The Soap Man

by Roger Hutchinson

  ‘The people for whom I plead,’ he said, ‘are deserving of the help and sympathy of the House.’ Dr Murray was, he continued, confident that the heart of Scottish Secretary Robert Munro was in the right place:

  We also want his actions to be in the right place. I would like honourable members to see the Secretary for Scotland bristling with thistles and flourishing a claymore in defence of the rights of his fellow countrymen. The men of the Highlands and Islands are coming back in their hundreds, and land has been promised them. They want to know when these promises are going to be honoured.

  When the war was over these matters were going to be settled, but so far as the people see the Board of Agriculture is doing nothing to redeem their promises about dividing some of the estates. In my constituency there have been for years 2,000 applications for smallholdings and in Skye 400 more. The first stone of the foundation for reconstruction in the Highlands and Islands is the settlement of the land question.

  Turning finally to the plight of the imprisoned South Uist men, Dr Murray concluded: ‘I warn the Secretary of State that if something is not immediately done to release these men it will light a fire in the Highlands and Islands that will not be put out.’

  Robert Munro replied with unconcealed sympathy. The case of the Glendale raiders was sub judice, he said, and out of his hands – ‘I cannot do more in the circumstances than express the hope that even at the eleventh hour some solution might be found which will prevent sentence being imposed upon these men.’

  On the broader subject of land settlement, Munro urged patience.

  It should not be forgotten that the system of [allocating] smallholdings was slowed down on both sides of the border during the war . . . Many pre-war schemes had been in contemplation with regard to Lewis, but all of them had necessarily been held up by the war.

  Since then a new development has occurred. The island has been purchased by Lord Leverhulme, who has a number of well-conceived and well-directed schemes in contemplation which would neither sap the independence nor affront the pride of the Lewis people . . .

  Privately Robert Munro, as he and his officials had already begun to make clear to Leverhulme, was deeply sceptical about the plutocrat’s ability to make good on all of his promises and extremely nervous about his relationship with would-be crofters. On 10 March 1919 they had good reason to be nervous, for three farms on the east coast of Lewis had just been raided as Messrs Murray and Munro addressed the House of Commons.

  The raids came in quick succession, at Tong, Gress and Coll. Murray would have been aware of the disturbances when he spoke of an unquenchable fire being lit in the Highlands and Islands, as would Munro when he replied so cautiously. Both of them were in receipt of a warning letter from a group of ex-servicemen which had been posted to Munro and copied to Murray and Lloyd George. It read:

  We thought it necessary to inform you of our firmly Determination concerning small holdings in the Island of Lewis. Shortly there is going to be a Lawful or Illegal action to be taken by us regarding Coll Farm. Of course we would rather have it lawful but time and space can’t allow us to wait any further, and we are determined to take it by force, without Delay to Fulfil the promise granted by the Government to Demobilised soldiers and sailors, the land ought to be in wait for us we are anxious to know where does the Obstacle Lay’s as we are in wait on the land.

  As propritors are not willingly to give us land suitable for Cultivation we inform you that there isn’t a landlord or even a Duke in the British Isles that will keep the land from us, that has been promised to us by the Primier and the Country at Large without bloodshed. As it is in your power we sincerely hope that you will grant and fulfill the promise made by the Government and at the same time giving us our wish and saving us from any trouble that’s liable to come round concerning small holdings.

  We desire every farm great or small to be cut down as long as there is any of us without a piece of Land able to call his own with Fair Fixity of Tenure and compensation for improvements . . .

