The Soap Man

by Roger Hutchinson

  Leverhulme then repeated this conversation, and Donald MacLeod’s apparent consent, to the Board of Agriculture’s Colin MacDonald. Mac-Donald was gratified to hear a fortnight later that Donald had left word in the castle kitchen that he had gone home to plant potatoes, and would not be coming back.45

  Robert Munro received in March 1921 a letter from Murdo Graham, one of the raiders of Gress Farm, which requested:

  Please do not allow our desperate plight to be camouflaged by reference to some minor industrial works at Stornoway. These works may or not mature; the signs are that they will not, as they are liable to be closed down at the slightest excuse. In any event, we are not skilled factory workers and such work would not benefit us or our class. It is necessary we should have land and proper dwellings. The Acts of Parliament passed for providing us with holdings is our Magna Carta, and as long as they remain law we consider it your duty to give effect to them. Once more we call on you to do so.

  A month later the Board of Agriculture advised the Scottish Secretary ‘that Leverhulme would be glad to get out of his industrial schemes and that he will use the Coll and Gress affair as his justification’.

  Robert Munro was as reasonable and placatory a Scottish Secretary as Leverhulme could have hoped to discover. He continued to urge compromise. ‘I am satisfied,’ he told the proprietor, ‘that many if not all the troubles in Lewis would vanish, if you see your way to adopt the suggestions which I make. It does seem a pity that the whole future of the island for years to come should be jeopardised and indeed wrecked on account of a difference in policy regarding two small farms.’46

  All that the Secretary of State got for his trouble from Lord Leverhulme were threats of a total capital withdrawal, noisy insistences that Lewis ex-servicemen should be prosecuted for planting potatoes in Lewis soil, repeated and increasingly absurd caricatures of the land raiders as a ‘small number of misguided men’, and excoriation of Munro himself and all his government’s works. The conviction rapidly hardened in the mind of Robert Munro of Alness that he was dealing – that he had always had been dealing – with reason and justice on one side, but with bluster and autocracy on the other.

  The decree nisi was served in September 1921, in the unlikely setting of Stornoway Highland Games. ‘Three years ago,’ Leverhulme told the gathering, ‘it was mutually accepted that our relations would be on a strictly business basis; that there would be no odious taint of philanthropy to lower ourselves in each other’s esteem.

  No one regrets more than myself that the canning factory, the fish products and the ice companies cannot be opened for work. But the conditions of supply and demand in these industries make it impossible to do so. The business could only make losses, heavy losses if operated at present. We must wait patiently for the world markets to be cleared of surplus stocks before the prices will adjust themselves to the cost of production.47

  It was little less than a concession of failure. Leverhulme knew that if his Lewis fish industry could not survive one slump, it was unlikely to offer any kind of stable long-term future to the island. And with it went all and any talk of railway lines and fruit farms and forestries and thousands of bungalows in the suburbs of Stornoway. They would never again be mentioned. All that remained was to cut the losses, rescue some pride and manage a dignified retreat.

  Robert Munro wrote immediately to acknowledge the capitulation. ‘In the circumstances as they are now,’ he said, ‘I feel that I would not be justified in refraining any longer from putting into operation a generous measure of land settlement.’

  In the spring of 1922, thirteen years after the passing of the Scottish Smallholders Act, which had been designed to enable such transactions, the Board of Agriculture completed its purchase of the farms at Coll, Gress, Tolsta and Orinsay and used the land to create 180 new crofts and to enlarge eighty-one existing crofts. Apart from a wilful attempt, which the Scottish Office managed to ignore, to have former raiders excluded from the apportionments, Leverhulme presented no further actual or oratorial barrier to these settlements, which in the remainder of the twentieth century were to become some of the healthiest and best-populated of Lewis communities.

  His project was over. The young doctor Halliday Sutherland arrived in Stornoway in 1923 to find ‘a half-built factory on which work had been abandoned, a derelict small-gauge railway, and thousands of pounds’ worth of machinery rusting on the shore.’ Anxious to uncover the reasons for such a depressing scene, Sutherland approached what was presented in his later transcription as a bellicose old man working a croft in the Back district. The man had no desire, Sutherland said,

  . . . to answer a whistle at six in the morning and work for wages in Lever’s factory. No damn fear. Poor as I am, I’m master here, and could order you off this croft.

  Why did some of us raid his pasture-land? A dairy farm for the island it was to be. I’ve another name for that – a monopoly in milk. No damn fear. We are poorer now than we were. Why? Because the line-fishing in the spring has failed. Why? Because of these damned trawlers that spoil the spawn, and half of them are Lever’s English trawlers. He makes us poor, and then wants us to work for him.48

  The divorce decree absolute remained for the time being on his desk; he was not yet finished with the island. He had still to score his swansong to Lewis. He held onto his castle and his position and his honorifics. And he took the high road over the Clisham to Harris.

  It was a pleasant road to follow. After the aggravations of Lewis, Emily Paul found the southern way conjured up some of the innocent joys of her uncle’s first unspoiled months in the Hebrides. One benefit was immediately apparent. Harris was still wet. There was no prohibition on alcohol in Tarbert and points south. Harris may have been part of the same Western Isles parliamentary constituency as Lewis, and part of the same landmass, but until local government reorganisation in 1974 Harris remained within Inverness County Council while Lewis was a semi-autonomous part of Ross-shire. Prohibition in Lewis was therefore not enforced south of the Clisham. As a result, throughout the early 1920s the Tarbert Hotel enjoyed the unprecedented patronage of parties of Leodhasaich who had braved the one-in-four gradients and hair-raising precipices of the Clisham pass in private cars, hired charabancs, on foot or in the saddle.

  Following an invigorating lunch Lord Leverhulme’s party – which may still have included, as well as the Paul family, such old friends as Jonathan Simpson – motored south ‘into the brightness of green sandhills, grassy plains and glorious blue sea rolling into beautiful sandy bays.’

  There, at Borve Lodge on the western shore of South Harris, Leverhulme had established his southern headquarters. Borve Lodge had been built and renovated on a more modest scale than the castle on Lewis, but it had its attractions. ‘Outside,’ noted Emily Paul, ‘the grandeur and majesty of nature; inside, the comfort and amenities of our comfort-loving age. In the walled garden only a few yards from the never-calm sea, we found flowers and vegetables growing in profusion, such as one might find in any southern garden.’ Within yards of the lodge the young men of the party shot deer so tame that they would eat from their hands. Occasionally they left this Eden to explore the nether reaches of the island.

  One day, we went to look over another Lodge called Finsbay, on the east coast of Harris.

  A more desolate spot I never wish to see, and one wonders how anyone could ever have built a Lodge in such a stony barren place. Presumably the trout fishing was good. Years before, many of the people and their stock, from the fertile and beautiful west side, had been evicted to make way for deer, and had been allowed to make homes along this forbidding looking coast. What sorrow and desolation must have been their lot in such a change of environment!

  Those words are evidence – incidental and minor, but still evidence – of disconnected trains of thought within the Leverhulme party. The sensitive and sympathetic Miss Emily Paul was capable of projecting herself into the ‘desolation’ of people cleared from their land by earlier propri
etors, but not into the efforts of those who attempted to correct the injustice during the suzerainty of her Uncle William.

  She could perceive – as who could not? – the pity of the nineteenth century. But when fifty years later the children and grandchildren of those who were despatched from grassy Borve to stony Finsbay (where nobody could possibly have wished to stay unless ‘the trout-fishing was good’) created waves of discontent, she was happy to agree with some Stornoway merchants and masons, with the editor of the local newspaper and with Lord Leverhulme’s party that the landless Leodhasaich were being manipulated by Bolshevik agents. ‘There were some,’ Emily would insist twenty years later, ‘who thought it was a question of politics, and that the crofters were only being used as tools. Certainly some of the letters appearing in the press over signatures of the men concerned, were unlikely to have been written by them. The style and phraseology were entirely foreign to a Lewis crofter, whose mother tongue is Gaelic, and whose English was, and is, always filled with Gaelic idiom.’49

  The misapprehension that ‘a Lewis crofter’ was by definition incapable of writing a letter in straightforward English, or that such a person would cheerfully have appended his name to any old incomprehensible communist propaganda at the urging of a Glaswegian agitator, was only possible in a group of people seriously distanced from the actual population of Lewis and Harris. Many people within the islands were also prepared to credit ‘red socialists’ with causing trouble, but they were strictly identifiable home-grown Gaelic-speaking socialists. The Leverhulme party, spoonfed with the cartoon Donalds and Anguses of Sir Harry Lauder’s creation (characters who would never utter a line of English without a liberal sprinkling of mock-Gaelic ‘idiom’, and whose dumb deference rendered land-raiding quite unthinkable), made their assumptions of political puppetry in ignorance of the recent history and traditions of their neighbours. It was neither a unique nor a passing ignorance. Such prejudice had distorted the southern image of the Scottish Gael for centuries gone and would colour it for a century to come. Embedded in the iron convictions of a landowner who needed to carry with him the hearts and minds of the Leodhasaich, however, it was at best unfortunate and at worst fatally naive.

  But Leverhulme was now in Harris, and Harris was different. Harris was smaller and Harris had more modest expectations. He might yet discover in Harris what he had hoped to find in Lewis: the satisfaction of materially improving by the application of Leverist economics the lives and prospects of a small but integral community. Hearaich were as possessed by the same ambitions for homes and a land fit for heroes as their cousins to the north, but on a more manageable scale. It is noteworthy that Leverhulme did not attempt in Harris a scaled-down version of his schemes for Lewis. That would have meant concentrating on the main town of Tarbert as he had concentrated on Stornoway. Tarbert was in many ways a perfect site for expansion. It opened onto both the Minch and the Atlantic; its two natural harbours were deep and sheltered; it was close to the Lewis border. Tarbert had shops and a hotel, tradesmen and a large school. But he eschewed Tarbert in favour of Obbe/Leverburgh. The small bay at Obbe was relatively exposed to the prevailing winds; it was a very long way by a very bad road from Stornoway; the Sound of Harris which it faced was shallow and a notorious graveyard of sea-going vessels. (Emily Paul noted that ‘it is exceedingly difficult to navigate on account of its innumerable rocks and strong currents. But my uncle determined to blast some of these rocks away and put lights on others, till he had made his harbour attainable at any stage of the tide by any ships likely to use it.’) Obbe had little or nothing, and that was its charm. Whatever he built at Obbe would be an improvement on desuetude. Whatever the inhabitants gained from his injections of capital would be – could surely not help but be – better than before. He had felt obliged in Lewis to excite high expectations in order to gain support. He would presumably encounter smaller but similar ambitions in the urban downtown of Tarbert, Harris. At Obbe, however, he promised them a row of curing sheds and they renamed the place in his honour.

  The land raids which took place in South Harris to some extent justified his faith. They were modest and containable, and easily condemned by the ambitious citizens of Leverburgh. They were however no less telling in their quiet insistence. In the middle of February 1921 several men from the Stockinish district of Bays approached the estate factor Norman Robertson at his office in Tarbert to make verbal applications for land at Lingerabay. One of them was a married cottar from Finsbay, a small township lying between Stockinish and Lingerabay, an ex-serviceman whose name was John Macdonald. Macdonald and his colleagues were hardly asking for the earth and all its bounty. Stockinish was one of the most barren but overcrowded areas of eastern Harris. Lingerabay, which to a flying crow lay only six miles down the coast, was equally stony but less densely habited. The men were looking not for rich agricultural soil but for sites upon which to build houses.

  By 1921 Lord Leverhulme had heard just about enough of this complaint, and his factors all across Lewis and Harris were under orders to refuse any and all such applications. The men were not surprised. Norman Robertson told the police sergeant at Tarbert ‘that they then said they would raid the land and take forcible possession of it’. Mr Robertson thought, reported Sergeant MacGillivray to the Chief Constable in Inverness, ‘that a number of men from Stockinish and Cluar will raid this land during the spring’.

  Mr Robertson was right. The men who had petitioned him for land had, along with a great many others, been employed by Leverhulme’s ‘Lewis and Harris Welfare and Development Company’ in Obbe/Leverburgh and on one of his road-building schemes. This temporary labour assuaged their hunger without offering them a long-term future. But early in 1921 the majority of workers were laid off from the schemes, in Harris as well as in disenchanted Lewis. Leverhulme could not have sent a worse signal to the Hearaich. Their restraint was obviously irrelevant in the larger calculations of international finance. They were damned if they did raid the land and damned if they did not.

  So they raided. Not all of them; not even a majority of them. In Harris as in Lewis there was a strong and stable element of the community which saw a better future in supporting Lord Leverhulme’s plans than in annoying him. Throughout the long island these men and women were to be found not only in the shops and masonic lodges and business offices, but in respectable crofting households. Their views and interests were not to be dismissed, at the time or later. They were people of faith, hope and integrity. It was their fate ultimately to be counted out of the historical reckoning precisely because their relative security had deposited them on the irrelevant middle ground. They were in No Man’s Land pleading for a unilateral ceasefire; they were caught uselessly between two gigantic historical forces; they were on the horns of a dilemma. In the end they were arguing for nothing other than obeisance. Obeisance to Lord Leverhulme may have served them and many other Hebrideans well. But it would never have resolved the crisis at the heart of their society: the fundamental question of the land.

  So their cottar and fisherfolk neighbours raided, and Lord Leverhulme prosecuted them. Whether they expected such a response is doubtful but irrelevant. By the late winter of 1921 the men and women of South Harris would have been aware of their proprietor’s changing temper in Lewis, of his hardening attitude. They will also have known of the on–off resumptions of land-raiding to their north, and of the Scottish Office and Board of Agriculture’s impatience with Leverhulme. They knew also that the proven way of attracting attention to land hunger in a district was for the people of that district to stake out claims on a forbidden acreage. And they knew that if the worst came to the worst, if the factor and the constabulary acted on their warnings and took legal action, both public sympathy and natural justice were on their side. They had, literally, little or nothing to lose.

  So they raided, and they were duly charged. Harris being part of Inverness-shire rather than part of Ross-shire-with-Lewis, they were answerable not to Stornoway Court but
to Lochmaddy in North Uist. Rather than ship the accused across the Sound of Harris, the Sheriff Court itself sailed north and convened in the sportsman’s hotel at Rodel.

  It made an unedifying scene. The bench was occupied by two Justices of the Peace: Dugald MacTavish of Lochmaddy and Norman Robertson of Tarbert – the same Norman Robertson who, in another hat, was Lord Leverhulme’s factor and was responsible for reporting several of the accused to the police. Nobody other than Leverhulme himself can have had a greater vested interest in the outcome of the cases, but it was deemed unnecessary for Robertson to acknowledge this by taking a furlough from duty. Having pressed for prosecution, having been a material witness to many of the alleged offences, he then sat in judgement at Rodel.

  Along with Dugald MacTavish he surveyed a steady procession of women and men who were prosecuted under the Public Health (Scotland) Act of 1897, for commencing to plant crops or to build dwellings on unauthorised land. They were fined ‘modified expenses’ of between ten shillings and a pound and given between three and four weeks ‘to clear the nuisance’. Their guilt or innocence was never in question. The Rodel hearings of March 1921 resulted in the first criminal records ever to be registered in the name of many of the MacDonald, Morrison and Macleod families of South Harris.

  But they failed to stop the raids. Local members of the Lewis and Harris Welfare and Development Company, who were chiefly citizens of Obbe/Leverburgh and Tarbert rather than of the east coast Bays district, felt obliged just two months later to intervene. On the last day of May 1921, two representatives of the LHWDC handed to John MacDonald, the cottar and prominent raider from Finsbay who had been among those refused land by the estate, a letter condemning his activities. MacDonald replied that anybody who attempted to interfere with his plans for crofting at Lingerabay would ‘sleep there for an indefinite period’, as he was the possessor of a large six-chambered American automatic revolver.