The Soap Man

by Roger Hutchinson

  ‘I can understand that,’ said Macdonald, ‘but what on earth is there in this rather barren island that offers economic scope for so huge a capital expenditure?’

  ‘You appear to be intelligent. You probably are. But vision is also required here. You know this island. Did you know that, if you take a map, fix one leg of a pair of compasses in the town of Stornoway and describe a circle of a hundred miles radius, within that circle you have the richest fishing grounds in the whole world?’

  ‘No. I did not.’ Macdonald’s scepticism was well placed. The fishing grounds of the Minch and the North Atlantic continental shelf were – at that time – good, but they were far from being the richest in the world.

  ‘Quite,’ continued Leverhulme. ‘Well, you have. That is a very important fact. Fish is a valuable human food. That is also important. How can I link up these terminal facts? I shall create the necessary connecting links so that I have a chain leading from the bed of the Minch to the breakfast tables of the world. First I must catch my fish. I shall soon have the best and the best-equipped fishing fleet the world has ever seen.

  ‘My fish must be conveyed quickly to the railheads. I shall have a fleet of fast carrier boats for that. I am in process of acquiring so substantial a block of railway company shares that there will be no danger of my fish rotting at the sidings.

  ‘I am getting on. But am I going to incur all this expense and risk, and then allow another fellow to reap the reward? No. I have already purchased most of the biggest retail fish shops in the big consuming centres. My fish will be sold in my shops. But I shall catch more fish than I can sell fresh. Well, I shall can the surplus . . . Canned fish is like whisky: the longer you keep it (up to a point) the better it gets. When my first cure is properly matured I send a consignment to my principal corner shops with instructions to make a good window display on the Saturday . . .’

  ‘He had all but mesmerised me,’ recalled Colin Macdonald ‘He was as an evangelist preaching the gospel . . . It needed a real effort to hang on to the one thing I knew to be true – namely, that nothing at that time could effectively stand between the returned Lewis soldiers and sailors and their land.’ Macdonald pulled himself together.

  ‘Lord Leverhulme,’ he said, ‘however much you may convince me . . . it would but mislead you if I said I thought you could convince Lewis men . . . Certainly nothing you can promise them will induce them to drop their demands for crofts. But surely there is a middle way. The retention of the large farms is not essential to the success of your schemes.’

  Leverhulme’s reply was curt. ‘I need them for the production of milk for supplying the greatly increased population which will be one of the direct results of my schemes.’

  ‘You can import milk from the mainland. That is being done now – and better and cheaper milk than you can produce in Lewis.’

  ‘My agricultural expert advises me I must have the farms. In this matter I must be guided by him.’

  ‘I do not question the ability of your agricultural expert to advise you – in England. But with respect, Lewis is not England.’

  ‘But I must have control of my factory hands. How can I have that in the case of men who are in the independent position of crofters?’

  Colin Macdonald seems instantly to have realised the significance of the last two sentences. ‘That is just the point,’ he said. ‘That is what was made so clear at the meeting today. These men will not tolerate being subject to your whim or charity. But if you initiate friendly relationships by giving them crofts you will have no lack of men willing to work in your factories. By opposing their desire you will but stimulate their opposition and in the end they will beat you. In one word my advice is: compromise.’

  There was no possibility of that. Leverhulme ‘reiterated again and again: “I will not compromise. I must control.”’

  ‘Then,’ said Macdonald, ‘I am afraid you are only at the beginning of your troubles.’

  The party was almost over.

  On the west coast in Shawbost the seven-year-old Calum Smith saw his father return home from the war in May 1919. Murdo Smith began immediately to work the croft, building a flock of sheep to accompany the milk-cow and horse, digging a cart-track to a previously inaccessible lower pasture and planting oats, potatoes and barley. He did so although he knew that his family’s days at Shawbost were numbered. Murdo himself came from nearby Bragar. As a younger of six sons he was not set to inherit the tenancy of his father’s croft. So when he married he moved onto his wife’s croft. She was the younger of two daughters. Upon her father’s death her older sister was bequeathed the croft. The older sister’s husband, John Macaulay, had also now returned from the war, and they were understandably anxious to settle on their land and in their home.

