The Soap Man

by Roger Hutchinson

  All the island’s war losses of the past four years – although these number fully four times the death roll of New Year’s Day morning – are not comparable to this unspeakable calamity. The bleak tragedy has not a redeeming feature. The surrounding circumstances but add to the horror of it.

  Provost Murdo Maclean received telegrams expressing sympathy and shock from the royal family, from the Secretary for War, from the Alness-born Scottish Secretary Robert Munro, from scores of diasporan Leodhasaich, and from Bolton, where the island’s proprietor was opening a Wesleyan bazaar and was moved to notice that the chairman voiced his condolence with the disaster in Lewis. ‘Bolton people,’ telegraphed Lord Leverhulme properly enough, ‘would in any case have felt keenly the sorrow that has overtaken the people of the island of Lewis, but at the present moment, in view of the fact that I am directly connected with the island, they feel a closer intimacy and have the keener sympathy with all those who are weighed down with sorrow.’

  Carloway School on the west side was closed in the following week, not out of prolonged respect for the Iolaire dead, but because the influenza pandemic which would kill millions of people across the world in the winter months of early 1919 had just struck down one of its nine-year-old pupils and an elderly lady in the parish. The boys, the girls and the old people were joining the young men of the Iolaire in the burial grounds of Lewis as the unhappiest of years unfolded. Things could only improve as the days lengthened. They could hardly get any worse.

  Lord Leverhulme arrived in Lewis two weeks after the calamity. He had not been idle in the interim. His donation of £1,000 topped the bill of the Iolaire disaster fund (the second-placed candidate at the recent election, W.D. Mitchell Cotts, followed him with £500). And he was determined to get to work himself and to put the island to work, which this practical man, who was no stranger to bereavement, may have rationalised to himself as the most effective manner of assuaging grief.

  In the few short weeks between the Armistice and the tragedy at Holm Point, Leverhulme had registered two companies whose names were self explanatory: the Stornoway Fish Products and Ice Company Ltd and the Lewis Island Preserved Specialities Company Ltd.

  On Tuesday 21 January he wrote from Lews Castle to his patent expert in Cheshire asking if the prefix ‘Mac’ were available for application to brands of fish, such as ‘MacTurbot’, ‘MacCod’ and ‘MacHerring’. Out of all the projects debated so keenly with friends and advisors, fishing was clearly to have precedence. A visitor to Lews Castle at this time would have observed a curious sight. His Lordship was in the habit of commandeering a downstairs window and placing inside it a can wearing a makeshift label. The label might have been little more than a white background bearing the red message: ‘Lewis Canned Fish’. Leverhulme would then stalk around the outside of the building casting furtive glances at the label from every reasonable distance and angle. He was pretending to be Mrs Mary Smith, as he would explain:

  John Smith has been busy in the office all the week (or so he tells the wife), and late home every night. On Saturday he goes home to lunch. Conscience-stricken he tries to make amends.

  ‘Mary, my dear,’ says he, ‘you’ve had a dreary week of it. What about a show tonight?’

  Poor Mary is overjoyed. What a considerate man is her John! On the way to the theatre they are held up at the corner for a car – the corner where my shop is. The light from the window shows up LEWIS CANNED FISH most attractively. It catches Mary’s eye.

  ‘I say, John, what a lovely label! Lewis Canned Fish. I like the look of it . . . Just a minute . . .

  ‘What is this Lewis Canned Fish?’ she asks.

  ‘Madam,’ says my salesman, ‘it is Lewis Canned Fish and very delightful too.’

  ‘Can you recommend it?’

  ‘Thoroughly, madam. I believe it is the best canned fish in the world.’

  ‘Thank you. Will you please send along a tin?’

  Back from the show Mary is peckish. That can just asks to be opened. They have Lewis Canned Fish for supper. They have never tasted anything so good. They lick their fingers. Nyum nyum!

  Monday morning Mrs Smith is in the back green hanging up the washing. Mrs Brown is over the wall on the right.

