In the furore which followed it was often asserted by Leverhulme’s party that ‘most of the people’ of Lewis and Harris ‘were pleased that he chose to include them in his title’.52 There is no evidence of this, although the Stornoway Gazette was staunch in its editorial support, and it was probably true that a majority of islanders either wished the little soap man well in whatever vanities might make him happy, or were so inured to the pretensions of feudal superiors that they neither noticed nor cared.
Sadly, there were people other than Viscount Leverhulme, David Lloyd George and their sovereign who set great store by such titles. Their first shot was fired on 23 January 1923, when Mr Alexander N. Nicolson, the secretary and treasurer of the Gaelic Society of Inverness, rose to address his colleagues. The Gaelic Society of Inverness was in January 1923 entering its fifty-second year. It perceived itself with justification as the most venerable Highland pressure group in the country. It had in its history been unashamedly political. Lairds flocked as ardently to the Gaelic Society of Inverness as did radicals, but it had nonetheless managed in the land wars of the 1880s to align itself uncompromisingly with the crofters – one of the Society’s founders, William MacKay of Glenurquhart in Inverness-shire, manipulated its ‘cultural’ remit to present to the Napier Commission evidence of traditions ‘which showed that the land in the Highlands was considered to belong to the crofters who worked it’.
In its fiftieth anniversary year of 1921 the Gaelic Society of Inverness had appointed Alex N. Nicolson as its secretary/treasurer. For almost another forty years Nicolson would be a mainstay, almost the personification, of the institution. He did not believe in a modest profile. With Alex Nicolson, wrote Mairi A. Macdonald in her centennial history, ‘a fresh wind blew into the Society . . . at times, this wind could be a perishing nor’ nor’ easter, causing chaos and bitterness, but it blew, and eventually fanned a steady flame of continuous activity.’ Viscount Leverhulme was among the first to feel its chill.
Leverhulme had, asserted Alex Nicolson, ‘been badly advised when he adopted the style “of the Western Isles” . . . It was a great pity that his Lordship should depart from the propriety with which Englishmen, who had bought estates in Scotland, had for many generations respected the sentiments of the Scots. [Mr Nicolson] did not know of any case in which the sentiments of the Scottish people had been offended as they had been in this instance.’53
Alex Nicolson was undoubtedly over-egging his pudding. It is unlikely that there was much more popular discontent with Leverhulme’s chosen title in Gorbals or Kirkcaldy than was evident in Breasclete. The Lancashire man had simply displayed yet again his ignorance of Highland history. His new title encroached on the honorific Lord of the Isles, which was (as the Gaelic Society delicately pointed out) at present the property of the Prince of Wales, the future King Edward VIII. It also trod on the toes of Sir Alexander Bosville Macdonald of Sleat in Skye, the titular head of Clan Donald, who was entitled to style himself Macdonald of the Isles.
More seriously, both of those established handles referred back to the same honoured memory of the Lordship of the Isles, the quasi-independent medieval Hebridean principality which for over 300 years before the end of the fifteenth century had represented the only autonomous Scottish Gaidhealtachd in history. It was a fabled estate, an insular emirate which had in its bloom reached from Lewis to the Isle of Man. The head of Sunlight Soap may as well have bought Cornwall and called himself Leverhulme of Camelot. He was not to know – although he could have been told by friends other than Sir Harry Lauder – that it was difficult to resurrect some hope of independent renewal in the Scottish Hebrides without stirring buried embers of the Lordship of the Isles.
And there was snobbish outrage that an upstart merchant’s boy from Bolton should assume such dignity; and more palatable annoyance that he chose to throw his seigneurial cloak across the Hebrides at the same time as he was apparently losing his interest in the future well-being of Lewis. There was existing disquiet about his ‘colonial’ renaming of Obbe as Leverburgh. And there were too many people in too many offices with nothing to do but pen irate letters.
