The Soap Man

by Roger Hutchinson

  It is, however, to the conversion of peat lands into cultivated soil that we must look for solid results. The crofters have by a slow process extending over generations reclaimed large tracts of peat lands along the coast, but what is needed is quicker and more scientific methods, and in this direction much research work is already being done. If success follows these experiments Lewis will become a great food-producing island.

  Meanwhile huge nurseries are being planned for the raising of forest trees, which thrive on the island. Indeed, had the available forest lands been planted at the same time as the 500 acres around Lewis Castle our war needs for timber would have presented a much less difficult problem. Lord Leverhulme proposes to plant five million young trees each year. These will consist largely of Menzies spruce and Scotch firs. It is also proposed to plant huge areas with the white willow, which grows well on almost any part of the island, and to bring into being a large basket-making industry. It is also proposed to experiment with New Zealand flax, which experts declare will grow well in Lewis. Unfortunately this plant is a long time in coming to the fibre-producing stage, but if success is attained it will bring another important industry to the island.

  Those who have seen the productive raspberry farms in Perthshire, which in the fruit season employ thousands of pickers, will not be surprised to learn that fruit-growing on a large scale is to be introduced. Here there is no need for experiments, because raspberries, strawberries, gooseberries, and currants grow splendidly and yield enormous crops. Other fruits, like the loganberry and American blackberries, may also be tried, and along with them the hardy Siberian crab[apple], which is so prolific and so popular for the making of crab and blackberry jelly.

  The proprietor further plans an experimental garden, to be devoted to the testing of the growth of plants for distilling, as, for instance, mint and camomile, and also the growth of herbs for medicinal purposes. It is the intention to convert all the raw materials produced on the island, whever possible, into a finished product upon the spot.

  It follows that these enterprises will be accompanied by a ‘boom’ in building both for industrial, commercial and residential purposes, and for the crofter as well as for the merchant and manufacturer. Before the War the population of the island was 31,000. Fully developed, the resources of the island are probably capable of supporting comfortably a population of 200,000.

  One wonders how far the Government will encourage this great design to increase the prosperity of Lewis. Will they so reorganise the land laws as to make co-operation between the owners and the cultivators of the soil mutually advantageous, or will they interpose other and more vexatious restrictions than those which at present exist, and which paralyse the spirit of individual initiative and collective effort?

  This was Lord Leverhulme’s incredible vision of Lewis. Those were the castles built in the air above his motor car as he drove between Stornoway and Shawbost or Lochs. That was the breathtaking summation of his few weeks of observation and conclusion. Its almost unimaginable scale would have made it preposterous from any other source. Issuing as it did from the multi-millionaire creator of Lever Brothers, its giddy immensity seemed almost seductive.

  Lewis would become an island of at least 200,000 people – six times more than had ever lived there. Stornoway would be an industrial and trading metropolis to rival Glasgow or Liverpool. Commuter trains would rattle across Barvas Moor carrying thousands of workers home at night. They would pass by fields of fruit pickers and lush acres of flax and herbs. Visiting anglers would wave from the sides of lochans. Forests of willow, spruce and fir would cover the less penetrable central regions. New villages would spring out of the reclaimed land, and older parishes would expand in orderly fashion far beyond the township bounds. And in the distance always, with its – how many? 50,000? 100,000 people? – the great centre of the island’s capital would lie simmering in the haze; the horizon broken by the steam from its chemical works, its canneries and its curing factories and the smoke from its peat-fired generating station; the busy surrounding sea populated by its fishing fleet and trading vessels.

  The fantastic world created by Leverhulme in cheerful collaboration with such allies as Thomas Hayton Mawson was in fact a mixture of genuine foresight, resurrections from the past and pure nonsense.

