The Soap Man

by Roger Hutchinson

  And when the last vote had been lodged in mainland and insular Ross-shire in December 1885 the Matheson/Novar era was over. (So too was that, immediately to the south in Inverness-shire, of Cameron of Lochiel, who was defeated by his fellow tribune on the Napier Commission, the reformer Charles Fraser-Macintosh.) The new Member of Parliament for Lewis and for the rest of Ross and Cromarty would be the crofters’ candidate Dr Roderick MacDonald, a forty-five-year-old physician, surgeon and coroner who had been born in Skye but whose successful career in London caused him to be labelled a ‘carpet-bagger’ by his foes. In the event MacDonald’s radical track record was held by the electors to count for more than his place of work – he had been treasurer to the London Crofters’ Aid and Defence Fund and supported reform of the House of Lords – and he polled 4,942 votes to Novar’s 2,925.

  Previous to 1885 the total electorate in Ross and Cromarty had numbered no more than 1,720. The Scotsman newspaper, lamenting the defeat of the landlord, described the 2,000 people who represented Roderick MacDonald’s clear majority as ‘illiterates’ who were unable to read English and consequently ‘knew nothing of politics’.

  If they knew nothing of politics they had exercised their new powers with remarkable unity and purpose. Dr MacDonald’s views, according to the Invergordon Times, ‘especially on the land question, were in entire harmony with the vast majority of the electors, who were sickened of landlord rule, and who were determined that they would have a member who thoroughly understood their wants and wishes to represent them. The victory was hailed with great delight throughout the counties by the crofters, and bonfires blazed and general rejoicings took place . . .’

  Roderick MacDonald would represent Ross and Cromarty and the island of Lewis at Westminster until his retirement in 1891, when the seat was inherited by another crofters’ candidate. Throughout most of his parliamentary career MacDonald was, however, conspicuously silent on the issues which he had been elected to raise. Raids came and raids went, crofters demonstrated, were arrested, were tried and were imprisoned, and Dr Roderick kept his counsel. His reticence may have been due to ill-health or to a previously unsuspected native shyness. But it seems most likely that he found himself compromised by love.

  For in January 1890 the campaigning Skye surgeon made a late and politically astonishing marriage to Frances Maryon Perceval. His new wife was the grand-daughter of the only British prime minister ever to have been assassinated, the Tory Spencer Perceval, who in 1812 was shot dead in the lobby of the House of Commons by a bankrupt bearing a grudge.

  Such a Trollopian liaison would have been entirely digestible by his electors. His wife’s other family connections were the problem. Frances Maryon was also related to Lady Jane Matheson, the widowed proprietress of the island of Lewis, whose mother and family had become familiar faces on the island (their name was, as we have seen, left on Stornoway’s Perceval Square). Roderick MacDonald found himself not only sleeping with the enemy as a guest in her citadel; this middle-aged Romeo had also, as a crofters’ champion, married into the Capulet household. He retired from the seat in the following year. MacDonald died at the age of fifty-four in 1894, having travelled a long way from his father’s Waternish croft.

  None of this star-crossed canoodling was foreseeable in the dizzy year of 1885. In common with other leading Liberals Ronald Munro-Ferguson of Novar was advised by the Land League never again to oppose a crofting candidate. He took the advice and disappeared to represent Leith Burghs, closer to the comforting embrace of The Scotsman’s editorial arm. A career in the diplomatic service took Munro-Ferguson later to the Governor’s chair in Australia, to the title of Viscount Novar in 1920, and to yet another bizarre re-engagement with this present narrative in 1922 when Ronald Crauford Munro-Ferguson, Viscount Novar and once, however briefly and however long ago, the Member of Parliament for the island of Lewis, became at the age of sixty-two the Secretary of State for Scotland in the Conservative government which was elected at the end of 1922.

  At not one election after 1885 was a person who opposed land reform returned to parliament to represent the island of Lewis. At most general and by-elections such candidates did not even bother to court the Hebridean vote.

