The Soap Man

by Roger Hutchinson

  And the rational alternative, recognisable enough to the speaker and to much of his audience, was to be found in the form of steady, gainful employment provided by an omnipotent entrepreneur, as he explained:

  Working on the lines of commerce, I hope we can solve this problem in Lewis by providing full occupation at wages not a whit inferior to those paid in other localities. We cannot carry on industries successfully unless we can compete in the open market with similar goods made elsewhere.

  If you have got the right material, and we have that, and if you have got wealth at your door waiting to be harvested, and we have that, it is for us to see that we prepare it for the market in such a way that it shall fetch the highest price, and out of that we can pay the highest wages. That is roughly the idea of how I think we can work together.

  No such benevolent government, he stressed in words that may later have returned to trouble him, ‘can be exercised without the consent of the governed fully and completely given . . . the true liberty is that in which all are governed and all take their part in governing. On such lines I believe we can work out such a condition of things here as will make Lewis the envy of less happy lands.’

  Aeroplanes, Leverhulme pointed out in a flight of imagination common and not entirely implausible to an educated, progressive Briton of 1918,

  . . . will so annihilate space that Stornoway might come to be regarded by the people of Glasgow as a suburb where they spend the afternoon and evening. Lewis might in future become a favourite starting place for New York! That is fanciful, but science has made such strides in the last twenty-five years that he would be a rash man who today would say what advantages a situation such as Lewis might in the future give to its inhabitants.

  All I can do will be done. We will work on business lines and we will have nothing to do with philanthropy. We will be able to look each other in the face, and you will be able to say to me: ‘We thank you for nothing but the opportunity you have given us, and that is all we want.’ [There was applause at this.] And I shall say to you, ‘We are good friends. It is a pleasure to live amongst you, and I hope we shall have a long and happy life together.’

  Those mild words and the loud and lengthy acclamation they received sounded the death knell in Lord Leverhulme’s visionary Lewis of any crofting tenure, let alone an extension of crofting tenure. In doing so they also rang the tocsin for rebellion. His contempt for the prevailing system as uneconomic and unscientific was total. Crofting was clearly not the solution to the ‘problem of Lewis’, or even a part of the solution. Crofting in the Leverhulme analysis was itself the problem of Lewis. The land question had been approached in a topsy-turvy manner: by appeasement of a medieval life style which not only had no place in a modern utopia, but which also actively dragged its unfortunate tenants back from the future into the muddy embrace of a long-lost century which had never known so much as an automated loom and which would probably, given half a chance, disinvent the wheel. The man from the centre of the industrial world would answer the land question by excising it as ruthlessly as the shacks had been torn down from Bromborough marsh.

  This removal of crofting from the landscape would be not so much a product as a precondition of the industrialisation of his estate. Leverhulme had determined, by the time of his fourth visit to Lewis and having spent perhaps sixteen days on the island, that the only important present and future asset of the community lay in its easy access to rich fishing grounds. If fish could be caught and landed in sufficient quantities at Stornoway, then it could also be processed there. This need not be a matter merely of pickling herring by the barrel in brine. If the late-Victorian sugar and soap millionaires had proven anything about marketing, they had demonstrated a simple equation: the smaller the packaged unit the greater the retail return. This was the source of mass employment: on the production lines and in the administrative offices. Many more people would be required to process, advertise and distribute the fish than to catch it. By Highland standards a lot of people lived in Lewis; by any southern urban measure the place was almost unpopulated. Lord Leverhulme’s revolution was predicated on a substantial workforce which was ready, able, adaptable, hungry and prepared to live within daily commuting distance of a Stornoway office or manufactory. It did not need employees who were forever slinking back to Tolsta or Leurbost to cut peat or see to the cattle.

  It required a deracinated urban working class with no alternative but the poorhouse. It had instead a proud community of insular Gaels from whom over 200 years almost everything had been removed but the independence of their working day, and who owed that surviving, precious independence entirely to the scatter of buildings, grazing rights and patch of family land that they called a croft. Leverhulme’s revolution needed the people of Bolton. It got the Leodhasaich.

  Clear as his message might have been in hindsight (and clear as it may have appeared to some of those present at the Masonic Hall, whose numbers included the old land warrior Reverend Donald MacCallum of Lochs), it was couched in such positive jargon and recycled through such an agreeable and optimistic section of Lewis society that its import was not yet fully digested. What came across most strongly was that the new proprietor wanted to create well-paid jobs, and no Lewis man or woman was opposed to the creation of well-paid jobs. Even his laceration of the crofting economy would cause little alarm: crofters generally being the first to agree that they were inadequately rewarded.

  The meetings continued and the messages of support rolled in. Six days after his manifesto address to the Masonic Hall he assumed his droit de seigneur as permanent chairman of Stornoway Pier and Harbour Commission. This position gave the reigning proprietor almost total control of the waterfront and quay, as commission members were almost invariably his own nominees. Flanked once more by provosts past and present, he heard the fishcurer John Mackenzie (who had held the provostship for seven years in between John Norrie Anderson and the present incumbent Murdo Maclean) advise the meeting that ‘the success of the harbour meant at all times the prosperity of the island’. Ex-Provost MacKenzie added that under the lamented rule of Colonel Duncan Matheson he and his fellow commissioners had ‘on all occasions had a free hand to act as they considered best’. Lord Leverhulme made no comment.

  His territorial scent-trails laid and his intentions outlined he settled nicely into castle life. There was work to be done inside and out. Central heating, a reliable supply of hot water and electric lighting were installed. He enjoyed with his guests the exploration of this gentle land. Lewis at any time was another country; at a time of war, to privileged visitors who understood no Gaelic, it seemed miraculously removed from anxiety, from shell-shock, from the sound of distant guns.

  The parish of Stornoway itself had, in truth, little to offer these moneyed sophisticates from the south. His niece Emily Paul – who had been hoping for something at least as exciting as Oban – ‘found a very drab-looking town, ill-paved and smelling of herring and harbour. A visitor could buy little except Harris tweed, a few postcards and perhaps a Fair Isle jumper. There were innumerable little shops selling foodstuffs, and clothes of an inferior cut and quality, two chemists’ shops, and a picture-house where, as often as not, the light in the projector would fail.’

  Only out in the wild beyond Marybank and Arnish Moor would the majesty and thousand little mysteries of the island reveal themselves. Emily would occasionally go along on her uncle’s ‘business trips’ into nether Lewis. On the far west coast she discovered ‘a timelessness and healing peace, a dreaming beauty over all which seemed not of this earth’. It was a place to produce giddy fantasy in a lady.

  I well remember getting a real attack of nerves on the Monday morning we returned to Stornoway. We had had no news of the outside world since Friday morning. ‘Supposing,’ thought I, ‘the Germans have landed in Stornoway and we are now running into a town in the hands of the enemy.’ By the time we reached the outskirts of the town, I was really worked up about it, with the details clear in my min
d as to how all messages to the landward part of Lewis would have been stopped.

  Emily’s travelling vagary faded with the sight of the smelly old harbour side and the castle turrets. Rural Lewis, not Stornoway, was the realm of midsummer dreams.

  Leverhulme made a point of not over-using his motor vehicles at a time of national petrol shortage, but it was necessary to traverse his new domain. Whenever possible he combined his tours of inspection with some official duty. On the last Monday in August he drove to Europie at the Butt of Lewis on the northern tip of the island. There, within sight of acres of commonly-worked runrig arable lands, a couple of miles from the home port of the traditional long-line sailing fleet at Ness, he unveiled a war memorial cross at the restored St Moluag’s Church.

  On a fine, dry day the unconscripted people of Ness, the old and the very young – many if not most of whom would have been monoglot Gaels – gathered in that silent place to watch and to hear the little Englishman who had come promising so much. They filled St Moluag’s until there was standing-room only at the back. But there was to be no talk here of the laughable economics of crofting, no tub-thumping oration about the glittering future of an industrialised fishing industry. The proprietor spoke at length, as usual, but he fittingly limited his observations to the pity of war and the virtue of building rather than destroying. Lewis had, he said, given more men to the armed forces in proportion to population than any other part of Britain, ‘but we can look back with pride, and our children’s children will look back with pride, on the bravery and self-sacrifice of the gallant dead.’

  The Great War, an Cogadh Mor on the memorials of the Gaidhealtachd, was not yet over. But the last German offensive of the conflict had expired and as Leverhulme spoke at Europie the conclusive Allied assault was underway. Even here, on the far north-western edge of the continent, people were able to hope for the first time in forty-eight months that the torment was approaching an end. The men were coming home.

  Leverhulme continued with his duties in an island increasingly expectant, not only of his own proposals, but of the restoration of its surviving young people. He addressed Stornoway Town Council on the subject of replacing the old Town Hall, speaking of a need to combine commerce and beauty in the redevelopment of Stornoway, as had been the case in medieval Venice. He held garden parties at the castle in aid of War Savings.

  He celebrated his sixty-seventh birthday on 19th September by distributing the Intermediate Certificates at the Nicolson Institute. The teenaged schoolchildren of Lewis were, he told them, ‘about to go out into the world to fight the same battle of life as their fathers and their grandfathers before them had fought’. He had a number of improving and cautionary tales to pass on, such as the parable of the Swiss chemist Nestlé who developed a huge business out of his modest attempts to make his baby’s milk more digestible. But many of the bright young minds before him, he knew, would be thinking: ‘What chance is there for us here in Stornoway? We must go out into the great world beyond.’ He was not sure that they were right. He would tell them a story . . .

  There was an Indian boy who became so obsessed with the idea of securing diamonds that he left home and spent his life in a vain search for them. He heard that his old father was in need of assistance on the farm, but he would not return. He heard that his father had died and that the farm was to be sold. But he continued his fruitless search for diamonds, until one day when climbing a mountain where he had been told diamonds could be procured his foot slipped, and he fell to the bottom and was killed. Meantime his father’s farm passed into other hands, and here after all were the diamonds which the boy had gone away in search of, for the farm became the famous Golconda Diamond Mine, the richest diamond mine that up till then the world had ever known.

  ‘If you go out into the great world outside in search of diamonds,’ Lord Leverhulme told the Nicolson Institute’s class of 1918, ‘well, you might never find them, while all along there might be acres of them under your feet at home without your knowing it. Whatever there is at home, near your hand, if you can develop it and cultivate it you are far more likely to succeed than by going long distances out into the great world.’

  He went to Shawbost on the north-west coast, where young Calum Smith was growing up without English, without his father and three uncles, who were all serving in the Royal Navy, and soon without a croft or a house to the family’s name. The proprietor left behind him there a small local controversy about the relative expertise of the fishermen who had been assembled to meet and advise him, and those who were irritated by having missed the visit.

  He attended church on the Sabbath, of course. And he delighted in telling the story of being approached by an elder as he left the United Free Church in Stornoway after one morning service. ‘Do ye no ken what the Auld Book says?’ asked the elder in the Leverhulme family’s vernacular version of the tale (which seems to imply that a Dundonian music hall artist had insinuated himself into the Stornoway communion).

  ‘What does it say?’ requested his Lordship.

  ‘It says,’ continued the aging oracle, ‘“Woe unto ye when all men shall speak well o’ ye” – and they’re speaking well o’ ye the noo.’

  He was, observed his son, ‘brimful of optimism, enthusiasm and determination’.20 He was also marking time. Everybody was marking time until the men came home. But although he could not yet let his builders and contractors off their leash, his imagination was running wild. After that startling introductory delivery to the Masonic Hall he leaked his intuitions and proposals slowly and carefully, and often away from Lewis. He cultivated the interest and company of the pioneering Lancastrian landscape architect Thomas Hayton Mawson. Mawson – an inspired 57-year-old planner of impeccable liberal Christian credentials whose garden designs were by 1918 in demand all over the world – visited Stornoway that August. The two men drove around Lewis together, the bright-eyed, cadaverous Mawson enthusing his host with rapturous talk of the island’s suitability for farming willow trees in sufficient quantities to join the basket trade (‘Covent Garden imports three million willow baskets a year grown in Holland. They should be grown in Lewis . . .’) and enough soft fruits (‘raspberries, strawberries, blackcurrants, gooseberries . . .’) to open a Hebridean jam factory.

  Upon his return to England Thomas Mawson used the Manchester Guardian – a liberal provincial daily newspaper close to both men’s heart and home – to describe Leverhulme’s ambitions, which had by then ballooned to encompass a railway network and a chemical plant producing iodine. His evidence is valuable as that of a friend and a sympathetic advisor to the early months of the project. It details, at length and in public for the first and only time, the astounding nature of the augurs for Lewis which in 1918 Leverhulme vouchsafed privately to such figures as Mawson and the past and present provosts of Stornoway:

  Lord Leverhulme, the new owner of the Isle of Lewis, is setting himself to work in hearty co-operation with the islanders to develop, by the introduction of capital, science and organisation, the natural resources of the island and the waters surrounding it. Lord Leverhulme has discovered a territory much of which is as undeveloped as the western prairies of Canada and with potential wealth proportionately great.

  It is the development of the fishing industry to which the new owner will first devote his energies. The production of iodine is also under consideration, and expert chemists are working on the seaweeds which are so abundant round the island. If the residuals or by-products obtained from the chemical treatment of the seaweed prove of commercial value we may look forward to the revival of what was at one time a considerable industry.

  But before this or any other industry can be a success it will be necessary to provide better transit facilities by sea and land. Safe harbours are the first essential of all economic developments. Engineers are accordingly at work making preliminary surveys for railways which will connect the principle harbours of the island with Stornoway, their natural base. We may soon have a railway on
the east coast, connecting Port of Ness, another railway connecting with Callernish on the west, and possibly a third to Loch Seaforth, connecting the Isle of Harris directly with Stornoway. As supplementary to these the main roads are likely to be further improved and motor routes created as feeders to the railways.

  A natural corollary to the introduction of railways and harbour facilities will be an increase in the number and size of the steamers trading with the mainland. A trawling fleet, too, is bound to appear as an arm to the fishing industry. Ice factories, cold storage, and canneries for the curing and treatment of fish for export are already planned, and the work of construction will soon begin.

  The solution of travel problems opens up vistas of many other industries which should add to the prosperity of the island. The most important of these, it may be, is the accommodation of tourists, for already Lewis is a fisherman’s paradise. Inducements to sportsmen can be considerably increased by improving the loch fishing, and, when it is stated that there are nearly 600 lochs and tarns on the island, it will be seen that the opportunities in this direction are unlimited.

  The utilisation of the peat lands, which extend to over 100,000 acres, offers prospects of considerable importance. It is possible to imagine great industrial developments if the peat can be used in the production of power. In the neighbourhood of Moscow it is said that 100,000 horsepower is produced from peat fuel, and therefore the problem has passed the experimental stage. In the meantime the peat is excellent for ordinary fuel, for peat litter and for horticultural purposes.