The Soap Man

by Roger Hutchinson

  This was a stubbornly contrary reading both of the circumstances in Lewis and of the Land League’s meeting on the island. In fact Mr G.J. Bruce of the Highland Land League had been cordially received in Stornoway on Saturday 16 March. His meeting was chaired by Reverend Donald MacCallum of Keose in North Lochs. Reverend MacCallum, the current chairman of Lochs Parish Council, a veteran of the Highland land movement and by no means a Londoner, wasted no time in attracting loud applause by describing ‘landlordism’ as an insatiable evil which inhabited the gloomiest corners of the night.

  ‘But long as the night has been,’ he insisted, ‘and great and terrible as have been the cruelties, there are signs of coming dawn which will break through the darkness in which the land has been enveloped, and bring peace.’

  Riding the hall’s acclaim, Reverend MacCallum then asked rhetorically why, if sugar-hoarding in wartime were as great a crime as it was made out to be, ‘what about [speculative] land-grabbing?’ If the freedom of the seas, continued the minister, warming to his theme, ‘were regarded as a glorious liberty, what about the freedom of the land and the mountains?’ – an observation which provoked more applause. We have the freedom of the seas, he resumed, at which a voice from the audience interjected, ‘Not for salmon!’ The Reverend happily accepted the amendment. They had the freedom of the seas, he agreed, ‘as long as we keep out of the reach of the water-bailiffs’.

  When the guest speaker from the Highland Land League managed finally to get a word in, G.J. Bruce advised his audience – ‘while expressing regret that an island and its people could be bought and sold in this fashion’ – that Lord Leverhulme was not a bad option. The ‘London meddler’ went on to praise Leverhulme as ‘a man of high ideals who looks after the interests of his work people . . . So long as landlords are to be tolerated,’ concluded Mr Bruce, ‘Lord Leverhulme will doubtless prove one of the best we could have, and the change might be all for the good.’

  The meeting had been called to decide which parliamentary candidate would win the support of the local Land League in the next General Election. It was to be an election of unusual interest in Lewis. Due to the war, it would be the first to be held since 1910. No date had yet been set but it was widely understood that the poll would be held at the end of the year or as soon as the war was over, whichever came first (the war ended in November 1918). The Representation of the People Act, which had become law a couple of months earlier, in February 1918, had given the vote to women over the age of thirty. This expansion of the franchise necessitated boundary changes across the United Kingdom. One result, not the least significant, was that the Western Isles of Lewis, Harris, the Uists and Barra (incorporating a dozen smaller inhabited islands) would for the first time comprise an integral parliamentary seat in their own right. The Southern Isles and Harris were to be removed from the Inverness-shire constituency, and Lewis found itself elevated from being a subsidiary part of Ross-shire to becoming the most populous and influential partner in a conglomerate of Gaelic western islands. Stornoway’s votes would no longer be counted at Dingwall. Other people’s votes would instead be counted at Stornoway.

  The sitting Ross-shire and Inverness-shire MPs remained with their mainland voters, leaving the Western Isles to uncover their own representative. It would be a three-cornered contest. The infant Labour Party was determined for the first time to fight every seat in the country, which was why Mr G.J. Bruce of the Highland Land League arrived in Stornoway in March to attempt to persuade Lewis land reformers to back the official Labour candidate, whoever he (or, in some dreams, she) might turn out to be.

  He failed. The local land reformers decided on 16 March to throw their weight behind the Liberal candidate, the Medical Officer for Lewis, Dr Donald Murray. Dr Murray had been born in Stornoway fifty-six years earlier, he had married a Lewiswoman thirty-six years after that, he had served on Stornoway School Board and as a Ross-shire Justice of the Peace. As the island’s Medical Officer he had won a great deal of gratitude and respect for his tireless crusade against tuberculosis, which had involved him travelling from village to village advising ‘against spitting anywhere, the importance of body washing, good food, windows wide open, pleaded for piped water, drainage in country villages and avoidance of contamination of wells and cows’ milk.’ Donald Murray was also an Asquithian, ‘independent’ Liberal, which is to say that he was not one of the Liberals who had followed David Lloyd George into unholy coalition with the Conservatives. Islanders had comparatively fond memories of the old-fashioned Liberal Party, less happy recollections of Conservative governments and little or no experience of the new urban Labour Party.

