The Soap Man

by Roger Hutchinson

  Many people warned me before I came here, and before I finally decided on the purchase of the island from its then owner, that I should find the people difficult, and the usual slander was uttered that I should find them not only difficult but lazy. Neither in my own experience, nor has it been so in the experience of others who have written on the subject, have I found the slander of laziness to have any foundation in fact. We have all of us our natural aptitudes, and, if we do not understand each other, we cannot draw right conclusions. I know for a fact that letters have been addressed to English papers, by working men, asking the question: ‘Did anyone ever hear of Lord Leverhulme doing a hard day’s work in his life?’, notwithstanding the fact that my day’s work begins by rising at 4.30 in the morning . . .

  There were no punctuations of applause at this fateful meeting, no outbursts of supportive laughter. He passed on from praise for the diligence of Leodhasaich to sing yet again of the unrealised potential of Hebridean fisheries. He pronounced dead the days of the cottage industry and the small crofter. Then he turned to land raiding. It had been made absolutely clear, he asserted, that Scottish Secretaries of all political persuasions were opposed to the imprisonment of raiders – ‘the raiders made their own law, and the Scottish Office permitted it’. In such intolerable local circumstances had he been obliged to wrestle with the enormities of international economic depression.

  In September of 1921 in speaking in Stornoway I called attention to this and also to the economic conditions which then prevailed and which of themselves made it impossible for me at that moment to resume development work . . . It would have been as mad for me to have said I would resume at that moment as it would be for any captain of any ship on the ocean that encountered fog to persist in going all speed ahead, but, just as surely as that the fog will lift and the mists disappear so surely would such economic conditions pass away, but I was given no opportunity for this to occur.

  The Scottish Office had interpreted Leverhulme’s suspension of his improvement programme as the landowner defaulting on his gentleman’s agreement to press on with job-creation in return for a ten-year holiday from croft-creation. This supposedly crucial arrangement was never much more than wishful thinking. Even if Robert Munro had felt himself able realistically to promise such a lengthy hiatus in land settlement, any successor in the Scottish Office would have been free to overturn it in an hour. All the major political parties were in favour of granting crofts to Highlanders, especially to Highlanders who had served in the Great War. Of all the leading figures in this drama, only Lord Leverhulme was opposed to crofting and an advocate of sending land-hungry holders of the Distinguished Service Medal to jail. For so long as he guaranteed to replace smallholdings with respectable and secure salaries, the government might try to humour him. The moment he announced that he was not only cancelling his future schemes but also curtailing those few labouring projects which were already in operation, the government had no choice but to revert to its previous position and answer the cry for land. This was duly interpreted by Leverhulme as the Scottish Office stampeding to betray him. It was, he told his audience in Stornoway on 3 September 1923, nothing short of Shakespearean tragedy:

  I am now left without any object or motive for remaining here. For me merely to come each year as an ordinary visitor to the castle, and knowing that I could take no interest in fishing or sport, would be meaningless. I am like Othello with my occupation gone, and I could only be like the ghost of Hamlet’s father haunting the place as a shadow. Under these conditions, I should feel rather depressed than exhilarated, and so I am proposing now to take one of two courses.

  The one of these two courses would be that I should sell the castle and all the sporting properties. I am informed that these would sell readily at a price which, under the circumstances, would be satisfactory.

  The other course, and the one that would be more congenial to myself, would be that I should make a gift of the whole of the island of Lewis as I purchased it from the late proprietor, Colonel Matheson.

  Without binding myself at this moment . . . I suggest that Lewis is divided into two spheres of influence for the Trustees. One sphere being all issue, crofts, etc, lying beyond a distance of seven miles radius from the Post Office, Stornoway, the other sphere being within this radius.

  In the sphere beyond the radius of seven miles from the Post Office, Stornoway, as to all existing crofts, including the crofts proposed to be cut out of Galson Farm, but excepting crofts occupied by ex-raiders, shall be given as a free gift from myself to their respective cultivators, being resident occupiers of same.

  All farms not yet taken for crofts, together with all sporting and fishing rights with their lodges and houses . . . together with all crofts in the possession of non-resident crofters, and all crofts the resident occupiers of which do not wish to avail themselves of this offer, and together with all crofts occupied by ex-raiders . . . I wish to give to Trustees nominated from time to time by the Lewis District Committee.

