The Soap Man

by Roger Hutchinson

  With his aspirations I expressed the most cordial sympathy and approval. I am satisfied his Lordship . . . has taken up the Lewis problem with the intention of solving it, and he has the energy and resolve to carry his plans to completion. He has great admiration for the Lewis people, who have done such great and noble service for the country in the war, and I think feels he should do what he can for them.

  However, his whole life has been industrial, and I question if his experience of three months among the Lewis people has taught him their sentiments or desires. He does not realise that they will never feel satisfied until the farms in Lewis are divided into holdings and given to them . . . What the Lewis man wants is a small piece of land for a house site, two cows grazing and potato and corn growing. That is his ideal and it cannot be eradicated . . .

  Wilson’s troubled presentiment would have been reinforced when he heard from Colin Macdonald in the March of 1919 that ‘it had been rumoured throughout the island that the Board intended to abandon their Lewis schemes to give Lord Leverhulme a free hand, and that the men, including demobilised soldiers and sailors, had made the [Gress] raid as a protest in favour of breaking up the farms into smallholdings.’33

  Macdonald, an ardent if diplomatic supporter of land redistribution, disliked intensely being on the front line of such a conflict with no apparent resolution. He felt ‘an awful ass’ at being unable to offer an officially sanctioned solution to the problems thrown at him daily by all parties. ‘Would the Board back Lord Leverhulme in his industrial schemes – which ruled out the prospect of any additional crofts – or would they use the power they had to provide crofts for the returned soldiers and sailors? It was an answer to that question which was demanded of me by emissaries of both sides who came in force to see me . . . Easier asked than answered!’

  The Scottish Secretary Robert Munro would confess to Nigel Nicolson when they met at a banquet thirty-five years later that he had only once, and briefly, given Leverhulme the benefit of his own doubts – but that any substantial concession of the land issue to the proprietor remained ‘politically impossible’ throughout. Not only was the House of Commons in favour of crofting resettlement, but the ‘deeper family loyalties’ of the people of Lewis meant that every time a raid occurred they stood quietly but solidly behind the raiders.34

  In the meantime, as his contribution to the parliamentary debate of 10 March had suggested, he tried to ameliorate, to keep Lord Leverhulme flattered and interested in pouring millions into Stornoway, and to keep his officials working towards a land resettlement programme in rural Lewis which would satisfy both camps. It was a thankless task. It proved unsustainable only because Leverhulme himself was, as he freely admitted, unwilling rather than unable to compromise.

  There followed another uneasy peace. The farms at Coll and Gress remained half-occupied throughout the summer of 1919 and the Board of Agriculture warned of imminent raids at Galson in the Ness district and Carnish and Reef in Uig. Housing began to be built in Stornoway and both a cannery and an ice-factory were raised down by the harbour.

  There had long been a peculiar anomaly in the infrastructure of Lewis. There was no direct public road along the east coast between Tolsta and Port of Ness. Lord Leverhulme announced that he would build one – or rather, that he would provide the materials and the wages, and the men of the east coast machair lands would build one. It seemed a neat, if unoriginal, temporary solution. The restless men of Back would be given something to fill their days; they would hopefully realize the delights of a wage economy; and a measure of public good would be achieved. Hiring commenced.

  And Colin Macdonald was invited to dinner at Lews Castle.

  6

  WITH ME OR AGAINST ME

  Lord Leverhulme’s charm offensive on the island did not stop at Gress bridge and the school at Back. Within hours of his arrival in Stornoway in March 1919 the Board of Agriculture’s Colin Macdonald was warned by his old friend Duncan MacKenzie of the Royal Hotel that he would ‘be at a dinner at the Castle within a week’.

  And he was. Leverhulme intended to enjoy himself in Lewis, and the nature of enjoyment – he had been assured – required more of him than endless meetings and planning and bookwork. He must also go through the motions of relaxation and conviviality. This would not come naturally. His niece, Emily Paul, recalled:

  He never took a holiday in the ordinary sense of the word, and kept to a routine of work even in the island, but the fresh air and numerous drives to inspect new roads, bridges, houses etc must have been of great benefit to him.

  He lived very simply wherever he was, and never smoked. He had a tremendous amount of energy and was up at 4.30 every morning, getting a considerable amount of work done before his breakfast, which was served at 7.30 or 8 o’clock.

  When in the island he used to take a walk after tea with one or more of his relatives or friends whenever he could spare the time and if the weather was favourable, and on Sunday he went with them to the United Free Presbyterian Church. Should we be dancing on any of the other evenings in the week, he would often join us in the ballroom, entering into both the Highland and the modern dances with zeal and enjoyment. When bed-time came he would run up the stairs two at a time to show us all how young and vigorous he felt.35

  He threw house parties, where humble functionaries of the local authorities would mingle freely with his glittering guests from the outside world. They could be thirsty affairs. In the first couple of years the teetotal Leverhulme often had to be reminded to pass round the whisky bottle. In 1921 the island of Lewis voted for the prohibition of retail alcohol. This local by-law was agreed upon two years after Andrew Volstead’s National Prohibition Act had been enforced across all of the United States. It was not an unusual measure, at the time or later, in the Protestant Celtic fringes of the United Kingdom, and its reverberations would be felt in some of the draconian decisions of the Western Isles licensing authorities throughout the rest of the century. Unlike the Volstead Act, prohibition in Lewis was necessarily an isolated affair. Not only did it take place within a country – within, indeed, a county – where the purchase and consumption of retailed alcohol was in other districts still legal, but its strictures in practice applied almost exclusively to Stornoway, as there were no public bars elsewhere in the island. Only smaller units of strong drink were banned. It remained legal to buy wholesale quantities, such as cases of whisky and casks of beer. This loophole was intended to alleviate the suffering of large hotels (which were permitted to serve drinks with meals to guests) and of the bigger private houses. In practice it gave a new lease of life to the rural village bothan, or shebeen, in Lewis. In many communities a crude but largely weatherproof building was set aside as a drinking den. The men (and it was always men) would contribute to a kitty, wholesale cases and casks would be – perfectly legally – imported, and the bothan would thereafter serve as a private club. This arrangement proved so congenial to the communitarian crofting townships (wholesale alcohol was, after all, cheaper by far than anything bought at a bar or from a shop) that in some cases the shebeen long survived the repeal of prohibition and for decades staved off the introduction of properly licensed commercial premises. In Ness a working bothan survived as a viable alternative to a public bar for more than half a century after 1921, and it was finally put out of business not by a public house but by another community venture: a newly-built social club run by and for the benefit of the local football team.

  There was of course no need for Lord Leverhulme to observe prohibition inside the walls of Lews Castle. He decided to do so because he agreed with the principles of prohibition and because he did not wish to offend the parish elders. Before 1921, therefore, drink was sparingly poured at his occasions. After 1921 they became more sober affairs.

  He had knocked the castle drawing-room and ballroom into one large entertainment area. Guests would be piped into dinner by Pipe-Major Donald MacLeod ‘in full regimentals’ – an experience in an enclosed space which
young Miss Paul found too ear-shattering for proper appreciation. The entertainment was, in Edwardian fashion, chiefly musical. Pipe-Major MacLeod having discharged his duties and gone away, the stage was prepared for more palatable diversions.

  Like many a businessman of his kind, Leverhulme had a fondness for the company of show people. He attempted in Lewis to give this preference a Scottish tone. His visitors from the south became a bizarre melange of the worthy and the baroque of his generation. One after another a succession of septuagenarian celebrities were met off the Sheila and hurried up to Lews Castle. The Manx novelist Hall Caine swept down the corridors in voluminous cloak and hat, pronouncing on the links between his popular romances of the Isle of Man and the Gaelic culture of Lewis. That recently-retired ornament of the late-Victorian and Edwardian stage, Miss Olga Nethersole, was chased by cattle in Uig after her bright yellow skirt reportedly annoyed the beasts. The artists David Murray, Luke Fildes and Raffles Davidson took their palettes and paints out to the hinterlands. Charles Coborn, the ‘cockney’ music-hall performer who had been born into a Scottish family and christened Colin MacCallum, attempted a rendition in Gaelic of the chorus of his international hit ‘The Man Who Broke The Bank At Monte Carlo’.

