The Soap Man

by Roger Hutchinson

  Two days later the Obbe/Leverburgh men reported this incident in writing to Lord Leverhulme at his London home on Hampstead Heath. Following their unnerving encounter with John MacDonald in Finsbay they had returned through Lingerabay, and discovered there a few unearthed rocks ‘presumably for building purposes’.

  We trust, [they requested their superior], that your Lordship will not take the least notice of any wild Bolshevik screed which you may receive from this individual. He has been notorious throughout Harris for some years as an individual who glories in causing enmity between landlord and tenant, and also for being always at loggerheads with anyone who chances to employ him, the law courts being his happy hunting ground, although he invariably comes out on the wrong side.

  We can assure your Lordship that we have no intention of breaking our promise to desist from land raiding for the ten years period required by you, and we shall make it our business that no hare-brained ‘red flag socialist’ like Macdonald will be allowed to carry on land raiding to any extent, however small, to the detriment of the whole of Harris. We are keeping an eye on all his movement, and if he begins building or any other illegal proceeding we shall immediately take steps to render his handiwork valueless. We believe that we can safely guarantee that you will not be troubled by land raiding in South Harris and we again take the opportunity of expressing our loyalty to your Lordship and our determination that Harris men will always remain men of honour whose word is as good as their bond.

  We are

  Your Lordship’s Obedient Servants . . .

  Within days the police constable at Obbe/Leverburgh, James MacRae, had taken himself over to the east coast to investigate John Macdonald’s ‘big American revolver . . . with a view for a report to the Procurator Fiscal for being in possession of firearms without holding a certificate’.

  Macdonald told the policeman that he had no such revolver. The Finsbay man had, he protested, merely been employing a figure of speech which had been misunderstood by the deputation from the south coast. ‘What he meant was that he had an American fountain pen, and would use same to seek protection in event of any persons interfering with his proposed works at Lingerabay.

  ‘In my opinion,’ reported PC MacRae, ‘he is not in possession of firearms. There has not been any raiding yet with the exception of unearthing a few stones with the intention to build . . . In my opinion the Police authorities should not regard this as actual raiding.’

  Just over a month later, on 13 July 1921, James MacRae was obliged to concede that ‘actual raiding’ had commenced. ‘With reference to my previous report regarding land raiding at Lingerabay, Harris,’ he informed his Chief Constable, ‘I beg to report that I visited that part of my district today, and find that the aftermentioned persons are proceeding with the construction of houses and ultimately intend to use the soil.’

  There followed a list of six names, comprised of two men from Stockinish and four from Finsbay. The first name on the list was that of John Macdonald.

  ‘These persons,’ explained PC MacRae, ‘are all ex-servicemen. They have every intention of holding onto this part of the estate.’

  They had, continued the constable, apparently been offered house sites elsewhere by Leverhulme, and an acre of land apiece, and building materials worth £250 with fifty years to repay – but they

  absolutely refused. They wish crofts under the Crofters Act and have nothing to do with the scheme put forward by his Lordship . . . Mr Robertson, Estate Factor, tried to reason the question with them but I understand found it impossible.

  Macdonald is the ringleader and I understand does not want the land, but his idea for such illegal proceedings is to stop all developments by the Lewis and Harris Welfare and Development Co Ltd, which I understand from the public he frankly admits . . . These persons have already cut out crofts, but I cannot say what acreage has been raided.

  Once again due process was observed. On the instructions of the estate the six men were prosecuted and sentenced to forty days in Inverness Prison. That did not stop the raiding. One of the most striking expressions of land hunger in Harris occurred at the beginning of 1923. Six men from the Geocrab district of east Harris, just south of Stockinish, applied in the spring of that year for holdings on the island of Killegray. This tiny scrap of greensward amounted to roughly one square mile in area, and lay three miles out from Obbe in the middle of the Sound of Harris. It fell within the boundary of Leverhulme’s estate.

  The Geocrab men stressed that their main ambition was to build family homes. In Bays at the time one of them shared a house with fifteen other people. Two of them shared their crofts with another three families. One of them lived with his wife and six children in a single-storey building 17 feet long and 10 feet wide. They were refused holdings because Leverhulme believed that ‘the crofting system is opposed to the best interests of the island’.

  The six men thereupon sailed out to deserted Killegray, built a shelter there and began to prepare the soil for cultivation. The estate factor in person and their new MP, Sir William Mitchell Cotts, by letter tried unsuccessfully to persuade them to leave. They voluntarily evacuated only after receiving an assurance from the Board of Agriculture that it would try to establish them within a year on crofts being created at Cheesebay in North Uist and at Talisker in Skye.

  The Board of Agriculture chose throughout the 1920s largely to ignore pleas for crofting settlement in Harris itself. The result was that by 1925 North and South Harris had by far the lowest number of satisfied requests for new crofts in the Hebrides. Only fifty-nine new holdings were created or existing crofts extended in Harris between 1912 and 1925. In the same period 337 applications had been lodged. The percentage of ‘settled demand’ was therefore just 17.5. In the same period in Lewis, Skye and the Uists an average of 40 per cent of ‘demands’ for crofts were settled, although many more requests were made in those islands than in Harris. By 1925 in Lewis 540 demands had been met out of a total of 1,344. In Skye the figure was 502 out of 1,304, almost all as the result of Board of Agriculture intervention. If Harris had enjoyed a similar degree of attention 150 crofts rather than 59 would have been created or expanded. But they were not, and as a direct result young Hearaich left – or more accurately, continued to leave – their island.

  They left it even before Lord Leverhulme. If Harris voted with its feet on the issue of Leverhulme’s proposals for the island, then his Lordship lost the poll. Overcrowded islands such as Taransay were abandoned for new settlements such as the one at Cheesebay in North Uist which was offered also to the Killegray raiders. In 1923 the Board – frustrated by its inability to solve the problems of Leverhulme’s islands within Lewis and Harris – bought the farms of Drynoch and North Talisker in north-west Skye, turned them into sixty-eight crofts and filled all but five of those crofts with immigrants from the other side of the Minch.50 Four hundred people, mostly from Harris, subsequently established themselves as fisherfolk, crofters and progenitors of the only commercial home tweed industry outside the Western Isles in the district of Portnalong. And as well as leaving for Skye and Uist, Harris men and women joined their neighbours from Lewis in a strangely revived twentieth-century version of that famous old Hebridean reel, the dance called America.

  They took much of their fate upon their own shoulders. The windows of the Church of Scotland at Croick in Strathcarron, Easter Ross, are scratched with graffiti made in May 1845. The messages were left by families from nearby Glencalvie who had been cleared from their land and who huddled on the consecrated ground for temporary shelter and relief. Perhaps the most celebrated line there reads: ‘Glencalvie people the wicked generation’. It is remembered because to later eyes it presented a conundrum. It was surely not the Glencalvie people themselves who were wicked, but the factors and landowner who had driven them to sanctuary in that place. But given a nineteenth-century churchgoer’s understanding of the word ‘wicked’, which would incline it more towards ‘sinful’ than ‘malevolent’, an
d given the metaphysical sense of human responsibility held by the Glencalvie people and their church, there seems no reason not to take those words at face value. For such evil misfortune to afflict us, an over-simplified interpretation might read, we must have done something wrong.

  Some similar anguish may have been at work on the spiritual consciences of the people of Lewis and Harris in the early 1920s. That generation was certainly fated. They had been born and brought up among dispossessed families. They had suffered and died to a disproportionate degree in the most murderous war of modern times. Despite the apparent support of government and public opinion, despite winning for half a century every debate from Westminster to Gress they had, not once but time and time again, been refused house sites and smallholdings in the land of their fathers. Two hundred of their brothers and neighbours had survived the war only to drown together a few yards from the coast of Lewis. The benevolent businessman who had arrived from the south promising security and affluence had put a padlock on his chequebook. They were self-sufficient people, trusting only in the Lord and His weather. They were temperamentally disinclined to blame others for their misfortunes. They looked with sadness at themselves in 1922 and 1923, perhaps seeing there a sinful and obscurely reprehensible generation. What, after all, had they done to deserve all this?

  And with heavy, reluctant hearts but without censure, obeying both the laws of economics and the dynamics of disillusion, from the northern tip of Lord Leverhulme’s Lewis to the south-eastern edge of Harris, they began in mass to emigrate across the North Atlantic Ocean.

  8

  DIGNIFIED RETREAT

  All things considered, Donald Murray’s defeat in the General Election of November 1922 came too late to be of much help to the proprietor of Lewis and Harris. The Stornoway man had been an active Member of Parliament in support of his constituents’ interests, which Dr Murray had always taken to include their access to the land of the Western Isles. He had not liked Leverhulme and Leverhulme had not liked Murray.

  Murray fought the 1922 election as a sixty-year-old whose health was so troubled that he had, in fact, only eight months left to live. It was a two-cornered race between himself and his main opponent from 1918, the Coalition Liberal (and recently ennobled) coalowner, Sir William Dingwall Mitchell Cotts, Bart. Thanks to the returned servicemen the electorate had risen since 1918 by almost 2,000, and Murray’s share of the Western Isles vote increased by almost the same amount. But the vote of Sir W. D.M. Cotts almost doubled, another low turn-out of 54 per cent giving him a majority of 939. Having entered parliament as a traditional Liberal against the national tide, Murray was evicted just as his party made enough of a recovery in the rest of the United Kingdom to present – along with the rapidly growing Labour Party – a troublesome opposition to the new Conservative Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin.

  Murray was accompanied through the exit by Robert Munro, the Liberal Scottish Secretary. Baldwin replaced Munro with Viscount Novar. In his earlier life as Robert Crauford Munro-Ferguson, Novar had been briefly the Member of Parliament for Ross-shire-with-Lewis. He had been dismissed from that post when the Third Reform Act had enfranchised sufficient crofters to elect their own MP in the General Election of 1885. Robert Crauford Munro-Ferguson had then been sent south with the warning ringing in his ears never again to oppose the crofters’ interest. He would not do so.

  The office of William Mitchell Cotts as parliamentary representative of the Western Isles was short, unexpected and unique. It lasted for only a year, it usurped a widely respected sitting member and it returned to Westminster the closest thing that the constituency ever had to a Conservative MP. Baronet Cotts would never have described himself as anything other than a Liberal, albeit a ‘National’ or Coalition Liberal. But he served under the Conservative administrations of Andrew Bonar Law and Stanley Baldwin.

  The significance to the land issue of his election was partly muted by the persistently low turn-out, by the lull in turf hostilities in November 1922, and by the fact that Cotts himself always agreed that a respectable, negotiable amount of estate property in the islands should be returned to crofting tenure. He was neither so fiery nor so effective on the subject as Murray, but he adhered to a substantial measure of land reform. He could hardly fail to do so: it was the official policy of his party. But Cotts was undoubtedly the Leverhulme candidate and the champion of the professional merchant classes. As a titled southern industrialist he had far more in common with the proprietor (who shared with him, it should be recalled, a distant Liberal pedigree) than did any Stornoway doctor. Cotts was also the favoured son of William Grant’s Stornoway Gazette, which spent a great many of the post-war years shrieking like a maiden aunt about reds under her bed.

  In 1922 a total of 21,089 men over the age of twenty-one and women over the age of thirty were franchised to vote in the Western Isles. Sir William Mitchell Cotts was endorsed by 6,177 of them. As Murray received just 5,238 votes this was enough to elect Cotts as the MP for a disturbed constituency in a chaotic time. There would be five General Elections between 1922 and 1931. The 53-year-old Cotts stood down at the next one a year later in December 1923. His term of office had been unremarkable, distinguished more by his substantial leaves of absence in southern Africa on business affairs (during which hiatuses the long-suffering mainland Ross-shire MP Ian MacPherson would attend to Hebridean constituency matters) than by legislative achievement.

  In the election which followed Cotts resignation his Conservative/National Liberal Coalition Party promptly suffered a series of electoral losses which resulted within two months in defeat in the House of Commons and Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour Party establishing its own coalition government with the Liberals.

  The Western Isles was one of the seats which contributed to this shift of national power at the end of 1923. In place of Baronet Cotts it returned a straightforward traditional Liberal MP named Alexander MacKenzie Livingstone. The 43-year-old Livingstone was the son of a family from Applecross in Wester Ross and was married to a Mary MacAskill from Skye (after Mary died in 1946 Livingstone took as his second wife a widow from Stornoway named Maggie Clark). His work as the head of a family exporting business had taken him to London, and he had first stood unsuccessfully for parliament at Dover in 1918. He revived his Highland political interests by standing in 1922 for Inverness-shire as a cohort of Donald Murray in the Liberal interest. Like Murray, Livingstone was defeated in 1922. His candidature for the Western Isles one year later was his next testing of the electoral water.

  He won a three-cornered race against Conservative and Labour opponents, after another tired turn-out of 40 per cent of island voters. The fatigue, the widespread satiety of Leodhasaich with the land issue and with the tiresome unnecessary controversies provoked by Lord Leverhulme was made evident by Alexander Mackenzie Livingstone’s earliest parliamentary activity: he devoted himself to challenging illegal east-coast trawling in the inshore fishing grounds of the Western Isles and the ‘inadequate’ postal service to Stornoway. The question of the land, which was now apparently back in the hands of the Board of Agriculture, bothered him hardly at all.

  Illegal trawling and the Lewis mail were enough to satisfy the bulk of his electorate. On 9 October 1924 the shortlived minority Labour government lost a House of Commons vote and the country trooped wearily into the polling booths for the third time in three years. Labour suffered only slightly in the resulting Conservative landslide, but once more Livingstone’s Liberal Party collapsed, from 155 seats across the country to a mere 40. And once more, the Western Isles kicked against the traces. Its Liberal candidate, Alexander MacKenzie Livingstone, was not only one of the forty to be returned – he was the only one to be reelected with a substantially increased majority. In a similarly low poll to that of 1923 he increased his personal vote and his majority from 233 to 2,161.

  And so Livingstone sat, as a member of what was suddenly, mysteriously and irretrievably the third party in British politics, in opposition to St
anley Baldwin’s second Conservative administration, until 1929, when he retired from the Western Isles seat to make way for another Liberal.

  Thereafter, not insignificantly, the Ross-shire businessman Alexander MacKenzie Livingstone and his former constituency of the Western Isles followed a similar political projectory. In 1930 Livingstone joined the Labour Party. He would serve his new allegiance faithfully, as a national administrator and a City of London councillor, until his death in 1950. The island voters would have patience with his Liberal successor for only another five years. In 1935 they returned the Labour candidate Malcolm K. Macmillan. For the remainder of the twentieth century, apart from a seventeen-year interregnum between 1970 and 1987 when the seat was held by a popular local representative of the Scottish National Party, the Western Isles would elect a Labour Member of Parliament. For most of this period the Labour Party was regarded as an instrument of the urban proletariat. Its persistent popularity in the most rural constituency in the United Kingdom posed therefore a psephological puzzle. At least a part of the solution was perhaps to be found in those dispiriting years which followed the First World War, during which a generation of Gaelic smallholders discovered that their interests coincided to an unsuspected degree with the concerns of their fellow ex-servicemen from the south – who had also returned to a land fit for heroes, and who had also discovered there instead a dystopia of homelessness and unemployment dictated by the epilepsies of high finance.

  In the opening months of 1923 Lord Leverhulme, having congratulated his fellow baronet Mitchell Cotts on his election and returned to the challenges of Lever Brothers, stepped carelessly into another Highland morass. The resignation Honours List of David Lloyd George in November 1922 had offered him a further step in the peerage. He was made a viscount. As with his baronetcy, the viscountship traditionally required the suffix of a place or a district. He decided upon the Hebrides. Despite everything, despite all the disappointments and misjudgements and retreats, he would recognise his happy months in Lews Castle by becoming Viscount Leverhulme of the Western Isles in the counties of Inverness and Ross and Cromarty. ‘When I was first raised to the Peerage,’ he would explain, ‘I took the title of “Lord Leverhulme of Bolton-le-Moors”, which is my birthplace and place of my ancestors . . . I viewed Bolton in the position of mother, and I viewed the Western Isles in the position of wife.’51