  All crofts, farms, castle grounds and policies within the seven-mile radius from the centre of Stornoway would similarly be given to Trustees nominated by Stornoway Town Council and elected from the Parliamentary Voters Lists. Both bodies were requested to give him their acceptance or refusal within five working weeks, by Saturday 6 October.

  The original seven-mile radius proposed by Leverhulme was just enough to put Gress within the Stornoway Trust and Tolsta without it. To the east it encompassed almost all of Point but the busy headland township of Portnaguran. To the south, most of North Lochs would have been governed by one body but all of South Lochs by another. To the west there was little controversy. Enough of the lowlands of Barvas Moor were contained within the township trust to keep their summer sheilings and peat cuttings in the reach of east coast crofters. And enough of the high wasteland of Barvas Moor was included to ensure that eighty years later, when a local resource which had escaped the attention even of Lord Leverhulme was ready for exploitation, the Stornoway Trust was in a position to propose wind turbine electricity generation on the far hills beyond the suburbs of Newvalley and Coulregrein, where once young Calum Smith and his family squeezed into a single living room and wondered how a living was to be found in 1920s Lewis.

  The seven-mile radius and the selection of trustees were rationalised in the following weeks. Tolsta and the whole of Point were taken into the Stornoway fold. Lochs, North and South, were excluded. The boundary now ran to the south of Arnish Moor. Everything else would be within the purlieu of a ‘country’ trust, half appointed by the Lewis District Committee and half elected. The ‘town’ trust would take the same form, with its appointees put forward by Stornoway Town Council.

  Leverhulme finished his speech that day with both a scripted and an improvised text. His prepared lines concluded:

  I am leaving Lewis with deep regrets. I am carrying with me the happiest recollections of my five years’ residence among the people of Lewis, and my most profound gratitude for the full and generous welcome and support I have always received practically unanimously from all, because support and welcome came from all but less than 2 per cent of those living in Lewis. I hope you will receive my proposals as indicating my desire when leaving Lewis to do all in my power to secure the future welfare, prosperity and happiness of its people.

  He then set down the script and addressed his audience – which had finally managed a round of applause – extempore. He would now be leaving the room, he said, so that in whatever discussions took place they would not be impeded by his presence. He felt they would want to discuss the matter amongst themselves, and in going he would save ‘some little pain’ to himself and it would be convenient for them. He did not want any votes of thanks (he got one anyway, albeit brief, from Provost MacKenzie). It was a very serious matter for all of them. As far as he was concerned his desire was that they should accept. He would have no difficulty in selling on the open market – ‘but I would rather that the experiment is firs
t tried of ownership of the island by the people of the island.’

  And so Viscount Leverhulme of the Western Isles divorced himself from the island of Lewis, beaten down by international market forces and the – in his rendering, equivalent – vandalisms of a group of land raiders from Back. The size of this crucial band of subversives remained always open to question. At times they could be claimed by allies such as Murdo Maclean to be as few as ten or twelve. Leverhulme had once informed the Board of Agriculture that this ‘small group of misguided men’ were about thirty in number. On other occasions, most notably following the meeting at Gress bridge, he had perceived them as being in four figures.

  He presumably deliberated before settling, in this keynote final delivery, for the total of ‘less than 2 per cent’. Not 1 per cent, which would have indicated 300 people, or a rounded 2 per cent, or 5 per cent, but ‘less than’ 2 per cent. Should we say, 500 men and women who from a population of 30,000 had failed to offer him ‘support and welcome’? He did not know; he never had known and never would know. Ten, 30, 500, 1,000 or 30,000: they were as invisible as conscience, a guerrilla army of ghosts, only rarely recognisable and quite impossible to count. They had not defeated him. The bulk and top-heavy weight of his own overblown schemes and expectations had rather collapsed about his feet. They had merely been there at the beginning, asking for promises to be honoured, as they would be there at the end to pick up the fragments.

  They would however, most of them, defeat his final scheme. He was offering to the crofters of rural Lewis owner-occupancy. He wanted them to relinquish their titles as tenant smallholders and become little private freeholders. For a number of reasons which would become evident as the weeks (and indeed the years) passed, almost all crofters were unwilling to take this step.

