Some did, but most of them paid greater attention to the entreaties of the representative of Ontario at meetings in Balallan, Leurbost, Ness, Barvas and elsewhere. Two poignantly symbolic events took place within fourteen days in the spring of 1923. On Saturday 7 April Leverhulme, who was making his first visit to the island since the controversy over his new title, announced plans to build a new town hall and art gallery in Stornoway. Two weeks later, on Saturday 21 April, the SS Metagama dropped anchor in the harbour, took on board 260 Lewis men and women and set sail with them for Canada.
The first of those occasions took place over a long and distinguished luncheon party at the Waverley Hotel. Leverhulme was presented with an illuminated address signed by the chairmen of every parish council in Lewis and Harris, congratulating him on becoming Viscount ‘of the Western Isles’, and with a telegram from Sir William Mitchell Cotts which regretted that following his recent business trip to South Africa the Member of Parliament had returned to so much work in London that he was unable to take the night train north.
Provost Kenneth MacKenzie, a tweed manufacturer, assured the proprietor that whatever had been said or written during the past few months, there had not been ‘a murmur of dissent’ in Lewis and Harris about his new title. On the contrary, ‘there is entire satisfaction’.
If there was any surviving doubt as to whether the old man had been hurt and embittered by Alexander Nicolson and his colleagues in Inverness, Leverhulme cleared it up with bravura. He was extremely annoyed. He was no sooner on his feet than the jibes commenced. He had uncovered, he said, ‘the previous record of some of the gentlemen who assumed the title “Lord of the Isles”, and I must say they do not seem to have been a very attractive lot.’
The packed tableside at the Waverley Hotel burst into laughter. And better was to come. ‘I quite understand that Inverness will have no more of them,’ he continued. ‘On one occasion a Lord of the Isles burnt Inverness to the ground. And on another occasion one of them seized the Castle of Inverness and levied toll on the inhabitants. Why? To keep an illegitimate son of his! I can assure the people of Inverness I have no intention of burning Inverness to the ground or of seizing the Castle, or levying toll on the inhabitants.’
Viscount Leverhulme returned then, in almost elegiac tones, to a summation of his plans, his philosophy and his feelings for Lewis. In an adjusted version of his epistle to the Gaelic Society of Inverness he spelled out in one more sad account his detestation of the crofting system. ‘It reduces the people in health and strength; it is a hotbed for the breeding of consumption.’ Cutting farms up into crofts ‘looks to me like certain men who do not go to sea at all casting their eyes on a beautiful haul of fish landed by other men, and, instead of going to fish themselves, say: “Let us help ourselves to these fish here, it is so much easier!” – and the Scottish Office supports this.’
Equating Lewis people with common thieves and describing the Scottish Secretary as their accomplice in crime was the language of a man who intended to go no further on this island. No more evidence was by April 1923 required of the gulf which yawned between Lord Leverhulme and his Hebridean tenants. Above all, perhaps, he stubbornly refused to comprehend their visceral attachment to the 1886 Crofting Reform Act. This measure had been won by these people and by their parents not forty years earlier. It was perceived accurately by them as being the fruit of their longsuffering testimony. When land raiders said – as they invariably did say – that they wanted not tied estate bungalows, but a croft ‘under the 1886 Act’ with security of tenure and compensation for improvements, they were not being sentimental or unrealistic. They were expressing their refusal to relinquish so quickly what they considered to be the basic human right of freedom from eviction.
Many of the men squeezed tightly around a dining table in the Waverley Hotel that day laughed and applauded their landowner when he repeated his comparison with fish-stealers. (The line had, first time round, evoked no reported response.) There were Morrisons present, and MacLeods and MacKenzies, as well as a William Grant. Perhaps they were so far removed from their origins and their constituents as to accept the analogy without flinching. Perhaps – we have no way of knowing – their hilarity was slightly forced and their handclaps muted and uneasy.