  As the 1918 election year progressed, the land issue was neutralised by the elementary fact that all three candidates declared themselves openly and often to be in favour of sweeping land reform as quickly as possible. Not one of the parties had the suicidal gall to propose a member for the Western Isles who was opposed to land redistribution. The Labour candidate, Hugh McCowan, who was eventually selected by the Stornoway branch of the Independent Labour Party but whose candidature failed to win the endorsement of the national Labour Party, was naturally supportive of land reform. The independent Liberal Dr Donald Murray, who was backed by many of the local radicals, called in his election address for ‘a strong and effective scheme of land reform which would result in a speedy distribution of all the available land in the Highlands and Islands among the people’. And the Conservative/Liberal coalitionist William Dingwall Mitchell Cotts, a Dumfriesshire-born colliery proprietor and shipowner who would more accurately be described as a conservative Liberal, appealed for ‘a radical transformation of our land system’.

  Whatever the inclinations, wishes and advice of such leading Stornowegians as William Grant, all of the national political parties of 1918 were united in one realistic assumption: the Hebridean land question was not answered, not outmoded, not forgotten, and not driven by the unpopular ambitions of London socialists. It was, in fact, the single electoral issue from which no seeker of votes in the Western Isles could escape.

  Leverhulme arrived back in Lewis at the end of March 1918, two weeks after the polite Mr G.J. Bruce had received the decorous applause of that Stornoway meeting. It was not to be his hour of assumption, his coronation tour: that would wait until the last niggling document had been signed and stamped. But it was made in an atmosphere of benign goodwill, among people fatigued by war, whose aspects ranged from cautious anticipation to gazing with shining eyes at the imminent Lewis renaissance. The latter were more likely to be found in the terraces of Stornoway; the former in the farflung countryside.

  He drove sparingly – for petroleum was strictly rationed and it was not his way to flaunt his wealth – about his new domain in a motor-car. He met with the eminences of Stornoway. He laughed engagingly at such arch jokes as the one about a Lewisman returning from the south who was asked what he thought of the English and replied: ‘I don’t know, I only saw [Scottish] heads of departments’. He addressed a meeting in support of war savings, introducing himself as ‘a poor Lancashire lad a long way from home’ and offering to double whatever was raised locally, up to £20,000. (Given that Stornoway Town Hall, complete with its public library and municipal buildings, had burned almost to the ground earlier in the month, his new island seemed to be making unpredictable calls on his largesse.) After seven days of such glad-handing he went back south again, crossed the Ts of the purchase, took possession of the ancient writings, or deeds of Lewis, and prepared his party to journey to the Hebrides as the courtiers of an island lord.

  They travelled on Friday 28 and Saturday 29 June 1918. His immediate cortège – they would shortly be followed by others – included his two maiden sisters and the family of Jonathon Simpson. Stornoway Town Council and the Lewis District Committee had prepared a lavish welcome. A specially appointed sub-committee had draped the South Beach and the steamer quay with bunting, garnished the area with evergreens and hung a banner which read ‘Welcome To
Your Island Home’. The town’s Pipe Band and local politicians waited at their marks and a large crowd gathered.

  Sadly, the Sheila was delayed. When she docked the witching hour had passed: it was slightly after midnight on Saturday and the Sabbath had begun. The Pipe Band was stood down, the councillors assumed a graver mien and the assembly was muted. Lord Leverhulme disembarked to uncertain cheers and a dignified greeting from Provost Murdo Maclean, emeritus Provost John Norrie Anderson and Charles Orrock. His party then bundled into estate vehicles and drove out to the castle through lines of curious spectators. His Lordship could be seen through the windscreen, smiling, nodding and modestly waving his acknowledgements.

  A few days later his 24-year-old niece, Emily Paul, made the journey in the company of her father Alexander, who was an Edinburgh journalist, and her mother, Leverhulme’s youngest sister Lucy Anne, for ‘great was the interest and excitement of [Leverhulme’s] family and friends to hear . . . that he contemplated buying [the island], and in that event intended to entertain at Lews Castle in Stornoway’.