  The men who wrote that letter and the Leodhasaich who marked out lots for crofts on those east coast cattle grazings early in March were aware of the fact that they were not acting alone – that in Uist and in Skye and all over the rest of the crofting counties men were demonstrating their lack of patience with the prevarications of landowners and the sluggishness of the Board of Agriculture. Several accounts of what happened in Lewis and Harris over the succeeding five years have attempted to isolate the men who did the raiding from the – supposedly submissive – bulk of the community. But from the very beginning those men were conscious not only of being a present part and the future hope of their own communities, but also of being strong components in a legitimate and justified revival of the entire Highland land movement – a revival which had the support not only of their neighbours and relatives, but also of the bulk of Highland MPs and, it was rumoured, the Scottish Secretary himself. Robert Munro was presiding over a country which just four weeks earlier had seen British army tanks deployed in the centre of Glasgow to discourage urban proletarian unrest led by the returned servicemen of the lowland cities. He was more anxious than most to ensure that his fellow Highlanders remained confident in and faithful to the law of the land. If that meant irritating a few shortsighted landowners, Munro was prepared to be an irritant. Following one set of raids which drove the proprietor to issue furious threats, the Scottish Secretary took Leverhulme’s good friend Sir Herbert Morgan to one side. ‘Tell Lord Leverhulme that he may interdict these men,’ he advised, ‘and the judge may send them to prison. But I have the power to release them the same day.’

  The choice of targets for the March 1919 land raids in Lewis was significant. If any potential crofting land in the island could be described as belonging to that zone ‘near Stornoway’, which in January had been declared out of bounds by Lord Leverhulme, it was the littoral at Tong, Coll and Gress. More than that, it was good land. A rare strip of east-coast Hebridean machair unfurled northwards from the head of Loch a Tuath, or Broad Bay, to the Traigh Mhor at Tolsta. It was a gentle, undulating seaboard, running down to dunes and white sand by the shore and rolling back for miles until the reclaimed green turf met the primordial heather and brown peatbog of Barvas Moor. Its unusual fertility was partly created by nature’s introduction of shoreline sand to the acid soil, and partly by generations of men who had followed and improved upon nature’s example. This patch of coast had traditionally been home to a good percentage of the population of Lewis. It was desirable property.

  Tong Farm stood three miles by road and one mile across the loch from Stornoway. Coll was a stone’s throw away at the other side of the bay from Tong, and Gress was ten minutes’ walk from Coll. The small farm at Tong was pointedly staked out into 30 acres of crofting lots. The farmers’ stock was driven away from Gress and replaced by crofters’ animals, and some potatoes were planted in newly turned earth. At Coll men and women pegged out the rectangles of notional new crofts, dug the ground and carried fertilising seaweed up from the shore. Nobody was hurt – as the tenant farmers sensibly stood back, nobody was even threatened – and no arrests were made.

  Instead Lord Leverhulme arrived. He might have seen the action, with or without a telescope, had he chosen to look from an upper window of Lews Castle. On Tuesday 11 March, the day after the debate in the House of Commons, he engaged in a debate of his own with some of the people of rural Lewis. The schoolmaster at Back, which lay between Coll and Gress, was requested to make free his schoolroom and to preside over a meeting of the two camps.

  Leverhulme did most of the talking to a politely sceptical gathering. He commenced as usual by expressing his gratitude to ‘every class in the island’ for the warmth of their welcome. But not until he assured them that he would ‘try to fulfil the reasonable and proper demands of every person living in the island of Lewis’ did he elicit a round of applause.

  He then proceeded as though delivering to Mr Morrison’s ten-year-o
lds firstly a civics lesson and then (aiming presumably at the weavers of tweed in his audience) a class in basic tailoring. Lord Leverhulme had determined that the source of the difficulty lay in the supposed estrangement of Stornoway from the rest of Lewis. People in all countries, he insisted, ‘divide into two sections – those who live in towns and those who live in the country.’ He went on:

  I have sometimes met people living in the country who thought that the welfare and well-being of dwellers in the towns did not concern them, and on the other hand, I have met people living in towns who thought the welfare of those living in the country does not concern them.

  This is of course a fallacy, for the town depends on the country and the country on the town, and every man living in the island of Lewis will find that his penny will buy more of the goods he requires for himself and his family if Stornoway, as the centre of the whole island, provided with proper harbour facilities and a well-balanced population, is made prosperous and successful. Whatever injures those living in the country will be felt by those living in the towns, and whatever injures those living in the towns will be felt equally and ultimately by those living in the country.