He moved on. He chewed unhappily and at length over the perfidy of Robert Munro, the brutal ignorance of the raiders and his own unimpeachable intentions. He said that the present wave of emigration was due entirely to the insurmountable obstacles which the Scottish Office and the land raiders had erected before his development schemes. He recapped the sorry tale of seizure and retreat and re-seizure at Gress in the far-off days of 1921. He mellowed towards his conclusion. He would, he said, like to see a park in Stornoway. He presented his plan for a new town hall, and asked the gathering to notice that it included space for an art gallery. He was presented in return with the illuminated address congratulating him on his latest honour. He stumbled a little in his thanks. He would never have adopted ‘of the Western Isles’, he said, ‘if I thought it would give pain to a single human being’. The illuminated address was then passed around an admiring table. As it made its way from hand to hand Leverhulme spoke again. ‘It is a beautiful work of art,’ he said. ‘But I value it most for the heart-throbs in it.’
He was consoled by Provost Mackenzie, by his old friend and former provost Murdo Maclean, by Reverend Alex White of Stornoway United Free Church and by John Mackenzie of Tarbert. He was told that the men who had raided his estate farms in pursuit of crofts were both untypical of Lewis and Harris and a disgrace to their compatriots. He was informed by Murdo Maclean that the raiders were the ‘lowest element’ of their community, and that they alone bore responsibility ‘for thwarting all of the objects that Lord Leverhulme had so much at heart’. He was reassured at length by John MacKenzie that far from resenting his adoption of the Viscountship ‘of the Western Isles’, everybody in Lewis and Harris welcomed the honour unequivocally. He was, Lord Leverhulme was told, ‘a prince . . . a man who had shown that his sole interest and desire was to promote the well-being of all who served him’.
A fortnight later the Metagama left with its human cargo for North America. It was not the last vessel to sail out of Stornoway carrying such a doleful burden. In 1923 and 1924 1,000 Leodhasaich would leave in similar ships. The Metagama became emblematic of them all because in April 1923 it appeared to present such a stark and final solution to the post-war problems of Lewis. Her departure took on the aspect of an exodus. Thirty-five journalists and photographers from the national press attended the ceremony. They witnessed astonishing scenes. On the Sunday before the sailing Reverend Alex White drew his sermon at the United Free Church from Genesis 12: ‘And Jehovah said unto Abraham, get thou out of thy Country and from thy kindred and from thy father’s house unto the land I will show thee.’ Reporters from Glasgow and Edinburgh saw the country buses – ‘motor vehicles of an antique pattern, with box-like open wagonette bodies’ – begin to roll into Stornoway on Friday night, along roads which ‘resembled scenes of refugees fleeing before an advancing army’.
The emigrants, chiefly ‘young men with sunburnt faces and new suits’ (there were 242 Lewis men and 18 women on the Metagama), wore maple leaf badges and were each presented with a Gaelic bible. The pipe band marched and played and psalms were sung on the pier. They were assembled on the quarterdeck of the Metagama late in the afternoon, and before she hauled anchor two Free Church ministers, from Ness and from Garrabost in Point, addressed them in their native language. Then they swung cautiously out past the Beasts of Holm and eastwards into the Minch before the liner set her course north, to round the Butt of Lewis and make headway into the North Atlantic Ocean.55
The 260 people who sailed on her, along with a few dozen from other islands and from the mainland, were certainly in search of a livelihood. But it would be misleading to suggest, as had been the received wisdom in the Waverley Hotel two weeks earlier, that they were driven from Lewis
because of the frustration of Lord Leverhulme’s schemes for industrialisation. Just 14 per cent of them were from Stornoway. The remaining 86 per cent departed home addresses in every rural parish on the island. They had been the passengers on those wagonettes, the refugees on the Stornoway road out of Point, Ness, Tolsta, Lochs, Barvas and Uig.
They did not travel to Ontario to look for a job on a factory line or a salaried office position. Overwhelmingly, they emigrated in search of land. They left Lewis because they were promised smallholdings, on the Canadian prairie or in the Australian outback, from which they could not be evicted and upon which they could build houses. Pastoralists they had been, and – whatever sorrows and disappointments, whatever other great and good and immensely rewarding careers they and their children would eventually discover in the newfoundlands – at the point of departure, pastoralists they intended to remain.