  It was a painfully familiar predicament, and one which was handled with characteristic sensitivity by all concerned. John ‘an Ban’ Macaulay was ‘a gentle, considerate and inoffensive man’ who insisted that Calum’s family should not leave the croft and the crofthouse until they had somewhere else to go. But there was nowhere else to go. Murdo Smith proceeded to make the barn on the croft as habitable as possible, and he, his wife and five young children moved into it. John Macaulay still pointedly refused to occupy the crofthouse, leaving it available to the Smith family. Calum’s mother undertook a series of desperate excursions by bus to the east coast in search of accommodation. There was nothing. There plainly were no crofts, and unfurnished town lets were either impossibly expensive or unavailable to a countrywoman with so many infants. When eventually she found four bare walls and a roof the Smith family had no alternative but to take it. They moved, two adults and five monoglot Gaelic-speaking children, into a single small room in a shack at Coulregrein on the suburban northern outskirts of Stornoway. The room was not big enough to take two beds together with a table and a kitchen-shelf. ‘I can never hope to understand,’ Calum would write, ‘how we all lived together in that little box.’ Both Calum and Murdo Smith became life-long socialists.

  Even with Coll and Gress still half-occupied, with the government pressing him to compromise and with minor, sporadic, exploratory raids exploding like loose firecrackers across Lewis, Lord Leverhulme’s instinct was not to retreat, nor even to entrench, but to expand. So he bought the island of Harris.

  In normal circumstances it would have been a logical step. Harris is part of the same landmass. It is separated from Lewis not by water but by a range of mountains which run from between the island of Scarp and Morsgail deer forest in the west to Loch Seaforth in the east, and which peak at the celebrated heights of Clisham. Mountains had been for centuries a more effective barrier to Hebrideans than any stretch of sea, and Harris and the Hearaich were indisputably a place and a people apart.

  There were two Harrises. North Harris was the isthmus town of Tarbert and the hills and rock-strewn rough pasture which reached towards the Lewis boundary. North Harris encompassed the busily independent fishing island of Scalpay and the coastal track which straggled hazardously towards Huishinish and Scarp. North Harris had the fantastic apparition of Amhuinnsuidhe Castle, a Victorian schloss stuck onto that coast like a child’s toy abandoned on the shore.

  South Harris was a dreamscape of atoll-yellow beaches, blue and white Atlantic seas and bright green machair on the west and modest hamlets hidden in mazy grey inlets on the east. It was a silent, unassertive place, less noticed by the outside world than many a better publicised island. Its settlements such as Northton, Rodel and Obbe on the coast overlooking the shallow Sound of Harris and the southern islands of Berneray and North Uist were organic outcrops of stone wall and thatch, villages as placid as the night.

  Harris had been the property of the earls of Dunmore since falling out of the hands of the profligate MacLeods in 1834. The seventh earl, an explorer and Victorian man of parts named Charles Adolphus Murray, build the baronial edifice of Amhuinnsuidhe Castle by the side of a sensational salmon run in 1865 and two years later divided up h
is property and sold North Harris – including Amhuinnsuidhe Castle and several thousand acres of deer forest – to Sir Edward Scott. The Dunmores’ interest in their surviving holiday estate of South Harris declined as the nineteenth century progressed (Charles Adolphus would transfer his affections to Kashmir and Tibet), but the Scott family managed to combine shooting stags with a degree of philanthropy in North Harris. The school and main road in Tarbert bear their name, for obvious reasons.