‘Sir,’ wrote Alex Nicolson, Secretary, from the Gaelic Society at 6 Queen’s Gate, Inverness, to his fellow Scot, the Right Honourable Andrew Bonar Law, Prime Minister, at 10 Downing Street, London, on 26 January 1923:
We deeply regret to trouble you over the subject matter of the enclosed copy of a resolution passed by this society re the style adopted by Lord Leverhulme on his being created a Viscount, viz., ‘of the Western Isles’.
While, however, we regret the necessity of troubling you, we strongly feel that action should be taken to prevent this outrage on the feelings of all Scotsman, particularly on the feelings of Highlanders, not only at home but also in the Dominions.
The last point was a diplomatic one. Although he represented a Glasgow constituency and had been raised by his maternal family in that city from the age of eleven, Andrew Bonar Law was born and had learned to walk in the dominion of Canada.
We desire, [continued Nicolson], to bring to your notice that this matter is causing a great deal of feeling, and, in the interests of all concerned, it is hoped that the matter will be rectified and this cause of offence removed . . . even if he did possess the whole of the Western Hebrides it would not justify the assumption by him of any title which suggests the ancient title of Lord of the Isles: especially when that title is held by His Majesty the King.
Andrew Bonar Law was an old, extremely busy and rather sick man. His private secretary despatched to Inverness a brusque reply regretting that the Prime Minister could not ‘take any action in regard to the matter’.
Lord Leverhulme himself was more combative. He responded to a similar plea by requesting further explanation of the Gaelic Society’s objections. Alex Nicolson obliged. He wrote to Hampstead Heath on 9 February 1923, after careful examination of the industrial patent procedure with which his correspondent would doubtless be familiar:
By the use of the words ‘of the Western Isles’, your Lordship is employing what would be, under the Merchandise Marks Act, be called a ‘colourable imitation’ of the words ‘of the Isles’ . . .
The title ‘of the Isles’ belongs to the heroic age of Scottish history, and is enshrined in the song and story of the West; consequently, its use – or the use of anything approaching it – by any other than the Royal House or the descendants of its ancient holders is bound to give offence to all who cherish the traditions of our race . . . In any case, I think I am right in stating that the islands of Uist, Benbecula, Barra etc., do not belong to your Lordship; therefore you are not entitled to include them in your territorial designation even though the term ‘Western Isles’ comprehended the Outer Hebrides only.
Alex Nicolson received for his pains an extraordinary manifesto from the proprietor of Lewis and Harris. Swiftly rebutting any suggestion that his honorific was unsuitable – ‘In my opinion the title indicates service and nothing but service’ – Leverhulme moved on to a lengthy vindication of his efforts in Lewis and Harris. It was as clear an indication as survives of his state of mind in February 1923, eighteen months since he had frozen all major developments in the islands and washed his hands of rural Lewis. It illustrated not only his continuing willingness to do battle with anybody who questioned his will or his judgement, but also a certain condition of denial. He wrote in part as though it was still a sunny day in 1919 and he could see the future of Lewis laid out on a clear horizon, as though Gress and Coll and the Niger Company and the fishery collapse had never happened, as though the milk farm argument were still there to be won, as though the only obstacles to health and prosperity were the purblind meanderings of a few pesky bureaucrats. He wrote as always in an effort to win hearts and minds, confident that all and any exception to him would be swept away by the power of logic and enlightenment. The members of the Gaelic Society of Inverness read with baffled fascination this further rationalisation of the rebirth of the
Outer Hebrides. He wrote as though, at the age of seventy-one, he could start all over again.
May I call your attention to the reports of Royal Commission after Royal Commission on the state of the very fine people of Lewis and Harris and other portions of the Western Isles. No finer manhood or womanhood exists. In reading history I find that the condition of my native county of Lancashire was very similar two and three centuries ago.
What has raised Lancashire to its outstanding position and what has raised the mainland of Scotland is the service the people render to the world at large in manufactures. In my boyhood days hand loom weavers in Lancashire still existed in the cottages and up the valleys through the country: hand loom weaving has now ceased. Today we find in the Western Isles the native industries are hand loom weaving and fishing.