Viscount Leverhulme was no longer in the Western Isles on the day the Metagama sailed. He did not need to be present to recognise the immense symbolism of the occasion. Nothing between him and Lewis could ever be the same again. It was not even a private severance. Those three dozen pressmen ensured that this bleak, emotional and highly visible conclusion to all his loudly touted plans and proposals and enthusiasms for the future of the Hebrides was splashed across newspapers from London to New Brunswick. ‘These isles are now being emptied,’ announced one Canadian journal. ‘Only the old are left behind.’ British editorial columns, which a few short years before had acclaimed him as the saviour of a benighted region, were now discoursing mournfully on the pity of emigration and the tragic circumstances of the land whose very name and titles he had assumed. There had been many beginnings to this end, but Saturday 21 April 1923 represented the final chapter. Had he only realised it, after the sun set on that spring night there was no longer any point even in trying to apportion blame.
Since his frank admission at Stornoway Highland Games in September 1921 that the real reason for shelving his improvement projects was the unfavourable ‘condition of supply and demand’ in the fishing industry, he had hardened into a condition of what later dictionaries would define as denial. His later statements and speeches were studded increasingly with self-justifying protestations, which bordered occasionally upon the maudlin, of his inculpability, of his helplessness in the face of events beyond his foresight or control. Crotchety and frustrated, the old proprietor rarely again referred after September 1921 to the economic situation which had forced his hand. As the months and years passed he felt obliged to uncover scapegoats, individuals, malevolent human explanations for the legendary industrialist’s defeat by the market. It might one day be the raiders, Murdo Maclean’s ‘lowest element’ of Lewis. It might another day be the Board of Agriculture. It could be Scottish Secretary Robert Munro. Munro’s successor, Viscount Novar, was surely an unlikely candidate for blame, but in the twilight view over ruined dreams from the turrets of Lews Castle any mirage was possible.
He brooded throughout the summer in London and in Harris and in Cheshire. His decision finally to relinquish Lewis was probably reached in July. At a meeting at the Scottish Office in London on 14 June called by the landowner to protest against the transferral of Galson Farm to crofting tenure, the chairman of the Board of Agriculture Sir Robert Greig hinted to Leverhulme’s representative Sir Edgar Sanders that the government hoped to continue providing new croft land in the Hebrides. To this end, farms might in the future be sequestrated.
Both Viscount Novar’s office and the Board of Agriculture subsequently insisted in writing that they had no intention of turning all of Lewis into a crofting estate, or even in the months to come of reallocating any more of Leverhulme’s farms. What had been said, insisted the Scottish Under-Secretary John Lamb, was ‘not a statement of policy, but merely an expression of Sir Robert’s fear that so long as there was any land available in Lewis there would be a demand for it and a danger of raiding. My recollection on this point is confirmed by Sir Robert.’
Viscount Novar and Sir Robert Greig appear to have felt compelled more to explain the realities of life in north-western Scotland than to issue Bolshevik threats. But Sanders and Leverhulme seized upon Greig’s vague and unremarkable repetition of the Board of Agriculture’s desire to ease the lot of land-starved Hebrideans. They decided to ignore Lamb’s placatory letters from the Scottish Office. An imaginary menace issuing from a wearily disputatious meeting therefore became, conveniently, the straw which broke the camel’s back.
‘It would be madness for me,’ Leverhulme would claim, ‘to disregard this clear intimation from the Scottish Office that under certain circumstances they might be compelled to take for crofting every farm in Lewis except the Manor Farm’ (which, as the estate’s Home Farm, was immune to reassignation). He had been given no such intimation. He had on the contrary been reassured that the Scottish Office supported his own proposals, if not his detestation of crofting. But they were out of patience with him, and he was out of patience with Lewis.