  It was a predictable guest-list, imitable down through the decades by any other self-made millionaire with a new country property. Two of its number do, perhaps, shed some light on Lord Leverhulme’s perception of and relationship with the Gaels of the Hebrides. Sir Harry Lauder was popular at the castle. (Although possibly not quite so much as his wife Anne, a lively and unpretentious Lothian girl who would insist upon leading the household in song at the dinner table.) Sir Harry Lauder was popular everywhere. The Edinburgh-born former coalminer had become by 1919 – when he was knighted – the biggest entertainer in Britain. Sir Harry had not lost all of his colliery education: before leaving for a day’s fishing he would ostentatiously prepare his own sandwiches, giving them to a servant only to wrap and place in his bag. And the songsmith Marjory Kennedy-Fraser sang her collection of Hebridean ditties to the enthralled gathering, accompanied on the clarsach by her daughter Patuffa.

  Lauder and Kennedy-Fraser had much in common. They had each made their names, and a great deal of their money, by the travesty of Scottish Gaelic culture. Marjory Kennedy-Fraser had been travelling about the Highlands and Islands since the last decades of the nineteenth century. A trained musician but not a Gaelic-speaker, her stock-in-trade was to note the gist of some refrain or snatch of music overheard in the Gaidhealtachd and then to represent it as a commercially attractive English-language lullaby or love-song. The result was as authentic as Ossian, and equally popular. Kennedy-Fraser’s collections of ‘Songs of the Hebrides’ swept the land. Upon first hearing ‘An Eriskay Love Lilt’, ‘Skye Water-Kelpie’s Lullaby’ and the ‘Uist Cattle Croon’ the celebrated music critic Ernest Newman wrote that ‘Schubert and Hugo Wolf would have knelt and kissed the hands of their unknown composers’. Schubert may well have paid homage to the unknown composers of true Hebridean music; his opinion of Mrs Kennedy-Fraser’s saccharine confections must remain speculative. But for Lord Leverhulme’s generation and for many who came later, the ‘Islay Reaper’s Song’ and ‘Aignish on the Machair’ were not just the most acceptable face of Scottish Gaelic culture – and the veritable acme of that culture – they were the only version of Gaelic creativity accessible to polite society.

  Harry Lauder’s deception was less devious. He made a fortune all over the English-speaking world by hoisting his tiny frame dressed as a drunken, absurdly-kilted ‘Highlander’ onto a music hall stage, pattering off a stream of lowland jokes about Anguses, Murdos and Donalds and singing songs like ‘Roamin’ in the Gloamin’, ‘A Wee Deoch an Doris’ and ‘StopYour Tickling, Jock’.

  There was nothing sinister about Leverhulme’s courtship of Kennedy-Fraser and Lauder, but something vaguely sad. Having bought for himself the heartland of the Gaelic language and become the feudal superior of tens of thousands of men and women who wore one of the oldest living cultures in Europe like a second layer of skin, he chose to import as his companions two people whose interest in that culture was exploitative and flawed. It may be frivolous to suggest that such company affected his business plans, but it would be foolish to imagine that Lauder’s jokes and Kennedy-Fraser’s tunes did not influence and simplify his view of the Leodhasaich.

  His relationship with Lauder certainly spilled over into the Stornoway business community. The two men sallied out together to open the town’s new bowling green in July 1922, Lauder in full stage regalia from his Glengarry to the sgian dhubh stuck in his sock, Leverhulme more conservatively clad in homburg and tweed plus-fours, the two small men like a pair of exotic gnomes beside the (far from lanky) form of Roderick Smith. In the same summer their shared freemasonry took them to Lodge Fortrose in Stornoway. Leverhulme had by then become the Grand Senior Warden of the Grand Lodge of England. On 14 July 1922 more than 100 Stornoway brethren heard Brother Lord Leverhulme, flanked by Brother Sir Harry Lauder, suggest that Lodge Fortrose could become ‘the driving force’ behind his plans for the rebuilding of Stornoway. The Emblems of the Craft which taught Morality, he said, ‘could well be used practically for the benefit of the community. The brethren as Masons could be a powerful influence. Why should we not have a better Stornoway, and produce out of a tangle of relatively mean streets a fine city which would be the Venice of the Western Isles and an inspiration to the whole of the West . . . the inspiration could come from Lodge Fortrose.’36