  ‘Mrs Brown! Do you know! I made the most wonderful discovery on Saturday!’ And she lets Mrs Brown into the secret. She also tells Mrs Jones on the left. Each buys a can. And so the great news spreads and spreads. Within a year – certainly within two years – there is only one canned fish that counts in the world, and that is Lewis Canned Fish . . .27

  On Wednesday 22 January he addressed a joint session of the Stornoway Pier and Harbour Commission and the Lewis District Committee. As chairman of the former body he faced the familiar retinue of Provost Maclean, ex-provosts Mackenzie and Anderson, estate factor Charles Orrock, the ‘wool manufacturer’ (or tweed baron) Kenneth MacKenzie and several others. What he had to say was not news to them. Earlier in the week he had greased the wheels of this presentation by rehearsing it on at least three of those present. Their responses were therefore preordained.

  He suggested that unless Stornoway ‘takes immediate and prompt action to provide the necessary harbour modernisation required by modern fishing, then far from going forward the town was ‘likely to find itself in a worse position than ever before in its history.’

  The cost of the improvements would leave little change out of £250,000. This formidable sum – perhaps £7 or £8 million today – he proposed should be borrowed by the Pier and Harbour Commission from the government, interest-free and repayable over forty years. The government, he insisted, could hardly refuse, given that a modernised harbour would also be an asset to the Admiralty and that ‘the percentage of the population of the island of Lewis who, at the commencement of the war, voluntarily joined His Majesty’s land and sea forces was believed to be greater than that of any other part of His Majesty’s dominions.’

  This being so, it is felt that the provision of harbours and roads, and later on railways, throughout the island would make it possible for the island to carry a much larger population than at present, and so prove a still greater source of strength should, unhappily, the country at any future date be plunged again into an equally critical period of history and of war.

  Even after the events of early January the concept of Hebrideans being encouraged to multiply as useful cannon-fodder was apparently acceptable to the businessmen of Stornoway. The retired solicitor John Norrie Anderson replied for the Lewis District Committee that he was sure ‘his Lordship was not born in Lancashire but in some part of the island of Lewis . . . Lord Leverhulme’s wonderful brain has gathered up all the ideas that have been trying to fructify in my mind since I was a young man’. Hitting the government for a grant rather than a loan was an inspired suggestion. The District Committee unanimously supported the Pier and Harbour Commission.

  Leverhulme turned then, and for the first time before a public Lewis audience, to his solution to the question of land redistribution which, with the actual and imminent return of those servicemen who had survived, was now pressed urgently upon Lewis and its proprietor. His answer was to move most of them to Stornoway.

  I understand that there are a number of men at present on crofts who, if there were houses in Stornoway, would be desirous of living here. That is, that certain crofters would come to live in Stornoway in houses with allotment gardens attached, and follow the life of fishermen exclusively.

  There are, I believe, at the present moment actual applications for crofts in the island numbering 800. Since my arrival last week I was informed that that was an underestimate and that the number desirous of securing crofts in the island is 1,200, or more. The land available in the island, if government exercised all their powers, according to the government scheme could provide only 131 new crofts. Now it is obvious that if there are 1,200 crofts wanted and only 131 can be provided, only one man in nine can be supplied.

  The question arises: how is this problem t
o be dealt with? It is no solution to give one croft to every ninth man. However fairly the apportionment might be made – and I cannot see any other apportionment fair except that of drawing lots – there will be eight disappointed men. They might recognise that they had been fairly dealt with in the drawing of lots, but there would be eight disappointed men for every one man made happy.

  Now, if there are men who are not happy on their crofts at present, and if I can put up 300 houses in Stornoway – as I shall try to do this year – then there will be a number of men leaving their crofts and coming to follow a fisherman’s life in Stornoway. In this way a certain number of crofts will be vacated, which could be given to men who desire crofts.

  Next year I will build another 300 houses, and the year after another 300, and so on until I have built sufficient houses in Stornoway so that every man in Lewis who wants to live in a house in Stornoway can have a house in Stornoway and every man who wants a croft can have a croft. The only way that this can be realised is by my building houses for those who have crofts and do not want them, and by transfer of their crofts to men who have not crofts and do want them.

  The whole scheme would be facilitated and administered by a welfare society ‘under some such title as The Stornoway Housing and Improvement Association’ which would qualify for government assistance and be underwritten by Leverhulme himself. ‘I should be very glad of the help of anyone wishing to help,’ he concluded to a rising susurrus of assent, ‘for we must make Stornoway the finest city – I think we should aspire to this – the finest city in the north-west of Scotland.’

  Just one of those present chose then to ask a telling question rather than to marvel at the imminent rebirth of Lewis. Councillor Norman Stewart of the District Committee drew from the feudal superior a significant reply to his request for elucidation on the matter of crofting. ‘My ambition is,’ a placatory Lord Leverhulme explained to Councillor Stewart, ‘that every man in Lewis who wants a croft shall have a croft. But he cannot have it near Stornoway.’

  Leverhulme had in this second major philippic once again misrepresented the situation in rural Lewis and, more crucially, mistaken the mood of the island. It was ill-advised of him to believe that in squaring the members of the Lewis District Committee he was satisfying the representatives of all the islanders, or even of the bulk of islanders outside Stornoway. A measure of obstinate naivety was to be found in his slick suggestion that a limitless but undefined number of men who were ‘not happy on crofts’ would voluntarily uproot and move to Stornoway. Any responsible councillor or other representative who was remotely connected with rural Lewis would surely have disillusioned him. Crofters may have been found who would move temporarily to work and even to live in Stornoway. But very few crofters indeed would have relinquished for a fisherman’s pay-packet and an urban allotment all their hard-won tenure on the family acreage and its connected home. For neither the first nor the last time Lord Leverhulme was making no attempt to perceive things as a Hebridean smallholder rather than as a southern industrialist. Projection into the minds of others had never been his strongest point. Asked to decide between a croft at the Butt of Lewis and a ready-made bungalow, garden and salary in Stornoway, he and every single one of his friends, his relatives and apparently his advisers would have fallen headfirst for the address on Matheson Road. Virtually every man and woman in rural Lewis would rather have chosen security of tenure on the windswept plot of turf at Europie. That decision would certainly have been incomprehensible to him. His failure, his great, conclusive failure, was to refuse to recognise its validity.

  His statistics were not entirely wrong; just artfully deployed. By March 1919 the Board of Agriculture had indeed received 1,273 applications for crofts and for the enlargement of crofts in Lewis. They did estimate that only 150 new holdings would be created by their current scheme to break up five farms at Galson in Ness, Gress on the east coast eight miles north of Stornoway, Carnish and Ardroil in Uig, and the single unit of Orinsay and Steimreway in South Lochs.

  But neither the Board of Agriculture nor the returning servicemen of Lewis had any intention of limiting their land claims to five small properties at the extremes of the island. The Board itself estimated that another 254 crofts could almost immediately be created on a handful of other farm holdings, should the proprietor agree.28 And so far as the Leodhasaich were concerned the whole broad island, every square yard of it from Kinlochresort to Skigersta was, in justice and in historical truth, theirs to live and work upon. They had fought for four years against what they had been told was an oppressive autocracy, they had watched their brothers die in the name of freedom and a home fit for heroes. They were unlikely to return to Lewis and meekly accept the injunction of a rich arriviste from Lancashire that they could not have crofts on the good land ‘near Stornoway’.

  A sword was hanging over Lord Leverhulme’s head as, apparently indifferent or oblivious to the threat, he continued to formulate his plans. Early in February, having been instructed that the syllable ‘Mac’ could indeed be applied to families of fish in the commercial arena, he established what would become one of the sturdiest legacies of his Hebridean venture.

  MacFisheries was the perfect incarnation of his plans for Lewis. It would be little more than a chain of British fishmongers. As its name suggested, however, MacFisheries was founded to retail the catches of Scotland in general and Lewis in particular (although Leverhulme sensibly retained a large number of the Lancashire boats working out of Fleetwood to make up any shortfall). It was a characteristically ambitious venture. He simply directed agents to buy for him every suitable high street fish shop in the country. The first such outlet, in Richmond, Surrey, was opened immediately. Within three years, by the end of 1921, there were 360 MacFisheries shops throughout the United Kingdom.29 They were doomed never to be supplied even in small part by a dedicated Hebridean fleet, but they were nonetheless an effective and durable brandname. The chain of stores themselves survived until the late 1960s and the brand itself was revived ‘as a symbol of quality’ in 2000 by a fish processor from the north-east of Scotland. Two generations of urban Britons grew up in the vicinity of a clinically clean and well-stocked MacFisheries, in happy ignorance of its origin as a notional retail outlet for Lord Leverhulme’s island of Lewis.

  The fishmongers inevitably brought with them a variety of other interests and holdings. In the early years of the twentieth century wet-fish shops also specialised in selling sausages. This led Lever Brothers to buy the sausage-making company of Ernest Walls in order to keep their 400 MacFisheries outlets dependably supplied. As there was a traditional decline in the demand for pork products during the summer months, and a simultaneous seasonal increase in the popular call for ice-cream, Walls diversified into ice-cream manufacture, wholesale and retail. As the direct result of its founder establishing a chain of shops to sell fish which would someday be caught and processed by the people of Lewis, Lever Brothers found itself within a couple of years to be one of the biggest meat and confectionery producers in western Europe. The small step into the food industry which had been taken when William Lever’s company entered the margarine business during the Great War had lurched, almost absent-mindedly, into a series of giant strides.

  But in 1919 the men who would catch the fish that would accompany the sausage that would be supplemented seasonally by ice-cream had other ideas.

  A month to the day after the incorporation of MacFisheries, on Monday 10 March, the House of Commons found itself debating the Highland land issue. It would have been familiar territory for any surviving member from the 1880s, for they were doing so in the immediate wake of a series of Hebridean raids.

  The servicemen were not only returning to Lewis. All over the Highlands and the Hebrides in the early months of 1919 demobilised soldiers and sailors carried their kit-bags for a last time back along the narrow roads and rough cart-tracks to their townships, and once the celebrations had eased all over the Highlands and Hebrides young men b
egan to ask aloud what they had been fighting for. They were armed with a sense of justice, and many of them were also armed with unrelinquished rifles and revolvers. A series of land raids recommenced which would continue throughout the region into the 1920s.

  The southern isles of Dr Donald Murray’s new constituency consisted of North and South Uist, Benbecula, Barra and some smaller satellites. South Uist and Barra had been for eighty years part of the domain of the Gordon Cathcart family of landowners from Aberdeenshire. Their current mistress was the last in the line, Lady Gordon Cathcart. This proprietress shared her late husband’s view of crofting and crofters. Colonel John Gordon had once proposed to the government that his Hebridean islands should be depopulated and turned into a penal colony. The Board of Agriculture had taken a more liberal interest in the Uists and had proposed that – as in Lewis – a few farms should be broken up to meet the demand for crofting land. When (to nobody’s real surprise, given Lady Gordon Cathcart’s long history of contemptuous refusal to countenance anything beneficial to her crofting tenantry) this failed to occur, and when the men returned, there was a reckoning to be made.

  The bill was first presented at Glendale, an isolated district at the southern tip of South Uist. When the farm lease there expired in 1918 local people were given to understand that the Board of Agriculture was considering allocating it to crofting. It shelved the proposal. Glendale Farm was consequently raided, staked out and squatted. Several Uist men were arrested and were still being held in custody when their Member of Parliament Donald Murray got to his feet for Scottish Questions to the Secretary of State in the House of Commons on 10 March 1919.