  The idea of giving Lewis a couple of branch railway lines was neither original nor utterly ridiculous. Just twenty years previously, in 1897 and 1898, two separate private enterprises, the Highland Railway Company and the Highland Light Railway Company, had surveyed and proposed small-gauge lines between Stornoway and Tarbert in Harris and between Stornoway and Breasclete and Carloway on the west coast. The £500,000 schemes had collapsed when the amount of capital required to be raised by private subscription – £290,000 – was not forthcoming.

  Seaweed and forestry were industries of the past and of the future. The plentiful quantities of weed which washed up on Hebridean shores had always been used as fertiliser It was known to have various other valuable properties, especially when incinerated and turned into the adaptable alkaline named kelp, which produced soda and potash. A century earlier, during the stringencies of the Napoleonic Wars, the Scottish Highlands and Islands had experienced a miniature economic boom because of the nation’s need for kelp in the making of – as Lord Leverhulme would have known – soap and glass.

  The process for extracting iodine from kelp ash, which was being suggested as a local industry by Leverhulme and Mawson, had been discovered in the nineteenth century. It would prove to be a bubble easily burst by the discovery and exploitation of mineral deposits of iodine in Chile and elsewhere. Not that this disappointment signalled the end of the industrial day for this versatile weed. In the 1930s work on seaweed-derived alginic chemicals popularly known as alginates indicated their suitability as emulsifiers and gelling agents in the food industry (as well as the exciting possibility of a ‘sodium alginate fibre’ which was employed to build one, and only one, experimental De Havilland Mosquito fighter aeroplane entirely from seaweed).

  A string of small alginate processing works was established up and down the Hebrides, which repaid crofters who cut and delivered seaweed to their doors. But all of these industries lived and died on the margin. After the defeat of Napoleon and the resumption of international trade, Hebridean kelp was priced out of the market by continental materials. In the second half of the twentieth century the alginate works of Lewis and the Uists struggled in competition with imported goods from as far away as South America and Tasmania to satisfy the demand for high-quality produce speedily delivered. The vision of Leverhulme and Mawson for an island kelp industry was not ludicrous; it was merely overstated.

  Overstatement was commonplace. It is tempting to wonder quite how big Leverhulme considered Lewis to be; to speculate that he was deceived by those limitless North Atlantic skies. Where were all those people and their homes and livelihoods to fit, along with the forests, the farms, the fruit gardens, herb meadows and 600 angling lochs? Small forestry plantations would be created by a later generation of Scottish crofters and private owners, but nobody ever again thought it safe or sensible to plant five million young trees a year in Lewis. Peat-fired power generation would remain obstinately on some agendas for decades, but would never seriously challenge the dominance firstly of King Coal and latterly of North Sea oil and gas – and by the time they were running out and peat’s day might have dawned the whole family of fossil fuels was considered wasteful and polluting, and was by-passed in favour of such clean renewables as hydro-electricity and – particularly in the Hebrides – wind and water power. Had Lord Leverhulme had access to wind turbine technology in 1918 he would doubtless have overpromoted it gleefully in Lewis. But he did not.

  Flax and soft fruit certainly did grow in the islands, but there were reasons why crofters did not already produce them by the sackful, just as there were reasons, not entirely linked to a shortage of equipment and agricultural science, why the same crofters had not al
ready reclaimed the whole of Lewis from peat bog. Leverhulme had visited his island in the winter, but not for very long. Mawson had never been there before the August of 1918. When the distinguished horticulturalist looked about him on fine, dry summer’s days, noted the twenty hours of available daylight shining on soil which needed only a treatment of lime to become the ideal habitat for gooseberries, and reported that most of the 770 square miles could be turned into an orchard, his enthusiastic host was neither inclined nor equipped to contradict. Any native could have told them. Lewis had certainly a more destructive rainfall than ever lashed the raspberry fields of Perthshire, but its wind was the real difference. The Outer Hebrides are swept by more sustained and violent winds than anywhere else in Britain. Such parts of the islands as Europie at the Butt of Lewis register a greater number of stormforce gales in a year than days of sunshine. Very little had ever stood up to the Lewis wind, which largely explained the popularity of root vegetables among local cultivators. It blew all year round. A raspberry bush – or a white willow sapling – might survive the equinox to be blasted in July. To recognise such reality was not merely the pessimism of the crofters, nor the wilful Presbyterian conservatism so mocked by their lowland critics. To face such facts was the very stuff of survival on Lewis, about which 20,000 sentient adults could have advised Lord Leverhulme at least as suitably as did the well-intentioned Thomas Hayton Mawson.

  The last paragraph of Mawson’s essay in the Guardian betrayed William Leverhulme’s fatal concern. His reveries had been disturbed by the news that the Board of Agriculture was intending to resume its prewar proposals to return private farms to crofting land, possibly on a larger scale than before and with the assistance of new legislation.

  The prospect of these ‘other and more vexatious restrictions’ which would ‘paralyse’ enterprise on Lewis provoked Leverhulme to write directly to Robert Munro, the Secretary of State for Scotland. Munro had been the wartime Scottish Secretary since 1916 and would retain the position until 1922. For most of that time he was the ‘coalition’ Liberal/Conservative representative of the parliamentary seat of Roxburgh and Selkirk in the south of Scotland. But Munro was a Highlander, a Liberal and a Free Churchman. He was born in 1868 at the Easter Ross village of Alness on the Cromarty Firth, a son of the manse and a young devotee of Gladstonian Liberalism. His path from the glebe to the Commons was, not unusually, taken by way of a career in the law. He was one of the generation of Highland Liberals who had seen their home constituencies – in Munro’s case, Ross-shire with Lewis – assaulted and usurped by crofters’ candidates such as Roderick Macdonald.

  Robert Munro may not have been, as a 50-year-old King’s Council and member of Lloyd George’s coalition cabinet, wholly sympathetic to the Highland land struggle. But he was fully aware of its power. He understood land hunger to be a visceral, organic force which was under normal circumstances virtually impossible to resist, and which a civilised government could therefore only assuage. The challenge presented to him after 1918 was whether or not Lord Leverhulme’s presence in and plans for Lewis represented such abnormal circumstances that appeasement would no longer be necessary. Could, in short, Leverhulme convert the majority of Leodhasaich to his own view: that crofting was outmoded and, once supplanted by a thriving wage economy, would soon become undesirable?

  The signs were not good. Letters from Leverhulme arrived in Munro’s office in the autumn and early winter of 1918 reiterating all of the proprietor’s standard arguments about the inefficiency of crofting. But they were read by a man who had forgotten more about crofting than William Leverhulme would ever learn. Munro took heed of them, while also taking care to proceed with the groundwork for a post-war revision of the Smallholder’s (Scotland) Act, and while reassuring the Lewis Crofters’ and Cottars’ Association that he was considering their suggestion that Lewis be bought out entirely by the state and converted into their promised land.

  News of this state of flux at home may have reached the trenches in Flanders and the ships on the high seas more quickly than it arrived in Whitehall. In October 1918 a serving Leodhasach named Roderick MacLeod, who came from a distressed part of rural Lewis, wrote from the Western Front to his old schoolmaster at home. The young soldier believed that Lord Leverhulme ‘evidently means to do well for the island . . . and its people’. He noted sharply that ‘the Stornoway Brigade had the barrage on him with all the needs of the situation before he has had time to put his sword and baton up . . . However, let us hope that all the schemes will mature, and that in a few years’ time the place will be a busy hive of industry in a network of electric railways.’

  And then this moderate, optimistic soul (MacLeod proudly supported the Liberal parliamentary candidate Donald Murray and not the platform of the Land League or the Labour Party) turned to the ‘steps necessary for the settlement of Lewismen and others on the island after the war’:

  I am afraid that is a question that will take some answering to the satisfaction of everyone. However, I hardly think that it can be satisfactorily solved by forming committees and accumulating funds to ship the people to the backwoods of our Colonies when they could be established on the land and otherwise at home.