  Such dalliances were inevitable. Money found it easier to dine with money. The pity was not in his cheerful enjoyment of ‘A Wee Deoch an Doris’ and the ‘Water Kelpie’s Lullaby’. The pity was that on the doorstep of Lews Castle a few thousand others, not least his adopted man from the Board Colin Macdonald, knew all of the words of ‘Eilean an Fhraoich’ but would never be asked to interpret them.

  Macdonald was invited to a soirée at the big house on the evening of the drama at Gress. He enjoyed his party at the castle, once he had learned to jog his Lordship’s pouring arm (‘I am so sorry . . . the tiniest drop of whisky . . . would make me witless, my thinking would be confused. I cannot afford to let my thoughts get confused . . . But please, please . . .’). Macdonald was not a house guest: he would not join the groups which gathered in the castle yard the following morning to tumble into estate vehicles and be driven with their rods and hampers to some west coast lodge and salmon run. He was there for a purpose. But before the main course came the petit fours. Songs were sung and dances were danced, and the young girls pleaded for a turn from their host: ‘Lord Leverhulme for the bathing song! Lord Leverhulme for the bathing song!’

  At first the great man demurred, refusing to offer ‘that dreadful song’ and leaving debutant guests such as Colin Macdonald wondering what on earth it was. Then he relented. He could not sing, but Lester Keith’s risqué (it ‘would make an Irish navvy blush,’ considered Macdonald) prewar hit ‘The Bathing Song’ was tailored more for lusty recitation. Effectively, he rapped it:

  A sweet little peach from Manhattan Beach

  Was strolling upon the sand,

  And met a young sport from jolly Newport

  Who thought she was perfectly grand

  She murmured to him, ‘I’d go take a swim,

  But I am engaged to be wed,

  Though it’s very warm, it’s very bad form.’

  ‘Yours looks good to me,’ he said

  She answered right away, ‘To Ma I used to say:

  ‘Mother may I go out to swim?’

  ‘Yes my darling daughter,

  Hang your clothes on a hickory limb,

  But don’t go near the water.

  You may look cute in your bathing suit,

  But act just as you oughter,

  Now and then you can flirt with the men,

  But don’t go near the water.

  ‘The Bathing Song’ was the musical equivalent of the gags he kept writ
ten down on pieces of paper in his waistcoat pocket. He followed it with a Lancashire dialect anecdote, gracefully acknowledged the applause, took Colin Macdonald’s arm in a steely grip and escorted him to a quiet corner of the room.

  ‘I should like to know,’ said Leverhulme, gazing intently at Macdonald, ‘exactly how I stand with you. Are you for me or against me?’

  ‘You mean,’ said Macdonald, gathering his wits, ‘do I think the Board will be with you or against your schemes?’

  ‘Put it that way if you like, but please, please do not be evasive. You know, and you know that I know that the Board will be largely guided by you in this matter. Are-you-with-me-or-against-me?’

  ‘I do not yet know. I have not made up my mind. I see both sides. You see only one. Tell me this. You said today at the meeting that you had arranged to spend five million pounds on your developments here. I cannot quite grasp what even one million means, but at least I have an idea that five million pounds is a lot of money. Do you expect to get a return from that expenditure – and how?’

  Leverhulme looked horrified. ‘I am not a philanthropist in this matter! I would not put a penny into this venture if I did not see that it would be a commercial success. Never have I seen the successful end of a venture so clearly as I do now. Not that I require – or desire – to make more money for myself. I am never sure on a given day just what I am worth in money, but last time my accountant reported to me it was in the neighbourhood of eighteen million pounds. In any case I have more money than I can possibly require. But I derive my greatest pleasure in life from business ventures which call for thought and vision. That is a great game: the creation of wealth – and thereby providing steady work and good wages for thousands of people.’