  Gladstone regained office once more as the national results rolled painstakingly in, and recording officers grew weary of their suddenly onerous responsibility to a majority of the male population, and 1885 turned into 1886. But he returned to Downing Street with the additional spectre at his shoulder of Liberal hegemony in north-western Scotland being wiped out by newly enfranchised local militancy.

  If a spur were needed to force a Crofters Holdings (Scotland) Act into life, that was it. A Bill which had largely been formulated to salve the weeping sores of rural Ireland, but which would never be applied by a British government to Donegal and Cork, was whittled into the mould of the Highland littoral and the Hebrides and became law in the summer of 1886. It was largely unopposed by the official Conservative opposition. Late-nineteenth-century Tories, who had been educated by Disraeli in the virtues of One Nation politics, recognised the need for some kind of deference to the crofting community, if only to stave off more civil unrest. And they found it ideologically difficult to protest too loudly against the creation of a new class of hardy, self-sufficient tenant agriculturalists, even while the Tories deplored those agriculturalists’ baffling but evident affinity for the militant politicking of the urban proletariat. A century of sweet and sour relations between the Conservative Party and the Scottish crofter was born in 1886.

  As the years passed, the 1886 Act would achieve mythological status in the Highlands and Islands (and would, not coincidentally, help to reestablish that belt of Liberal representation around the north-western seaboard). It dawned on people slowly, but dawn on them it did, that following 25 June 1886 each and every one of Scotland’s crofters suddenly possessed virtually unassailable security of tenure at a fair, independently assessed rent. To other, later citizens of Britain such benefits might appear nugatory. To Scottish Gaels in the 1880s they were transforming. After so many lifetimes of loss and grievance they must adjust to a new freedom from fear. They could plough, breed and build without the oppressive threat of eviction. It was only a successful battle, but to many of the people of Lochs, Uig, Tolsta and Ness it was a battle which indicated that the war was there for the winning.

  All they needed – and they still needed it badly – was the land. Once the land was won, the moment it had been retrieved acre by petty acre from shooting and sheep and brought under crofting legislation, it would be theirs by law for good. This is largely why the Park deer forest and Galson and Aignish farms in Lewis were the objects of raids and demonstrations in the winter of 1887/8. These actions, in common with other post-1886 land seizures, were represented by the landowning classes as being mere anarchy unleashed by Gladstone’s leniency. Having been given an inch, they argued, the irresponsible crofters were now grabbing miles of private land under the impression that they would receive unlimited government support.

  The truth was more complex. It may be viewed from either side of the political spectrum. For the Right the continuance of unrest in the Gaidhealtachd was evidence of one of the major landowning nostrums: that the Highlands and Islands were suffering not from bad policy, but from a great historical imperative which had created a kind of territorial inflation. Too many people were chasing too little land. The solution, as even Baron Napier had seemed to realise, was not more redistribution but depopulation by way of assisted emigration.

  To the Left the problem appeared in a different light. Nobody had ever claimed that ‘fixity of tenure and fair rent’ would alone deliver Paradise. They were an essential halfway house, but they would not solve the land problem. Unlike Irish peasants with their backyard pigs and allotments of potato-patch arable land, unlike the kailyard agriculturalists of the Scottish lowlands and east coast, Highlanders depended chiefly upon grazing animals. On the thin soil of the far north-west sheep and catt
le required to forage across large tracts of hillside and glen. Without access to all the traditional ‘common grazings’ of heather-covered moor and grassy bog the crofter could not maintain adequate flocks and herds.

  In an island such as Lewis, where the amount of available grazing was strictly limited, the exclusive devotion of tens of thousands of acres to game-birds and deer was most keenly felt. It was proposed by one agitator in the years before the 1886 Act that if all the surface of Lewis was available for crofting pasture, the island would be able to support 80,000 rather than 24,000 people. That is doubtful – almost as doubtful as the claims of William Hesketh Lever for an even more explosive Hebridean revival some forty years later. But what cannot be disputed now, and could not seriously be denied then, is that if the 50,000 acres of Park were free once again to be grazed by their cattle and sheep rather than enclosed for the landowner’s grouse and venison, the existing population of south-eastern Lewis – where in the late 1880s perhaps 1,000 people were landless squatters – would have enjoyed a more stable and comfortable life. And if they could not run their beasts on Park they could run them nowhere, for over the hill lay not another county, not another glen. At the other side of the heights of Beinn Mhor, Gormol and Uisenis and the cliffs of Kebock Head lay nothing but the open sea.