  These words appear to have been met by silence from the assembly in Back school. He needed quickly to play to the gallery, and he did so by moving sharply onto garmentry, expressing ‘my desire to see that every man in the island who wishes to live on a croft in the country districts shall have his desire . . . We cannot all wear coats of the same size and we do not all wish for coats of the same pattern . . . But while that is true we must cut our coat according to our cloth, and before any of us can have a coat we must see that there is cloth to cut.’

  Lord Leverhulme then repeated his 1,200-applications-into-143-crofts-does-not-go equation. But even as he spoke, he said, ‘a very large firm of contractors are now landing from steamers at Stornoway the materials for the first instalment of 300 houses. These houses will go up as quickly as material and labour can be obtained. When these houses are erected and all occupied I will build another 300.’

  He had, said Leverhulme, enquired into the income made from crofting in Lewis. ‘I understand the government officials when assessing for old age pensions take the income that can be earned on a croft at 8 shillings a week . . . we might take 12 shillings as being pretty near the mark. Some of those who have applied to me personally for houses at Stornoway told me they were tired of the drudgery connected with crofting, and they would prefer to make £2 or £3 a week at fishing than work on a croft for 12 shillings.’

  Lord Leverhulme then broached the heart of the matter: what would become the chief rationale for his insistence on preventing the spread of crofting ‘near Stornoway’. The Lewis Food Control Committee had written to advise him of a shortage of the milk supply to Stornoway. As things stood milk had to be imported from the mainland to the town. How, he wondered, was an expanded borough to cope?

  This is a very serious question for people living in town, for it is absolutely necessary that young children should have milk, and it also affects the invalided and the weak . . . As I am taking land for the building of the new houses from the Manor farm and Goathill, that will obviously decrease the supply of milk while increasing the demand, and therefore I propose to put all the cattle I can on Gress and other farms within motor distance of Stornoway so that the supply produced there can be brought in to meet the needs of the people.

  Someone has said to me, [appealing to his earlier theme and to the charity of his listeners], that the country districts have nothing to do with the milk supply of Stornoway. I will never believe that there can be a schism between the people of the country and the people of the town.

  Suppose you say you do not care what becomes of Stornoway – let the children of the town die or grow up weak saplings for the want of a proper milk supply – and suppose you take all the farms that are available for holdings. What then? You will have 143 new crofts, and that number is not sufficient for yourselves, and where are you going to get crofts for your children and grandchildren working on the same lines? The problem that has been in Lewis for 100 years will be here 100 years hence in an aggravated form . . .

  All my life, I have worked with people and not against them. You might think I am working against you in this matter. I am not, and I feel certain that if my scheme is given a fair trial you will see it is you that have been working against yourselves. If you will not have confidence in me and trust me, I can do nothing . . . It is my sincere intention to do all in my power to see that, as far as the cloth will go and as far as patterns can be made, every man and woman in the island of Lewis will have what they desire for the full development of a happy and comfortable life.

  Having accused the people of Back, Coll and Gress of selfish indifference to the malnutrition of Stornoway infants he stood back to polite applause. When responses from the floor were requested a young man from nearby Vatisker spoke up. John MacLeod said that before the war he had been prevented by Colonel Matheson’s estate authorities from erecting as a dwelling for himself an extension to his father’s home. As a result of this prohibition John MacLeod had been forced to cut four inches off his bed to squeeze it into the small corner of the family home that was available to him. When war was declared, John MacLeod of Vatisker had been the first man from his district called into uniform.

  Now he was back, and he had no ambitions towards a cottage in Stornoway and a comfortable salary. ‘I want,’ said John MacLeod, ‘a holding on Gress and a house for myself.’

