The Soap Man

by Roger Hutchinson

  Munro did have some sympathy. He was constrained not only by his own gut sodality with fellow Highlanders but also by political reality. When the people of Lewis and Harris complained that the land had been promised to them by the government, they spoke no more than the truth. The government had certainly never envisaged breaking up every farm, deer-run and shooting estate in the Highlands and Islands, or even in Lewis. But the government – urged on by the Board of Agriculture – had many years earlier and throughout the war insisted that it was converted to the cause of crofting, and that it would find the tens of thousands of pounds necessary to create enough crofts to satisfy the bulk of legitimate popular demand, especially in such islands as Lewis and Harris where the number of cottars (men and women on unsecured property with no fixity of tenure or controlled rent) was large enough to create serious destabilisation.

  Nobody had expected Lord Leverhulme. Once they got Lord Leverhulme, nobody expected his proposals to be on so gigantic a scale that they promised to eclipse all other forms of social and working life in his domain. And nobody was quite prepared for the dogged tenacity of his refusal to bargain or to compromise.

  Munro attempted to keep all the balls in the air. If Leverhulme took home in a huff his sacks of spending cash, it was important that this should not be perceived as the fault of the Scottish Secretary. Leverhulme requested a ten-year moratorium on land resettlement in Lewis and Harris to give his plans time to succeed. Robert Munro’s reluctance to grant this demand was denounced at the time and later as unreasonable and ungrateful. But the unreason lay with Lord Leverhulme. When he asked for ten years’ breathing space he was almost seventy years old. He had always made it clear that Lewis and Harris were his personal interests and had nothing to do with the Lever Brothers company. There was absolutely no guarantee that after his death, whenever it should occur, the Hebridean schemes would continue to be financed and supported – and every reason to suspect that they would not.

  In the meantime the government was confronted by the unattractive spectacle of thousands of Hebridean families who had in the previous decade demonstrated their courage and their loyalty in the most indisputable fashion, being reduced to squatting on a few disputed acres of comparatively worthless peat bog and grazing land.

  Leverhulme did not understand their aspirations. He deceived himself. When the islanders said that they wanted a house, they did not mean a rented bungalow in Stornoway. When they said that they wanted land, they did not mean a suburban allotment. They did not need to be given lectures on the paltry income earned by crofters: they knew that better than most.

  They also knew that life on the north-western fringe of Europe was uncertain; that kings and queens and landowners and politicians came and went; that great schemes were started and then collapsed. It had been unforgettably proven over the previous century that they, the one human constant in all this flux, had little security. But if they had a croft they now had – thanks to their living relatives’ agitation just thirty and forty years earlier – safe tenure at a legislated rent. They had sufficient land upon which to keep a cow and grow root vegetables. They had a share of common grazing on the hillside, a peatbog from which to cut and dry their year’s supply of fuel, and somewhere to draw up a boat. They might never be rich in money, but none of their traditions – their history, their culture, their religion, their laconic, intelligent view of life – set much store by bulging bank accounts. It is not a difficult philosophy for most people to understand, even to admire. The people of Lewis and Harris were simply the only population of the United Kingdom which had avoided deracination. Some unfortunate north-country ancestor of William Hesketh Lever had in an earlier age been uprooted from her ancestral turf by enclosure or plague or industrialisation or crime. The majority of Hebrideans had in the first quarter of the twentieth century escaped that fate. They understood him – they had the imagination and the experience to project themselves even into his incomprehension. They knew why he could not understand them. He was incapable of returning the compliment. He heard not songs of visceral attachment and yearning, but the vapid lilts of Marjory Kennedy-Fraser; not the considered articulacy of the Free Church lay preacher, but the lampoons of Harry Lauder.

  And while they were prepared to compromise, he was not. Like the action in Park of the men of Lochs in 1887, the land raids at Coll and Gress and Tong in 1919 were more of a demonstration than a seizure. When they protested that they had no opposition to his job-creating proposals but wished merely to have a home to live in while he developed them, they were being perfectly honest.

  It was, as Robert Munro understood, a reasonable request. There was neither a pressing need for dairy farms to the north of Stornoway, nor any certainty that if they were to be ring-fenced they would efficiently cater for an expanded town’s milk demands. If a sizable number of young men with families were to be settled on that disputed machair land, however, then Lord Leverhulme’s new projects would have in their immediate vicinity a stable and substantial reservoir of potential employees, without him having gone to the trouble and expense of putting a roof over their heads. The more that Leverhulme’s demands were examined the less reasonable they appeared. One or two things were by the end of 1919 starkly clear. His conviction that crofting worked as a drag-anchor on progress in the Highlands was absolute. Crofting was in his opinion not only uneconomic and obsolete: it was positively harmful and retrogressive. Crofting would wither and die on the twentieth-century vine, he was sure of that. But in the meantime it was a deadweight on his own activities, not least because – as he privately admitted – the independence of mind and movement allowed to a crofter was quite incompatible with his own requirement of a docile and malleable workforce. And having announced that his semi-choate plans for Lewis involved the pasture land at Tong, Gress and Coll being devoted to farmed cattle, he would never retreat. It was the received wisdom of Leverhulme’s catechism of industrial relations that a personal retraction, a small compromise, would be identified by the labouring classes as a weakness which they would not hesitate to exploit. In fact the independent labouring classes of Lewis and Harris would have applauded such a compromise as the judgement of a sensible man. The weaknesses that they recognised instead were the petty, unworthy flaws of pride, blinkered obstinacy and arrogance.

  While Robert Munro was speaking publicly of his confidence in Leverhulme’s plans and of the need to accommodate them, he and his officials were working behind the scenes to persuade the proprietor to relax his prohibition on new land settlement ‘near Stornoway’ and elsewhere in Lewis. Leverhulme not only rejected these overtures; he resented them. Invited to address the Philosophical Institution of Edinburgh on 4 November 1919, he took the opportunity to accuse government involvement in Highland affairs – from the Napier Commission to the Board of Agriculture – of being responsible for the plight of the Gaidhealtachd. Drawing roughly on John Milton, he claimed that:

  Reports from Royal Commissions and visiting commissioners, thick as leaves in Vallombrosa, have been the dominating feature of Government policy in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland.

  I will not weary you by detailing them, but the invariable rule seems to have been, where expenditure of public money was recommended by such commissions, for the Government either to ignore such reports or to cut down expenditure so penuriously as only to result in the waste of public money by not spending the full amount required . . . Lewis and Harris have too long been the Cinderella in the Government pantomime.

  In other words, Westminster wasted a lot of money in the public charade of commissioning reports on the Hebrides, wasted even more money by part-financing their recommendations, and then wasted the lot by scrapping everything. Whatever grains of truth they might have contained, those were undiplomatic assertions from a man who was petitioning the government for substantial grants towards the improvement of facilities in Lewis and who needed the support of as many visiting commissioners as he could recruit.

  In Jan
uary 1920 demobilised servicemen reoccupied the farmlands at Gress and Coll which they had left the previous autumn. This time they began to build houses. In February 1920 Leverhulme announced that he was ceasing improvement work throughout rural Lewis and would be concentrating his developments solely on Stornoway and in Harris. The small south-coast harbour township of Obbe would, as Stornoway became the Venice of the north, become the Stornoway of Harris.

  In gratitude for this unexpected attention the eminences of Obbe had agreed (following an unspecified number of heavy hints and meetings with both his Lordship and the South Harris estate factor) to abandon their thousand-year-old Norse–Gaelic name and give Obbe the new and more fitting postal address of Leverburgh. A Scottish doctor of Highland descent named Halliday Sutherland heard in the south of this proposal. ‘Hitherto, no-one in the mainland had troubled about what was happening in Lewis,’ Sutherland would recall. ‘As soon as the change of name was announced, quiet old gentlemen all over Scotland rose from their chairs and said: “What the devil is the meaning of this?”

  ‘Poor Lord Leverhulme! He was trying . . . to buy one of the things in this world which money cannot buy – an immortality for his name.’38

  Sutherland was only partly right. A name’s immortality may not be for sale, but its Ozymandian longevity is. More than eighty years later the quiet coastal town of Obbe in Harris would still identify itself on most maps as Leverburgh.

  The Tolsta to Ness road was abandoned at the northern side of a deep ravine, leaving a symbolic bridge to nowhere across the Geiraha River. The project was not over, Leverhulme would insist, it was merely cutting its cloth appropriately. There were pressures from abroad, as well as an enemy within.

  7

  NOTHING THERE BUT SLAVERY

  In the autumn of 1919 a young man named Arthur Geddes was employed by Lord Leverhulme to assist in an agricultural survey of his Hebridean estate. Geddes, who would go on to become a noted sociologist and historian of rural Scotland, helped Dr M. E. Hardy, who was in his turn treading in the exalted footsteps of Thomas Mawson, to prepare a lengthy report on the natural assets of Lewis and Harris.

  It was not part of Geddes and Hardy’s brief to look at the sea fisheries. The sea fisheries were taken without question to be a huge unexploited local resource. Once properly worked, the fisheries, assumed everybody from Leverhulme down, would provide the stable foundations of the islands’ future prosperity. Without the fisheries, as the proprietor had made clear on numerous occasions, he might never have considered the salvation of Lewis. Without that compass circle drawn around Stornoway, which enclosed ‘the richest fishing grounds in the world’, he might never even have bought the place. Hardy and Geddes were asked instead to explore such ancillary developments as commercial peat-cutting and market gardening, which might be launched on Barvas Moor as complementary activities to catching industrial quantities of fish, canning and freezing them and sending them off to 400 MacFisheries retail outlets.

  Only later did Arthur Geddes observe, from a distance, what was clearly a staggering flaw in Lord Leverhulme’s business plan. For a variety of reasons, the demand for and the price of fish was plummeting.

  Pondering years later on the fate of the project in which he had played a small part, Geddes found himself wondering exactly why ‘the differences of viewpoint’ between Leverhulme and the Leodhasaich, instead of being harmonised by two parties with so many interests in common, ‘led so soon to friction, deadlock and breakdown’. He dismissed the notion of the ‘stubborn crofter’, and that of the procrastinating Scottish Office, and even that of the ‘impatient or obstinate’ Leverhulme as being too simplistic, too lazy a view of what happened in the Hebrides in the early 1920s. Instead Arthur Geddes looked at market forces and suggested that,

  Surely one basic fact remains. In 1917–18, when Leverhulme framed his policy and made his plans, the Scottish fisheries, to judge from pre-war years, could still expect to hold high place in providing for a brisk market in herring and white fish.

  True, the value of the Island cure of white fish had fallen from £100,000 in 1900 to one-tenth, £10,000, in 1913; but Leverhulme saw that since fresh fish were now demanded, his capitalisation of equipment with accelerated transit of the catch should bring quick recovery. The herring trade had been active at Stornoway up to the eve of the War; and although the islanders had made leeway following the introduction of steam and of larger motor drifters, Leverhulme thought he saw an opportunity to capitalise the industry, providing ‘work for wages’.

  This forecast was wrong. Consumption declined, and the market fell. Not only so; the proportion contributed by Scots fishermen to the shrinking market declined even more.39

  And the proportion contributed by Hebridean fishermen to the Scottish catch also declined. By the start of the Great War the fishing fleets of Wick, Helmsdale, Peterhead and Fraserburgh had been for many years substantially composed of steam-powered drift-net trawlers – which would enable them in times of peace not only to harvest more fish, but also to exploit the waters around the islands which west coast men had previously regarded as their own. The Stornoway fleet only began to make similar mechanised headway after 1918. The post-war domestic market for fish simultaneously declined because peace brought with it the removal of naval blockades and the return of free trade. Fish, which had been in wartime a valuable source of protein, was suddenly competing with a variety of other foodstuffs on the shelves at the same time as it was being caught more efficiently and landed in unprecedented quantities. Its wholesale and retail price collapsed.

  The Hebridean boats were also drastically affected by another train of events. Following the Russian revolution in 1917, the Bolshevik withdrawal from the war and the execution of the Romanov royal family, Britain had imposed a trade embargo on the new Soviet Union. These sanctions had little effect on the greater part of the British economy, which was not reliant overall on doing business in eastern Europe. But they certainly affected the herring trade. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the enormous Russian appetite for pickled herring had largely been satisfied by catches from the great shoals which made their way annually down the Minch. Herring had become a staple of the Hebridean fleet because it was freely available on the doorstep and because there was a traditional and apparently bottomless market. Consequently twenty times as many barrels of herring might be exported from Stornoway in a year than all the white fish catches combined. The domestic market for herring – which was perceived in the south as being a food of rough necessity rather than a gourmet product – was one of the first to collapse after the Armistice. Its disintegration was contemporaneous with British politicians preventing British fishermen from reopening their old herring export routes to Russia.

  James Shaw Grant, the son of William, shortly after acceding to his father’s editor’s chair at the Stornoway Gazette in 1932, would tell the visiting poet Louis MacNeice that the post-war collapse of the Lewis herring fishery was also partly caused by Prohibition in the United States. ‘The Stornoway herring,’ related MacNeice, ‘is exceptionally large and tasty and the Americans, being connoisseurs in this matter, used to import large quantities of these herrings, salted, for use in their saloons – the salted Stornoway herring being a great thirst-maker.’40

  The results were devastating. In the pre-war years more boats had worked the herring fishery from Stornoway and Barra than from Wick and Aberdeen. Some 6,000 fishermen and 2,000 shore workers were seasonally engaged in the Hebrides.

  The industry’s historian, James Coull, writes that after the war:

  The disorganisation which came in the herring fisheries was particularly severe . . . while the white and other fisheries were less severely affected, they also had formidable problems to face . . .

  Other countries had begun to catch up even before World War One, and although the inter-war years were disorganised and at times chaotic for the global economy, competing countries continued to undermine Britain’s previ
ously leading position . . . Other countries were developing and modernising their fisheries, and the struggle for survival in the difficult market conditions indeed was a stimulus to do so. Norway, Holland, Iceland and Germany all advanced to the first rank among European herring producers, and had in general lower production costs than the fishermen in Scotland.41

  Just over 200,000 tons of herring were landed in Scotland for salt curing (the staple of the Stornoway fleet) in 1913, which was a bad pre-war year. In 1919 the amount was almost halved to 120,000 tons, and it continued dramatically to decline, as did the overall catch, as did demand and as did prices, throughout 1920 and 1921. It would never properly recover.

  The situation was catastrophic not only to the active Lewis fleet of 1919 and 1920, but also to Lord Leverhulme’s confident proposals. ‘In the early years of Leverhulme’s adventure,’ recalled Arthur Geddes, ‘the fall in total sales and prices of fish brought immediate loss to the keenest and hardest working of the fishermen, and to their financial backers in Stornoway.’

  These losses warned others of the uncertainties of fishing. Now the fall in the fishing industry is not so much as mentioned in [his son’s] biography of Leverhulme; nor do we remember a word of it in Leverhulme’s speeches. One finds no data to show a substantial endeavour by the Scottish Office to co-operate with Leverhulme in framing policies either to change the trend of European markets or to make local adaptations to combat downward trends. The Fishery Reports certainly record the losses, year by year.

  As for the Island fishermen, they shared the feeling expressed by other Scots fishermen, that the old markets across the North Sea, eastward to what had been St Petersburg, could and should be reopened, not closed ‘for party reasons’ by ‘English politicians’ . . . In brief, the Scots fisheries suffered after the War as neither Leverhulme nor others had foreseen when first he laid his plans for the island’s prosperity . . . [both he and the government] turned their faces away from this disquieting factor of the Baltic markets, though both knew it to be fundamental to the success of Scots fisheries and the island’s future.