My problem is to try to make these staple industries for the people. The women take naturally to hand loom weaving; the men take naturally to fishing. Crofting today is entirely an impossible life for these fine people. In considering an old age pension the Government, I understand, assess the value of a croft at 8s per week. Crofting and the life on a croft undoubtedly were substantial and reliable two or three centuries ago, but since then the cost of clothing, tea, coffee, sugar, and other items which are necessities today, but which were luxuries then, are out of the reach of the crofter because the income from the croft is practically nil. The produce of the croft is merely a portion of the food consumed.
The service I wish to render is that of an attempt to introduce a higher scale of living and of greater opportunities for happiness and well-being to the fine people of the Western Isles. I have travelled around the world and I find Lewis and Harris men and women honoured and respected and filling the highest positions in Canada, Boston, New York, and elsewhere throughout our Colonies. It is only in their own native Island that they are living under conditions of squalor and misery . . .
Unfortunately, the Scottish Office, notwithstanding the adverse reports of Royal Commissions . . . that farms are essential to the life of a community, are determined to convert the farms into crofts, thus hampering me and crippling me in the work I have undertaken . . .
There will soon be no farms left in Lewis; the Scottish Office have given me notice again this week to take another farm. They have the power to do so, and disregard the warnings of their previous experience of following this line of policy. It can only lead to the forced exile of the rising generation – the sons and daughters of the people of Lewis and Harris.
The service I am proposing to render is to make it possible for the rising generation to find congenial and profitable employment in industries native to the Island, and then it will still be possible for the adventurous spirits to emigrate to Canada, New Zealand, or elsewhere if they so desire.
What I resent very much, and what I know the people of the Island resent, is the forced exile under present conditions owing to lack of employment. I got a most pathetic letter from the wife of a crofter about Christmas time, which to me was more like the wail of a drowning person crying for help than any words of any letter I have previously received, and this wail was from the wife of a crofter in the very district in which the Government are proposing to take the only remaining farm to convert into crofts.
. . . you might know that the people of Lewis and Harris have expressed their pleasure that I added these words, and I have not had a single dissentient word from the people of Lewis and Harris.
Leverhulme was in many ways an unusual landowner. But he held in common with the great majority of his predecessors and successors the inability to distinguish between what he was allowed to see and hear of his tenants and their actual opinions and ambitions. His personal armoury consisted not only of a refusal to comprehend opposing voices, but also the unwillingness to recognise that just because no crofter was self-destructive enough to tell him that he was arrogant and misguided, it did not mean that no crofter thought such things.
Forced against their intention to debate with Leverhulme on the future of the Hebrides and on the views of Lewis and Harris men and women, the Gaelic Society soldiered on. At its annual dinner six days later the Society’s chief, Sir John Lorne MacLeod, noted with asperity that ‘Lord Leverhulme is not in the lonely furrow he thinks he is about his plans for the welfare and prosperity of the Islands’.
On 26 February the indefatigable Alex Nicolson replied once more to Leverhulme: ‘even though the people of Lewis and Harris were unanimous in their approval, and we know that they are not, they only represent one of the Western Isles. Consideration must be given to the opinions of the inhabitants of over 200 other islands.’
Nicolson added a sentence of advice which may have been directed at more than the views of Leodhasaich on Viscount Leverhulme’s title. ‘It is well known,’ he said, ‘that Stornoway seldom, or never, represents Lewis opinion.’
This quaint debate was pursued for a further month, increasingly with more enthusiasm from the Gaelic Society’s secretary than from Lord Leverhulme, and reached the delighted columns of the southern newspapers. Leverhulme signed off by huffily refusing to change his title and describing Alex Nicolson’s entreaty as ‘a request that should never have been made’.