  While Lord Leverhulme drew the meeting at Back to a close by requesting a list of those in need of crofts, a young official from the Board of Agriculture was making his way across the Minch from Kyle of Lochalsh to Stornoway. Colin Macdonald was a 37-year-old Gaelic speaker who had been brought up on a croft in Strathpeffer in mainland Ross-shire. He was, in common with most Board employees, both sympathetic to the crofters’ cause and fully aware of the strength of their feelings. He was nervous as he boarded the Sheila at the railway pier at Kyle. Macdonald had been in the far north of the Scottish mainland when he read in The Scotsman of the raids at Tong, Gress and Coll. ‘With a shrewd instinct for self-preservation,’ he would joke, ‘I tried [then] to get officially “lost” in the wilds of Sutherlandshire. But a rascal of a telegraph operator – a really bright lad – proved too efficient. With untiring tenacity he tracked me to my hidey-hole to deliver the inevitable yellow envelope which contained the curt instruction to proceed to Lewis immediately!’30

  Macdonald walked down the gangway at Stornoway pier into a ‘highly charged’ atmosphere.

  Many of those on the pier were old friends and soon I was generally spotted as ‘the man from the Board’. Questioners in Gaelic and English demanded to know what the Board were going to do . . . The lads had been led to believe that crofts would be ready for them. Not only were there no crofts ready, but with a hostile proprietor, and a hesitant government, their prospects of being settled on the land were anything but bright. Disappointment, succeeded by intense anger, surged through the island.

  Colin Macdonald was thoroughly acquainted with the Hebrides but had never previously met Lord Leverhulme. The proprietor wasted no time before introducing himself to the man from the Board in the second week of March 1919. The Strathpeffer man would find it an unforgettable encounter, and not only because ‘he was my first millionaire and Industrial Magnate’.

  At very first glance one would put him down as a rather insignificant little fellow. That impression lasted for a shorter time than it takes to write it. Charm, tact, decision, power radiated from the man’s every word, look and gesture.

  I had never met a man who was so obviously a megalomaniac and accustomed to having his own way. He had the sort of personality which immediately afflicts ordinary people with a pronounced inferiority complex.

  Colin Macdonald was quickly educated in Leverhulme’s obdurate refusal to be contradicted or denied. The two men had hardly shaken hands when the proprietor
told the man from the Board that – to follow what he perceived to have been a successful debate in the school at Back – he had arranged an open-air meeting with land raiders on the bridge at Gress at 11.00 on the following morning, 12 March. He would like Macdonald to accompany him there. Colin Macdonald had no intention of going to the meeting, and certainly not of attending in the company of Lord Leverhulme. In the whole of the following six weeks he would be given no instructions whatsoever from the Board of Agriculture or from any other branch of government as to what his mission was on the island in that spring of 1919. His own reasonable assessment of his role was to work evenly in the background, collecting information and gauging the public mood. This task was unlikely to be accomplished by sharing a public platform with the proprietor.

  So Colin Macdonald told Lord Leverhulme that he had no desire to go to Gress on the following morning. ‘But he pressed that I should go. I would not go. “Pity,” said he, making for the door, “but I hope you will change your mind. Goodbye.” ’

  Within three hours Macdonald received a telegram from his employers at the Board of Agriculture ordering him to attend the open-air meeting at Gress. No sooner had he finished reading the telegram than a grinning Leverhulme reappeared in the doorway.

  ‘Have you changed your mind?’ he asked.

  ‘I have,’ said Macdonald.

  ‘Good. I thought you would.’

  Colin Macdonald managed to resist travelling out of Stornoway with the landlord’s entourage on the morning of Wednesday 12 March. He attended on the ground. Over 1,000 people, mostly men but with a ‘fair smattering’ of women, waited for Lord Leverhulme on the broad, rolling machair where the Gress River swept quietly down to the dunes and the sea. It was, judged Macdonald, a sullen, resentful crowd which would have been ignited by the smallest spark.

  William, Lord Leverhulme may not have understood the Leodhasaich, but he understood massed gatherings of irascible workers. With his Gaelic-to-English interpreter at his side he walked straight into the middle of them, made a circular clearing like a primitive boxing ring among the curious faces, and stood up on top of one of the Gress farmer Peter Liddle’s home-made beer barrels. His oration began immediately. As though adapting to his changed environment, his schoolmasterly adjurations of the previous day at Back were lost and forgotten. He addressed the hungry crowd at Gress at once like a politician on the stump and a snake-oil salesman before a hanging magistrate. Colin Macdonald has left to us the most vivid of all of the portraits of Leverhulme at large in Lewis. He began: