The Soap Man

by Roger Hutchinson

  The war depressed him; being a widower depressed him; his hearing had deteriorated badly since the death of Elizabeth (although he unscientifically attributed his deafness to the quinine taken in Africa); but he could not stop making money and reaping recognition. What to do with it all, and with the energy that still burned him out of bed before dawn on each and every breezy day? He needed as much as ever some project to adopt, some huge distraction, some gigantic scheme, some means of changing a section of the face of the earth, some gambler’s hand to play.

  One day towards the end of 1917 he picked up a copy of The Times and noticed that the island of Lewis was for sale. It was advertised as a sporting estate complete with castle: a whole island devoted to salmon, grouse and deer. He collected his land agent Frank Clarke, drove north in a motor car and took a ferry across the Minch to Stornoway. Nobody there remembered him.

  A small but steady trickle of land in Lewis continued to be redistributed throughout the early years of the twentieth century. As we have noted, Aignish Farm was returned to the common weal in 1905. Mangersta Farm on the far west coast in Uig was turned over to crofting in 1909, and the old military training ground at Stornoway’s Battery Park was converted into fishermen’s holdings.

  These and other minor transfers, which were gestures of goodwill rather than a panacea for the Lewis land fever, were carried out by the new regime of Lieutenant-Colonel Duncan Matheson. Colonel Matheson had taken over the estate from his father, Donald Matheson, in 1899, Donald Matheson having inherited the island from his aunt, Lady Jane, upon her death three years earlier.

  Despite his small acts of charity Duncan Matheson was not a supporter of the crofters’ cause. On the contrary, he confessed in private to having swallowed wholesale the landowning lobby’s most recent position paper, which was that crofts were no good for crofters, being too small, and that by opposing the creation of new crofts and the extension of the crofting system landowners such as himself were therefore actually doing crofters a favour, would they only recognise it.11

  Such concessions as those at Aignish and Mangersta (and it should be recalled that Matheson had not given away the land: he had simply switched his rental income from one farmer to several dozen crofters) were also recognised as a sop, an attempt to buy time. Duncan Matheson had inherited from his father and his aunt the recommendations of the 1892 Deer Forest Commission. That report had scheduled not only Aignish and Mangersta for new crofting land, but also great swathes of the rest of rural Lewis. More than 3,000 acres of South Lochs should be assigned to crofting tenure, considered the Deer Forest Commission, and the entire 50,000 acreage of game shootings at Park and Aline combined should be redeployed for the ‘extension’ of crofting. Both of the west side farms at Galson and Dalbeg should be returned to crofters, as should the Gress, Tong, Coll and North Tolsta grazings north of Stornoway. For good measure, the Commission advised that the 13,000 acres of Morsgail Deer Forest in Uig might well be better served if used as crofting pasture land.

  In voluntarily conceding 2,750 acres of rough pasture and arable at Mangersta and Aignish, Colonel Matheson was getting off lightly. The sops were taken hungrily, of course. But they were not enough.

  The Small Landowners (Scotland) Bill of 1911 gave to the Board of Agriculture and the Scottish Land Court both the power to create crofting holdings and some of the compensation money needed to transfer private Highland farms into public property. The Board (which replaced the Conservative Government’s Congested Districts Board, whose principle answer to the Highland land question had been to encourage emigration) promptly found itself in receipt of 5,352 applications from throughout Scotland for smallholdings. Of those, no fewer than 1,300 came from the Western Isles, and most of those were from Lewis.12

  It is a measure of the fortitude and community discipline of the land-starved Leodhasaich that they had been prepared to wait so long in such good faith to fill out a thousand application forms. The 1911 Act had taken fully five years to get through parliament; it became law in diluted form; but in the years of its difficult gestation there had been only minor disruptions on the island. (Where there were explosions, as at Dalbeg Farm on the west side in 1909, it was the result of a grievance long pent up by Shawbost crofters whose families had been cleared from the land less than sixty years earlier, who had petitioned and demonstrated for its return since the 1880s and who were running out of patience.13) Lewis was feared by capital and by government alike as a powder keg, an island which might blow into open revolt at any time. It did not do so partly because its people were more sober, more law-abiding, more reluctant to cause social unrest than the authorities credited, and partly because Herbert Asquith’s reforming Liberal administrations of the Edwardian period – to which Ross-shire and Lewis duly returned their supportive MPs – promised that constitutional action was in hand.

  That action appeared in 1913 to be imminent. After arduous consultations and agonised deliberations the Board of Agriculture decided that it would use its new powers to apply to the Land Court for conversion to crofting tenure of the whole of the farms at Gress to the north of Stornoway, Galson in the west, Carnish and Ardroil in Uig, and Orinsay and Steimreway in South Lochs. That total of 22,000 acres would accommodate 128 new crofts. It would not answer the polite applications of 900 others, but it would be a start.

  A certain widespread mythology has it that the First World War then intervened, in August 1914, to put this long-awaited initiative on hold. In fact it was scuppered by the proprietor. Colonel Matheson’s Edinburgh solicitors fought a long, dogged, ingenious and doubtless hugely expensive rearguard action in the Land Court against the Board’s proposals. They employed every piece of ordnance in the landowning arsenal. They argued that crofters made bad tenants. They claimed that crofting land lost value. They alleged, person by person, that the individual applicants were unsuitable people to be given the tenancy of a smallholding. They suggested that the rateable value and therefore the social infrastructure of Lewis would be harmed. They said that Lewis’s roads were not capable of servicing new crofting townships. They refused to hand over documents and delayed replying to letters.

  They did all of this in the landowner’s name, while – as they and he knew full well – thousands of Lewis men and women were absent from the island, voluntarily staking and too often losing their lives on land and at sea in defence of the United Kingdom. They took advantage of the fact that among those thousands bogged down in Flanders or navigating the North Sea was a majority of the applicants for crofts at Galson, Gress, Ardroil and Steimreway. Duncan Matheson’s solicitors began this tawdry campaign in 1913; they were still engaged in it when Germany invaded Belgium; and by March 1916 – when their own conflict had been underway for three years and the world war for eighteen months – they had ground the Board of Agriculture and the Land Court into submission. The Secretary of State for Scotland decided that consideration of the transfer of the four Lewis farms into crofting tenure should be suspended until the end of the war. The filibuster had been successful. It had also spotlit the yawning gulf in class sympathy between landlord and tenant, for both Colonel Matheson and his son – whose life would be preserved by a supreme act of heroism by a ranker in the Cameron Highlanders – were also in France. They may have been composed of the same vulnerable flesh as their troops, but their aspirations lived in another world.

  At least one of the Board’s sub-commissioners recorded his dismay on paper. Neil MacLean wrote to his employers immediately following the suspension, pointing out that while the high level of recruitment from Lewis might temporarily have assisted the landowner’s tactics, a day of reckoning was due when the men returned to Lochs and Ness. They had sown the seeds of ill-will, implied MacLean, and they might yet reap the whirlwind: ‘the Lewis people, having had these farms dangled before them for some years, will break the peace if the thing is postponed more or less indefinitely.’14

  Chronic land hunger notwithstanding, the 1900s were neither especiall
y good nor particularly bad years in the Hebrides. Island long-line fishermen in their traditional home-made lug-sailed sgoths (skiffs) suffered competition from new motor-powered trawlers steaming into the Minches from the south and east coasts of the Scottish mainland. The local commercial fishery went into decline and, lacking the capital to invest in new craft and equipment (a deficiency which was not helped in 1902 when the Fishery Board withheld further grant aid to the island), Lewis fishermen slowly withdrew from the deep-sea export industry. They did not stop fishing, but concentrated instead on catches from their inshore waters for home consumption. The Stornoway fish-curing barons became increasingly serviced by fleets from Aberdeen and Buckie. Of the 237 sailing boats registered at Port of Ness between 1868 and 1901, 205 were over 30 feet in length and therefore equipped for deep-sea work. Of the thirty-four fishing boats registered at Ness between 1903 and 1910, only seven were larger than 20 feet in length. As late as 1939 – when almost all of the rest of the Scottish fleet was motorised – the islands of Lewis and Harris contained between them 34 per cent of the working sailing boats left in the country.

  Lewis itself won a new ironclad steam connection with Strome in Wester Ross in 1904, when the Sheila first sailed the route which she would ply for twenty-two years. The Sheila carried the celebrated notice: ‘This deck is available for passengers when not occupied by cattle’ – an admonition which was more of a reflection of the comparative priorities of the islanders than an insult by David MacBrayne’s ferry company (passengers in a later age would be similarly barred from the occupied car-deck). The fact that it was humorously noted and not forgotten is interesting in itself, as a further indication of the Leodhasaich’s proud, almost hyper-sensitive awareness of their independent humanity.

  Post offices which could receive telegrams sprang up in virtually every village. The security of tenure granted by the 1886 Crofting Act had encouraged people to improve their properties. Visitors could still be surprised and depressed by the thatched blackhouses of rural Lewis and Harris, but they had stood the test of time in the far north-west and would not easily be relinquished. Despite their hugger-mugger modesty they were not – as a sympathetic tourist could perceive – homes to any underclass, ‘for the Lewis people as a whole are well-conditioned physically, mentally and morally, and there is certainly much more intelligence, culture, happiness and virtue in these black houses than in the comparatively well and skilfully built houses of the Canongate and Cowgate in Edinburgh. The people living in these black houses are not the dregs of the community, they are the community’.

  The infant mortality rate in those houses was high. Inside walls would be covered with clay and whitewashed to guard against cholera, news-print might insulate the cladding, wallpaper might even be hung, but this was a stern environment and the children continued to die. When Calum Smith was born in Shawbost in 1912 he arrived as the fourth child of 28-year-old parents. Only one of his siblings was there to greet him: the other two had survived for just two or three weeks. Calum himself almost died within days of his birth, and while a toddler contracted firstly pneumonia and then jaundice. Having conquered those he survived – not untypically – for a further nine decades.15

  Young Calum enjoyed a commonplace childhood in rural Lewis. His mother had spent the day of his birth gathering seaweed for fertiliser. He spent his boyhood in an environment where Gaelic lore cohabited with a Presbyterianism so firmly applied that no water could be collected from the well on the Sabbath day; he was raised on potatoes and barley bread and salted peat-smoked fish. When he was two years old his father went off to war with the Royal Naval Reserve. And when he was eight his entire family was uprooted from the west coast and moved to the ramshackle suburbs of Stornoway because their borrowed croft was reclaimed by its tenant and there was no other land for them at Shawbost – or, mysteriously, anywhere else in the boundless world of a schoolboy’s native Lewis.

  The North Tolsta historian Donald Macdonald recorded Tuesday, 4 August 1914 – when Macdonald himself was ten years old – as the unforgettable day ‘when the postman delivered the buff-coloured envelopes to the Militia and Naval Reservists’.16 Because of the islanders’ abilities at sea and consequent long tradition of naval service, Lewis lost a disproportionate number of its sons to the First World War. Their sacrifice would be made the harsher, had they but known it, by an unprecedented tragedy after the Armistice was signed. But in 1914 they knew only that their country called upon them once again and they rallied to her, walking across Barvas Moor or sailing to Stornoway from Ness, the Naval Reservists then rattling south by train to the Channel ports, the Militia men to France, ‘and before long, the postmen were delivering their grim messages of death:’

  First to fall were the regular soldiers fighting at Mons, the Marne and the Aisne, followed all too quickly by the young Militia lads, some under eighteen years of age. French names like Loos, Cambrai, Ypres, Hill 60 and Passchendaele became familiar, all associated with the death of the young islanders.

  Calum Smith remembered for the rest of his life the west side funeral processions of those few whose bodies were returned – the black-clad non-combatants, the old men who formed all of the cortège with one exception: a soldier from faraway Park on leave whose khaki-clothed figure loomed over the company.

  He remembered another man in khaki ‘who made his way down to the shore, and looking out over the Atlantic fired shot after shot from his rifle. I . . . couldn’t see or understand what he was firing at. When I spoke about it after I got home I was told that it was the last evening of his leave and that he was setting off for France the following day . . .’

  Lewis men fought in France, Italy, Russia, Egypt, Mesopotamia, Palestine, Greece, Bulgaria and the Dardanelles – many youngsters who had joined up straight from the Nicolson Institute secondary school in Stornoway distinguished themselves at Gallipoli. Lewis sailors died at the Battle of the Falklands, at Jutland and on the Dover Patrol. Their regular Ross-shire regiment, the Seaforth Highlanders, won seventy decorations, including five Military Crosses and four DSOs. Stonemasons commissioned at the end of the war to engrave memorials developed a terrible familiarity with the curlicues of such names as MacLeod and Morrison.

  In the opening week of January 1917 Lewis was given its first local weekly newspaper. The Stornoway Gazette was the brainchild of an Inverness journalist named William Grant, who had been despatched to the island in the early 1900s by the Highland News. Grant settled in Lewis, marrying in 1906 a Nicolson Institute teacher named Jane Morrison. When his brother Duncan became a partner in a Dingwall printing concern the opportunity arose to throw one stone at two birds: to launch a newspaper which would tap the virgin advertising and cover sales markets of Lewis and Harris, and which in doing so would put Duncan Grant’s new printing presses to profitable use. For the next thirty-one years the Stornoway Gazette (and West Coast Advertiser) was composed and edited in Lewis, but printed on the east coast of the Highlands. The strategic problems of this dislocation would many times be evident – even without bad weather, the distances over land and sea between the editorial office, the printing depot and the retail outlets were so formidable that the columns of the Gazette would often not be read until three or four days after they had been finalised. But William Grant was a diligent correspondent, his journal had no competition, and it quickly established itself as a feature of Lewis society.

  On Friday 8 February 1918, readers of the Stornoway Gazette found themselves poring over the week’s main stories – a tribute to ‘our most distinguished soldier’, the fallen Colonel David MacLeod, DSO, of the Gordon Highlanders; a letter from some Bernera lads serving in Holland; a petition to the Scottish Secretary requesting that Gaelic be taught in all Highland schools – when the more discerning among them spotted an auspicious five-line item at the very bottom of page three. Clearly inserted late in the day, at the expense of the line-spaces and leading in the Gaelic report which preceded it and which was consequently concertinaed up th
e page, this short, six-point paragraph read:

  REPORTED SALE OF THE ISLAND OF LEWIS

  A report comes from Edinburgh that the Island of Lewis has been purchased from Major Matheson by Messrs Lever Bros., the world-known soap firm of Port Sunlight, near Liverpool.

  It was almost true.

  4

  SIGNS OF COMING DAWN

  By 1917, when Lord Leverhulme noticed that the island of Lewis was in their portfolio, John Knight, Howard Frank and William Rutley had been in business for only twenty-one years. Property was not their first interest; they were auctioneers and retailers of jewellery and fine art with whom Lever – when he had been just William the collector – had done more routine business.

  Knight, Frank and Rutley progressed as a matter of natural course from valuing and selling the contents of country houses to selling off the edifices themselves. When Lieutenant-Colonel Duncan Matheson decided to put his Hebridean estate on the market they presented themselves as the obvious agency. Colonel Duncan was resigned to making a loss. In 1844 his great-uncle Sir James Matheson had paid the widow of Mr Stewart MacKenzie £190,000 for the island. Sir James had since added to the apparent value of the estate by raising the Gothic magnificence of Lews Castle (which cost an estimated £100,000) on the site of an old lodge, by the creation of quays, utilities and fish-curing plants in Stornoway, and by the transfer of land from community use to shooting estates and private farms. As well as the purchase price Sir James Matheson and his widow may have spent on Lewis another million pounds of their opium fortune. Their descendant sold it for £143,000, with a few thousand pounds on top for improvements and accessories. But it was a paper loss rather than a personal deficit. Colonel Matheson, who was commanding his battalion of the Seaforth Regiment in France in 1917 and whose son was also a serving officer, was liquidating an inherited asset in a buyer’s market, rather than writing off his own investments. In short, he was suddenly £150,000 more wealthy, with no more castles to maintain or crofters to mollify. He had been anxious to offload the island for many years: in 1913 Duncan Matheson had almost succeeded in persuading the Chancellor of the Exchequer and future Prime Minister David Lloyd George to buy it.