  Throughout all of these proprietorial comings and goings the nineteenth-century ritual of dispossession was enacted in miniature among the few thousand people of Harris. The clearance of people from the good west coast began under the MacLeods and was continued by the Dunmores. In the words of James Hunter:

  In the 1820s and 1830s the fertile machair lands on the Atlantic coast of Harris – lands which had been occupied from time immemorial – were completely cleared and the evicted population settled on the island’s eastern shores.

  This was so bleak and stony a district that, as a Harris crofter observed bitterly, ‘beasts could not live’ in it. Among the rocks on which they were thus forced to set up home, the newly arrived inhabitants of the eastern part of Harris painstakingly constructed the lazybeds or feannagan which are still to be seen there and which alone could provide a depth of soil sufficient to raise a crop. More than 100 years later, the pioneer ecologist, Frank Fraser Darling, was to comment of the feannagan in question:

  ‘Nothing can be more moving to the sensitive observer of Hebridean life than these lazybeds of the Bays district of Harris. Some are no bigger than a dining table, and possibly the same height from the rock, carefully built up with turves carried there in creels by the women and girls. One of these tiny lazybeds will yield a sheaf of oats or a bucket of potatoes, a harvest no man should despise.’37

  It was said that at the end of the nineteenth century a person could walk from West Loch Tarbert around the entire Atlantic coast of Harris to Obbe, and pass only three houses – the few lodges and farm dwellings of the landed class. On the stony east coast overpopulation was so acute that the people emigrated in their hundreds.

  There was therefore land hunger and struggle in Harris as well as in her larger, more demonstrative sister to the north. There was occasional active resistance to some of the western seaboard clearances. The same appeals for the return of land upon which they could survive were made by Hearaich to the Napier Commission, appeals that were as elsewhere fortified by the teachings of their reformed Presbyterian church. Lachlan Campbell of Scadabay in the overcrowded Bays of Harris reminded Baron Napier and his colleagues that according to Holy Writ, ‘He gave the land to the children of men’. Some Hearaich joined the first Park deer forest raid in 1887. Soldiers and sailors from North and South Harris fought and died in the Great War in equal proportion even with the ‘loyal’ island of Lewis, and men from Harris were among those denied even a short enjoyment of the rewards of peace by the sinking of the Iolaire. Those that did return shared identical aspirations. ‘When we were in the trenches down to our knees in mud and blood,’ said one Hearach bitterly in 1919, ‘we were promised all good things when we returned home victorious.’

  When Leverhulme bought South Harris and North Harris from the Dunmores and the Scotts respectively in the May and June of 1919, he became the feudal superior of 4,500 people who may have lived in a gentle link of the Hebridean chain, but whose calm surface concealed powerful undercurrents.

  He arrived in Harris with the highest references. Samuel Scott, the deceased Sir Edward’s eldest son, despatched in October 1919 from Amhuinnsuidhe Castle to his erstwhile tenantry a circular letter in Gaelic and in English. Scott had arranged through a lease-back deal to hold onto the castle as a retirement holiday home. His valediction was therefore delivered to people who may have been curious about his motives; it read:

  In view of the many years during which my family and myself have been associated with you, and the very cordial relations that have always existed between us, I feel I owe it to you to announce that I have ceased to be your Proprietor, having sold North Harris to Lord Leverhulme, and further that I should give you reasons for my decision. Though I have sold the property I have not severed my connection with North Harris. Owing to the increase in taxation and great rise in all expenses caused by the War, I found that it would be impossible for me to continue in Harris as in former days.

  ’Till recently it had never entered my head that I should not remain your Proprietor during my life, and it was only with the greatest reluctance that I came to the conclusion that it was in the best interests of all that I should accept Lord Leverhulme’s offer, for the following reasons:

  First, because after long talks with Lord Leverhulme I was convinced that in him you would have a Proprietor who would further your interests and do all in his power, far more than I could ever do, to help you. At my death the estate would have had to be sold, and I believed it best for you all that the estate should be sold to a man who, I am convinced, will be a good and generous landlord, than that it should be sold after my death to some unknown person who might not have your interests at heart.

  Secondly, because I could see no other way of being able to come to Harris, the place I love best in the world, as in former years, and that I should have to let it year by year. I hope now to come to Harris for many years, though only as a tenant; but I need hardly say that my interest in yourselves and your affairs will remain unabated, and I can only hope that in years to come you will look upon me as a friend in the same way as I venture to believe you have looked upon me in the past. I shall do all I can to further your interests both individually and collectively.

  I bid you farewell as Proprietor with a very sad heart, and take this opportunity of expressing my great gratitude for the very many proofs of good feeling towards my family and myself which you have always given, and also for the many acts of kindness I have received at your hands; and I earnestly hope that that bond of good feeling and good relationship between us will continue for many years.

  Samuel Scott received £20,000 (or approximately £600,000 today) from Leverhulme for North Harris; Lord Dunmore took £36,000 (approximately £1 million) for South Harris and its distant cousin, St Kilda.

  Leverhulme’s short gubernation of St Kilda is a less-remarked corner of his Hebridean project. The seventy-three souls, including a minister and a nurse and their families, who inhabited this remote outcrop 60 miles west of Harris had enjoyed an eventful war. Village Bay in St Kilda had been the only community in Britain to suffer a bombardment from an offshore German U-Boat (whose skipper had sportingly announced his intention by megaphone before shelling the place, thereby giving the islanders the opportunity to find safe shelter).

  The long-term indigenous human habitation of St Kilda had been the subject of critical debate for the better part of a century. The population had many times been lower than it was between 1860 and 1919, when it hovered around the seventy to eighty mark, but St Kildans had not previously found themselves living their medieval life as citizens of an increasingly prosperous great power. The Victorian pleasure cruisers which brought sweetmeats and spending cash into their bay brought also the unignorable promise of a life of luxury to be discovered on the mainland of the United Kingdom. In 1930 they determined reluctantly to redeem that promise and were voluntarily evacuated to Scotland.

  They were Lord Leverhulme’s responsibility between 1919 and 1925, although there is no record of him ever once acknowledging the place, let alone visiting St Kilda. He was not the first such negligent proprietor of what was easily the most inaccessible population in Britain. But he was the first to have bought into the Hebrides with the avowed aim of making them thrive rather than stagnate. St Kilda was, however, an island group too far. It had not the population nor the surface area nor the resources to be pulled up by its bootstraps. In coarse entrepreneurial terms it was an economic basketcase. St Kilda has posthumously been made the unwitting symbol of too many lost caus
es for its own good; it needs no others adding to the roster. It represents only a fraction of Leverhulme’s final failure, and that fraction is significant only in one regard. It is that a small number of people called St Kilda home, and would not have left it if presented with a reason to stay. For half of its last ten years of life Lord Leverhulme – the man who announced to the world that he was buying the bigger Hebrides to solve their problems and stem their decline – had it wholly within his power to help the living St Kilda. Like a score and more of others, he failed to act on his promise.

  He did not, then, buy Harris in order to obtain St Kilda. He bought it most probably because he had intended all along to bring the entire insular landmass into his estate. There would not be much point to a bustling, industrialised, affluent, densely populated Lewis which stopped at some invisible line between Morsgail and Clisham, south of which was to be found only Third World poverty, migrant labour and eighteenth century agricultural practices. He certainly did not intend Harris to become a bolthole; things just turned out that way.

  Throughout 1919, as his purlieu and his proposals expanded, Leverhulme increasingly needed the support of the Scottish Secretary and the Board of Agriculture. The Board’s officials, who tended to be of northern smallholding stock, he knew to be largely prejudiced in favour of land redistribution. Robert Munro, however, despite his Ross-shire origins, was like Leverhulme a Liberal lad of parts clambering gamely up the social ladder (Munro would end his life as Lord Alness). He should surely have some sympathy with the proprietor’s case.