  Emily and her parents took the same route in July 1918 as had Uncle William at the end of June, overnighting in Inverness before catching the train west to meet the Sheila at Kyle of Lochalsh railhead. ‘Owing to the war and consequent naval activities,’ she recalled, ‘north of Inverness was a prohibited area, and we were not allowed to take our seats in the train for Kyle of Lochalsh before we had produced passports authorising us to travel to Stornoway.’ The four-hour train journey under brilliant skies was a revelation to Emily – ‘I remember thinking that Heaven itself could not be more beautiful’ – which was promptly dispelled by a bilious voyage across the inhospitable Minch.

  The landing at Stornoway came as both a relief and a fresh ordeal for a young lady who was neither feeling nor looking her best, and who was consequently grateful for the couple of hours of northern Hebridean midsummer’s night at either side of 12.00 p.m. The Sheila’s docking . . .

  was effected in the presence of a huge crowd who had come down to welcome their friends and inspect the visitors. In those days the boat arrived so late that daylight was fading for it was quite dark by the time she reached the pier, so no one saw what a sorry sight one looked on disembarking.

  Passengers had to force their way through a narrow passage from the gangway to the road, between a sea of gazing faces, which was truly an ordeal for one unaccustomed to such publicity. We were soon packed into a car, and leaving the main street of the town we sped through an arched gateway up the long drive to Lews Castle.

  The Paul family was ushered inside Lord Leverhulme’s new redoubt, adjusting their eyes to the gloom. They were taken to refreshments in the dimly-lit dining room and as they ate the gas-jet lamps flickered lower and lower until the place was almost in darkness. This was a temporary aberration, they were reassured. It was caused by Uncle William turning on the geyser to draw his midnight bath. When it was full they would once again be able to see each other and their meal.19

  On the afternoon of Tuesday 2 July, two days after his own arrival, Leverhulme was formally welcomed to Lewis by an assembly of the island’s great and good in Stornoway’s Masonic Hall: a congenial enough setting for the guest of honour, if one made necessary by the accidental burning of the Town Hall.

  The reigning provost, Murdo Maclean, a fishcurer and tradesman of the burgh, greeted his new superior by joking that when the news of his new venture was made public many southerners must quickly have consulted their maps – ‘Some people seem to have the idea that Lewis is somewhere adjacent to Greenland, and that the population is in the first stages of evolution.’ Quite the contrary, asserted Provost Maclean. The island was a ‘nursery for all the learned professions, into which Lewis has sent a constant stream of young men who have taken honoured positions and adorned them’. Nor was all of its potential fully exploited, added the provost to meaningful applause: ‘[Lewis] has great natural resources that are yet undeveloped, but which we hope to see developed in the future.’

  If Leverhulme still needed to be told what was expected of him by the Stornoway merchant class, John Norrie Anderson, a retired solicitor, cleared up any confusion. The new proprietor must grasp the land question by the ears and shake it until it cried pax. Former Provost Anderson assured the gathering that ‘there are very serious problems to be solved, and his Lordship will have to tackle them bravely’. Lord Leverhulme must learn to ‘take with a grain of salt what some people might say to him . . . The problems of Lewis can be solved if they are tackled courageously and in the right spirit, but if there is to be any progress old traditions must first disappear.’ Great remedial measures were imperative, said John Norrie Anderson, if the war heroes were to return to a suitable twentieth-century home, but this was not the time or the place to dwell on such matters, which would certainly be discussed with his Lordship in the forseeable future.

  He stood then to address them. His stiff shock of hair now white, his short 67-year-old frame broader than of yore but still unbent, his hearing defective and his vocal delivery monotonous and louder than was required; that gin-trap mouth, stern chin and unblinking gaze as riveting as at any time. He jested that his castle would be as lonely and miserable without their goodwill as any summer sheiling.

  He looked back over the island’s proprietorial deeds of 600 years past, noting that the owner’s title ‘is based on service’ – ‘you have always looked upon your laird as one who can render you superior services . . . I cannot think that there is any logic or reason in the possession of a property such as this if it were not founded upon service – and only to the extent that I can render service should I consider that there was any reason for my becoming possessor of the island.’

  The jokes and niceties accomplished, William, Lord Leverhulme then delivered his prospectus for Lewis. With the fresh, unprejudiced eye of the newcomer, the business brain of a self-made multi-millionaire and the unswerving confidence of a man whose instincts had rarely betrayed him, he was convinced that he had identified the road to Hebridean riches. That road lay not on the land, but at sea. The speech that followed on that July afternoon in Stornoway’s Masonic Hall indentured all of the fury and disappointment of the succeeding years, issuing as it did from a man who had set in stone as his personal creed: ‘I scorn to change or fear’.

  ‘I do feel that we in this island,’ he said, ‘have been drifting a little away from the modern line of march of science and art . . . There is no blame to any of us in that . . .’ But . . .

  But: ‘We have here in the island of Lewis surrounding us wealth beyond the dreams of avarice —’

  A tumultuous ovation from his audience obliged him to pause. Wealth beyond avarice apparently figured large in the dreams of the assembly. His jokes were one thing; what was really needed from the head of Lever Brothers was a step-by-step guide to unlimited affluence.

  ‘And so far from Lewis,’ he continued, extemporising, ‘so far from Lewis being considered an outlying part of the world as you, Mr Provost, were saying, it is really, so far as the harvest of the sea is concerned, what you may call the hub of the universe . . .’ The applause broke out once more, as it would do at every punctuation mark and parenthesis for the remainder of his exposition.

  ‘It is only a question,’ he resumed, ‘of dealing with this matter on the lines that will enable every inhabitant of Lewis to become better off than at present.’ The sentimental philanthropist then broached the concept of adding value at source – presumably, given his earlier remarks, to fish.

  We want to deal with it so that a shilling to every man and woman in Lewis shall be worth more than a shilling . . . There are two ways of dealing with a community. One method is called philanthropy – muddling sentiment, I call it. I don’t believe that the people of the island require any philanthropy . . . There is the other method of dealing with communities, and that is the one in which there is no philanthropy, but where by the logic of the situation, by availing yourself of the means
placed at our disposal by science you can enable people to live for themselves and to work out their own destiny.

  Within all of their lifetimes, he insisted – yes, within even the remaining lifetimes of himself and Mr John Norrie Anderson – Lewis could enjoy ‘a more even distribution of wealth and a higher rate of wealth per inhabitant than any other part of the United Kingdom . . . we can have it!’

  This incredible consummation was within the grasp of the Leodhasaich, his wondering audience was assured, thanks to the appliance of science. It would be achieved through dedication and cooperation.

  And it was wholly necessary, he continued, if the ‘brave men who have gone from Lewis’ to place their ‘bodies in the living rampart against tyranny’ were to return from the Great War ‘to a better Lewis than ever they knew’. The utopian island would be accessible only, however, on certain terms.

  What form the new Lewis may take, said Lord Leverhulme disingenuously, ‘I cannot say’. But certain unprofitable practices were clearly incompatible with creating the most affluent district of twentieth-century Britain.

  More than thirty years ago a Royal Commission considered the Lewis problem and their proposal was that 33 per cent should be taken off the rents.

  I just worked it out and am reminded of the Scotsman who, when he saw the pyramids, remarked, ‘There’s been a terrible lot of building here for very little rent.’ This Royal Commission takes 33 per cent off the crofters – less than one pound per croft if you take in the squatters and cottars. In Lewis, families are not smaller but bigger than elsewhere, but if they were even of the average size, each person would receive four shillings per annum (there would be five persons to a household). But four shillings per annum is less than one penny per head per week!

  The paltriness of it all exasperated him. Who got out of bed for a penny a week? ‘Now can we do anything in that direction? What can be done with a penny a week?’ He was, as many of the men in the Masonic Hall that Tuesday knew full well, deploying a politician’s artifice. The Crofters’ Commission rent reduction of the late 1890s had more accurately delivered to the heads of most crofting families an immediate saving of three or four pounds, which was at that time the equivalent of a month or six weeks’ income to the ordinary labouring person. Such a bonus would not have been scorned anywhere, and it was not scorned in rural Lewis. By reducing it to the lowest denominator Leverhulme was displaying not so much his ignorance of Hebridean home economics as his determination to belittle them, to hold them up to ridicule before proposing a rational alternative.