  They had attempted to operate within the new property market. When the section of Park which had been enclosed as a sheep farm was put out to let, people from the cramped remaining villages duly applied and petitioned not for the whole of it, but for a few smallholdings in the lonely hills beneath Ben Eishken. They knew that land – ‘We remember the men that left it. They were old men when we were boys, and to the day of their death they used to mourn their removal from Park, and wished to go back to it.’ Their applications were ignored.

  The township of Balallan was always the first settlement of any size to be met by the traveller entering Lewis from Harris. It sprawls lengthily along the great north road between the needling inlet of Loch Erisort and the low hills of southern Lewis. With the sea to its south and the moor to its north, there was never anywhere for Balallan to go but east and west along both sides of the winding thoroughfare, so east and west it went, until traversing the settlement from one extremity to the other amounted to almost an hour’s hike from Ceann Loch Erisort to the city line with Laxay.

  Balallan and neighbouring Laxay were unlikely refuges, but so they had become to the people of Park and South Lochs when their villages were emptied in the nineteenth century. A sixty-three-year-old told the Napier Commission in 1883 that he had arrived there in 1828, ‘along with my father and another ten crofters, who were driven away with all their belongings from their thriving and agreeable holdings at Aline and Park, in which they knew nothing beyond prosperity and happiness’. The blue remembered hills of Aline, ten miles away, are almost always visible from Balallan and Laxay. The huddled, thatched shoreline villages of South Lochs and Park sat just across the thin neck of Loch Erisort, as alive as a memory, as tantalising as a dream and as untouchable as a mirage.

  Balallan’s slender resources of a sheltered anchorage and good inshore fishery supplemented by rough grazings were stretched to capacity by the immigrant population from the eastern peninsula. And like most harbours of the dispossessed, in any country at any time, Balallan became a melting pot of grievance. Its branch of the Land League was strong and active; its schoolteacher Donald MacRae – a Gaelic-speaking incomer from Plockton in Wester Ross – was a celebrated radical; it was from Balallan that the call had been made during the 1885 election to mistrust the sitting MP Munro-Ferguson of Novar simply because he was a Highland landowner.

  On Friday 11 November 1887, it would later be reported in the Scottish press, people from all over south-eastern Lewis gathered at Balallan and resolved that ‘groups of crofters and cottars . . . should leave the various townships and meet at a place half-way between Balallan and Eishken, then to proceed into the forests of Park, in one body, and shoot all the deer they might come across or drive them into the sea.’

  This incursion, half-uprising and half-demonstration, was scheduled for Tuesday 22 November. Far from any attempt being made to conceal the plans, they were broadcast as widely as possible. The national and local press was informed. The proprietress Lady Jane Matheson, the lessees of the Park game forest (an English manufacturer named Joseph Platt and his wife Jessie) and Sheriff Alexander Fraser in Stornoway were all not only told of the impending action; they were invited to the district to observe for themselves its immediate cause: the poverty and land-starvation of the people of South Lochs and Park. They declined.

  Day broke at 8.30 on the morning of Tuesday 22 November to the sound of horns in the villages of South Lochs, horns blown into the winter air from Balallan and Laxay to Gravir and Calbost. Men then began to walk eastward across the marshy head of Loch Erisort from Balallan and westward down the neat defile of Glen Gravir, each group of forty or more carrying supplies, sail-cloth and rifles. Pipers were in their van, and red flags waved, and women and children cheered them as they passed.

  The contingents met at the head of Loch Seaforth, ‘half-way between Balallan and Eishken’. Their destination was not the estate house and control centre at Eishken, as some had apparently feared, for as they marched westward along the narrow shore from Seaforth Head they encountered the redoubtable Mrs Jessie Platt (who had been telegraphing the Scottish Office with alarmed requests for government help in quelling the insurrection) and her head gamekeeper Murdo MacRae. There followed one of the memorable exchanges of the Lewis land struggle. Urged in English by Mrs Platt to stop and go home the men replied, in English, ‘We have no English, my Lady.’