His options were limited. The traditional recourse of an estate owner at the end of his tether was to sell his property. Leverhulme searched for an alternative to this. Property prices were still in recession. Whatever relatively small sum he might be offered for Lewis would mean little to the personal fortune of a multi-millionaire approaching the end of his life. To sell, to hand those proud deeds over to somebody else, would moreover be the final personal admission of defeat. It would also carry with it the unconscionable danger that a new proprietor might prove to be more popular and more successful than Viscount Leverhulme of the Western Isles.
So he determined to divide the island into separate estates, falling broadly into the categories of town and country, Stornoway and the outlying districts – the very parishes which he had once insisted to the people of rural Back were indivisible. Having done so he would offer Lewis as a gift to its people.
There can have been no single, easily identifiable reason for this decision. It was in 1923 an unprecedented gesture. It came from a man who had insistently railed against the threat of Bolshevism and the nonsense of socialism. All of Leverhulme’s working life had been interpreted as an exercise in benign capitalism, as a practical demonstration of the benefits of that apparent oxymoron, liberal autocracy. His efforts in the Wirral had been intended to prove that healthy and well-housed urban workers were happier and more profitable to their employer. His efforts in Africa had been attempts to give colonialism a human face. His efforts in the Hebrides had been unashamedly inspired by the desire to set twentieth-century market forces loose in a ‘backward’ agrarian part of the United Kingdom, and thereby prove to the world that everybody – Merseyside proletarian, northern industrialist, Lewis crofter and Highland landowner – stood to gain by the intelligent application of capitalist principles.
This was the man who now suggested turning Lewis, one of the biggest private estates in Britain, into a couple of autonomous workers’ soviets. It has been suggested that he considered himself to be handing a poisoned chalice to his erstwhile tormentors, that he expected to provoke either their refusal to accept such responsibilities, or their catastrophic failure to carry them out. If so he was half-rewarded. He may have considered the crofting Hebrides to be ungovernable by any other person or persons. He may (as he privately suggested to at least one English friend) have wished to pre-empt any attempt by the Board of Agriculture to bring them into state ownership. He may also (as he said publicly and privately on several occasions) have nursed a reluctant regard for his formidable ‘enemy’; he may have believed that these proud and God-fearing and articulate people, with the exception of their ‘lowest elements’, had earned the opportunity to mould their own future.
And he may, at the end of the struggle, have allowed most characteristically that sentimental, philanthropic part of his nature to well up and spill out in a dramatic demonstration of unrequited love. The Western Isles, he had said, were like a wife to him, and he was ever a devoted husband.
Leverhulme called virtually every public representative in the island to a meeting at the Town Council Chambers in Stornoway on Monday 3 September 1923, sixteen days before his seventy-second birthday and two years after he had announced that both his own affairs and the national fishing industry were in such crisis that he could no longer continue with most of his Lewis investments. He had arrived on the Sheila a few days previously. Harley Williams, the recently-appointed Medical Officer for Lewis who would later become a successful author, was among the curious gathered at the waterside and sensed ‘a certain coldness in the welcome . . . A respectful crowd thronged the wharf, but I remember there was no cheering, no enthusiasm, and the thickset grey-combed figure moved up the gangway and drove away between silent throngs.’56
Some of those present at the meeting on the following Monday were familiar to some degree with the purpose of the assembly; everybody was aware of being witness to something of great moment. Leverhulme was introduced with grave ceremony by Provost Kenneth Mackenzie. He rose from his chair to the shuffling silence of a church service.
I never had a more uncongenial burden laid upon myself than the one which devolves upon me today, which is to explain fully and without reserve the position I find myself placed in with regard to my relationship with the island of Lewis to all my friends – you in this room, and the greater number outside this room – with whom I have had such agreeable and friendly relations for over five years.
As I explained to you at our first meeting together, I am not attracted to Lewis by any love of sport such as fishing, game shooting or deer stalking, but entirely by the possibilities I thought I recognised here, in Lewis, of doing something in a small way, within the limits of my capacity, for the permanent benefit of the fine people living in the island of Lewis and who have for centuries won the admiration of all who have known them.
The Soap Man Page 24