  Give them a stake one way or another in the country for which they have fought so well and it will awake in them a sense of duty to it that has hitherto been asleep. How can the majority of us be truly patriotic having to fight for countless acres that by right should have been ours long ago, but up to the present have been preserved for the sport and pleasure of the idle rich, to uphold laws that enable the so-called owners to cast our old folks into prison for trespassing on these lands while we are abroad defending them?

  We could do a day’s work for a day’s wage in any country and under any flag. Let us have something of our very own to fight for in the next war, and there need be no conscription.

  There were many ominous sentiments in this message from a Liberal, educated Lewisman. Contempt for the ‘so-called’ landowning classes was clearly not confined to a few dispossessed malcontents in the Lewis of 1918. More disturbingly for Leverhulme – who would probably have shared the young man’s scorn for the ‘idle rich’ – Roderick MacLeod considered that a mere ‘day’s wage’ was insufficient. He was not looking for the kind of comfortable employment that could be gained ‘under any flag’. He was looking for a stakeholding. He was looking for the ‘countless acres that by right should have been ours long ago’. He was looking for what he perceived to be justice.

  He also made a distinction between settlement of the land struggle and the schemes of Lord Leverhulme. In the view of Roderick MacLeod they were not mutually exclusive. Had they been so, from his faintly sceptical description of ‘a busy hive of industry in a network of electric railways’ we may suppose that MacLeod would have taken the land ahead of a salaried position in one of Leverhulme’s enterprises. But he saw no conflict between the two. Lord Leverhulme, however, did.

  From the very beginning, the official version would insist, William Leverhulme found himself frustrated by the dead hand of government. His son, William Hulme Lever, published the first biography just two years after his death. ‘His early days in Lewis were very happy ones,’ wrote the second Viscount Leverhulme, who spent part of that summer with his father in the Hebrides, ‘but they were not to last for long.’

  He encountered the first obstacle in his path in the late summer of 1918, when the Scottish Board of Agriculture declared its intention of taking over, under the terms of the Small Landowners (Scotland) Act 1911, certain of the few remaining farms in the island to meet the demand for further small holdings or ‘crofts’. Leverhulme, while he consented to some farms on the western side of the island being taken, was strongly opposed to the splitting up of others ...

  The Government Authorities were obsessed with one sole idea, the provision of further crofts. They admitted Leverhulme’s good intentions and welcomed his investment of capital in the island, but they seem always to have viewed his d
evelopment schemes as being a thing apart and unconnected with the problem of land hunger which had been so long with them . . . It was also said that he sought to ‘industrialise’ a people who had no desire to be industrialised . . . [but] he had no thought or intention of establishing in the island ‘industries’ as the term is understood in England.21

  The son and heir was being filially disingenuous. His father actually was ‘strongly opposed’ to the reclamation of a single Lewis farm by crofting, on the west or the east coast. Leverhulme pleaded with Robert Munro to prevent the Board of Agriculture from continuing with any of the land settlement schemes that they had initiated before the war, but which had been debated into stalemate by Colonel Matheson’s lawyers. The new proprietor claimed to the Scottish Secretary that upon purchase he had been entirely ignorant of such proposals – a fantastic suggestion which implied not only extreme negligence by his land agents, but also an implausible level of ignorance in Charles Orrock and the ‘leading men’ of Stornoway whose intelligence he had tapped during the lengthy negotiations.

  And by any reasonable definition of the term in England or elsewhere, he had every intention of ‘industrialising’ Lewis. He may not have turned Barvas Moor into the Black Country, but his declared, ineluctable purpose was to increase the population to as many as 200,000. The additional 170,000 would be supported by wage-earners working in chemical plants, fish-processing and jam factories, electricity generators, railway yards, building sites and service industries. When Lord Leverhulme talked – knowledgeably and ahead of his time – of adding value at source to every Hebridean product, he was talking of the industrial processes of refining and preserving and canning.