Nicolson took pleasure in two last words. On 5 March 1923 he informed Viscount Leverhulme that he was ‘flaunting public opinion . . . from all parts, including your own district of Lancashire’. Three days later the Gaelic Society of Inverness decided that as the peer seemed bent upon error, there was no further point in writing to him at Hampstead Heath or Port Sunlight. Instead they agreed unanimously that all Highland Members of Parliament, the Scottish Secretary and the – increasingly ailing – Prime Minister should be circulated with a request to revoke the title ‘forthwith’.
So Andrew Bonar Law, two months before ill-health forced him from the premiership and seven months before his untimely death, received from Alexander Nicolson in Inverness another request to ‘cause the removal of this gross insult to Scotsmen in general and Highlanders in particular . . . This is not an agitation on the part of a few perfervid individuals . . . If you, Sir, can obtain the removal of this blot, and restore to us, unsullied, a title which belongs to the heroic age of Scottish History . . . you will earn the deep gratitude of the members of this Society and of thousands of others.’ Poor Bonar Law found the request impossible to meet.
It was in the end just another Highland exasperation for Viscount Leverhulme. The public merriment which surrounded the press coverage of his spat with the Gaelic Society of Inverness (and with the Clan Donald Society of Glasgow, which petitioned chippily on behalf of its chieftain Sir Alexander Macdonald of Sleat) was an unexpected irritant. He had been certain that his benevolent intentions at least entitled him to a degree of goodwill. Compared with other proprietors past and present, he should have been a popular hero. He was restrained in pointing this out, as to do so would have involved describing all manner of Highland lairds (whose honorifics were never questioned) as rogues and vagabonds. He would eventually be driven to do just that, but in the short term he restricted himself to describing in detail his own efforts and left the public to draw the appropriate conclusions. His ally William Grant at the Stornoway Gazette was first to articulate the real sense of grievance in the Leverhulme camp; in February he wrote:
In all the circumstances of fact and of right, those who object to the claim are left with little but sentiment to justify their attitude and action. But in this case the sentiment must be very thin and far-fetched. When we face the historical settings of the matter, what have we to commend the title ‘of the Isles’ to our modern sense of honour and of chivalry? Clan Macdonald may boast of its Lordship connections as it pleases, but what have their so-called Lords done for the Highland people?
The attentions of the people of Lewis and Harris were still focused on what their present proprietor was doing for them, and too often they found it to be too little. While people in Harris were being told that in order to have crofts
they must leave for Uist or Skye, the Board of Agriculture was having difficulty in keeping pace with the scale of the housing problem in Lewis. Landless families such as that of young Calum Smith had been squatting since 1921 in huts on the Marybank and Coulregrein grazings outside Stornoway. Early in 1923 Leverhulme’s estate finally initiated action at the Sheriff Court to have them evicted even from this undesirable terrain. The Board of Agriculture considered applying to the Land Court to have the squatters’ camps reassigned as legitimate housing sites. A survey of the Coulregrein grazings, however, revealed that they were too wet and badly drained to qualify for building consent. Like the squatters themselves, the Board searched desperately for alternatives. Calum Smith’s family, which by 1923 included seven children, moved from their small shack at Coulregrein to a thatched two-roomed cottage a mile away at Newvalley. ‘For occupation by a family of nine,’ he would recall, ‘it couldn’t be described as anything other than a rural slum . . . My family survived, like all islanders, because of perpetual hard work on the land and sea, and because of the system of mutual communal aid that obtained at the time.’54
Others went farther afield. Advertisements for shipping lines and passages to America jostled beside advertisements for Sunlight Soap in the columns of the local newspaper. Australian government agents disembarked at Stornoway and urged Leodhasaich across the length and breadth of the island not to forget the charms of the Antipodes. ‘It is to be hoped,’ enthused the Gazette, ‘that the opportunities offered by the Australian Government will be seriously considered by many in the island of Lewis who have not had a chance in the past of taking up agricultural pursuits under such good conditions.’
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