  Murdo MacRae then intervened in Gaelic with the question: ‘An ann as ur ciall a tha sibh?’ (‘Are you out of your minds?’)

  There was no answer. MacRae pressed on with an idiomatic phrase of slight ambiguity: ‘Co tha air ur ceann?’ (‘Who is on your head? / Who is your leader?’) A man from Cromore replied: ‘Tha ar bonaidean.’ (‘Our bonnets.’)

  They marched on by the dark waters of upper Loch Seaforth to an expanse of low ground at the north-western edge of the Park deer forest. They pitched camp, using the sail-cloth as canvas, opposite the village of Airidh a Bhruaich, whose dim house lights were visible a mile away across the kyle as evening fell. They drove and shot deer, cooking some carcasses and ferrying the remainder over to the inhabited shore, where familiar hands lugged them to land and hid them away in the moonlight. (Those carcasses transported for later use were in the event the only Park deer to be ‘driven into the sea’.) Fishing boats carrying meal and peats arrived from South Lochs and journalists – filling their notebooks with atmospherics – disembarked, squelched through the shallows towards the sparks from the camp-fires and the gun-toting shadows, and roamed wide-eyed and wondering about the encampment.

  They were, on that fine November night, the matinee critics at a melodrama. The Park raid was a staged event. The men with sail-cloth tents and rifles had no more intention of staying there than of burning down Eishken Lodge or guillotining Mrs Platt. They were dramatising their simple requirements and their elementary rights for an audience which had failed to understand them when they spoke plain English. If this meant recreating that same prelapsarian illusion which had been invoked against them by the likes of Cameron of Lochiel, the dreamworld of a free and happy people roaming and thriving on the fruits of their own land, then recreate it they would.

  And recreate it they did. The weather favoured them that late November night. The visiting press could easily have been drenched and frozen, or drowned in a squall in Loch Seaforth while being rowed over from Airidh a Bhruaich. But it was calm and mild and dry, and the man from The Scotsman was escorted by schoolteacher Donald MacRae (his appointed ‘interpreter’) into a sylvan idyll. The definitive account of that soiree in Park was assembled later by a contemporary Highland writer and historian, James Cameron, who had the good fortune to be present and was there
by able to combine his own experience with the surprisingly unanimous press reports and summon up . . .

  a camp, 100 yards long, illuminated with five peat fires, each as large as a haystack [a stook, or Highland hay-rick, being about the size and shape of a small bonfire].

  Over the one in the centre was suspended a magnificent specimen of a Royal Stag. Within yards of this fire there was another of equal size above which there was the carcass of a deer broiling, and there was an immense cauldron with Irish stew.

  Behind these fires there were raiders sitting in couches of heather and stone, pretty much in the fashion of their forefathers when they roamed the ancient forests of old Caledonia. Some were eating, others attending the fires, others chanting songs . . . On the approach of strangers no attempt was made to stop them; on the contrary they were asked to listen to the cause which induced them to resort to such methods of hunting for food, and to invite them to partake of a share of what was going.

  Then there was the dramatic effect of the white-headed patriarch from Marvig. Alastair Tharmoid, Alastair MacFarlane, standing bare-headed with his back to the blazing peat fire, with uplifted swarthy hands invoking a blessing in rich sonorous Gaelic upon the venison festival.

  This marriage of a verse of the Old Testament and a scene from Les Brigands was certainly impressive to southern eyes. It had the additional virtue of being not too far removed from actual Victorian life in the Hebrides, whose pastoralists and hunter-herders had much in them of Moses, Ruth and Joshua, with an occasional necessary streak of banditti. And if this was indeed drama, it was drama with the incidental benefit of supplying meat to hungry homes. Of the 500 or 600 deer in Park on the morning of 22 November, it was later estimated that several score had been culled and surreptitiously exported by the evening of the following day.