when it was exhibited in Edinburgh.
I walked into the main exhibition area in the company of Joyce Laing and was confronted by these incredible creations suspended in glass cases like a surreal archaeological find.
They were, indeed, as something of an archaeological revelation, like artefacts from another age, the intricately woven garments uniquely fashioned using rough grass, wool and beech leaves to create human garments of mythological proportions.
Angus MacPhee created, said Munro,
out of the natural found materials, work of incredible intricacy and power, the techniques which would have been learned in his Uist boyhood surfacing like an archaeology of the mind, a point of contact, a realism of nature, amidst the uncertain truth of mental illness.
The objects were in themselves visually powerful as they invited enquiry, searching and a sense of wonderment at some greater space, a world where the ordinary was elevated to greatness . . .
Angus MacPhee’s work is a powerful evocation of a world which, in his life, was fast disappearing, the love for the horse, the rough rope, the harness, the mythology of the gigantic heroes of a Celtic past, the powerful omnipresence of man and nature locked in struggle and permanent partnership.
There is filmed footage of people looking at Angus MacPhee’s woven objects. Their faces suggest that most of them share Donnie Munro’s wonderment. Their first response is to stop still and gape. Their second response is recognition, at which point they smile knowingly, often secretly to themselves. Their third is to examine and admire.
The main garments – the tunic, the trousers, the boots – can only be appreciated in person, in real time. Still or moving film does not pass on their power. The sheer size of them is compelling. Baggy and misshapen with the passing of the years, they nonetheless convey a strange conviction. They are unmistakably what they are – a tunic, trousers, a pair of boots – but equally obviously not those things. Tunics are made from wool, trousers from cloth, boots from leather. Outside the extraordinary world of Angus MacPhee, none of them are made from woven grass to fit a well-proportioned eight-foot man.
The Silent Weaver Page 14