  There was never much doubt that Stornoway Town Council would accept its part of the bargain. They were being offered the freehold of some considerable amenities, they would be buoyed by substantial urban rates and duties, and they would be responsible only to the croftlands to their immediate north. Within a week the Council had met and agreed ‘to accept the gift subject to the adjustment of details’.

  Beyond Barvas Moor and south of Arnish matters were more complicated. Murdo Morrison, a Justice of the Peace from Bragar on the west coast, described how:

  During the first flush of the excitement [following Leverhulme’s offer] no possible drawback seemed probable. Complete freedom and independence – so dear to Lewis hearts – was ours for the taking. Not a cloud on the horizon, and we were to be happy ever after – like the ending of all good children’s stories.

  But on the morrow, after sleeping over it for a night, the awakenings brought misgivings. Questions of managements and economies forced themselves forward. Miniature parliaments and legislative assemblies soon became the order of the day, and ‘ways and means’ were discussed in a manner that does credit to the Lewis crofter, and as it is generally known that the parish of Barvas is not self-supporting, the various sources of revenue suggested, which were never before tapped, are highly interesting, and some of them appear quite feasible, the object being that the crofter may not have to pay in taxes as much as he now pays in rent and taxes combined . . . At the moment the general impression is that it would be a crime against all Lewismen, both ‘Burghers’ and ‘Outlanders’, if the offer is declined.

  One thing was quite out of the question. The ‘outlander’ crofters of rural Lewis (and for that matter, the ‘burgher’ crofters of the Back machair) were not prepared to sacrifice their rights under the 1886 Act. And the 1886 Act was framed to protect them as tenant smallholders. Once they had become owner-occupying freeholders, the 1886 Crofters Act would cease to apply in Lewis.

  There was some sentimental attachment here, and some financial acuity – for a croft was a small and difficult patch of land to hoe, and its crofter might ever prefer to be under the protective umbrella of a larger conglomerate. But there was also an atavistic intuition about the precious nature of crofting. It was a peculiarly communal livelihood. It allowed the crofter an enviable combination of independence on his own small turf and free association with his neighbourhood. Many crofting activities, such as gathering and shearing sheep from the common grazings, or cutting the year’s peat fuel supply, or renewing thatches, had always been and would continue to be embarked upon in large and cheerful groups. Sometimes this was necessary – a gang of men and boys and dogs was unquestionably more efficient at a gathering. Sometimes, however, it was not – no time and motion study could ever prove that a family group of three which spent six weeks cutting and drying its own peat would be slower and more inefficient than a township group of eighteen which devoted six successive weeks to cutting each others’ peat. They chose the latter (or some approximation of it) because it was more enjoyable that way.

  To reduce a crofting community to a series of independent freeholdings would be to fracture and ultimately atomise that collective. This was understood perfectly well by crofters throughout the twentieth century. It was not that they idolised a laird. They did not, and were almost always happier and more secure once their landlord became the state, in the form of the Board of Agriculture or any of its heirs. Rather, they valued the egalitarian communion of their crofting townships, not only for its workaday practicality, but also because without it the system of crofting would lose its very soul and independent value, and its practitioners would be no better and no worse than a million other self-absorbed peasants competing for a livelihood on the worst soil in Europe.

  The most widespread demonstration of this attachment was made fully ninety years after the passing of the 1886 Act, and half a century after the commotions in Leverhulme’s Lewis. In 1976 the Labour Government, acting chiefly on the advice of William Grant’s son James Shaw Grant, who had followed his father into the Stornoway Gazette’s editorial chair and thereafter into a series of quasi-governmental Highland authorities, passed another Crofting Reform Act. James Shaw Grant was an intelligent thirteen-year-old student at the Nicolson Institute in Stornoway when Viscount Leverhulme made his offer in the Council Chambers in 1923. Between 1963 and 1978 he was chairman of the administrative and advisory body, the Crofters’ Commission. The main plank of Grant’s 1976 legislation was designed to give all crofters across Scotland the right to do what Lord Leverhulme had recommended to the crofters of Lewis: buy their own crofts. For an easily attainable sum, a small multiple of their annual rental, they were given the legal capability to become owner-occupiers.

  Despite the loudhailing by an uninquisitive media of this ‘bargain of the century’, they refused to do so on a massive scale. Almost every crofter in Scotland simply failed after 1976 to accept this apparently generous offer of promotion up the social scale from dependent peasantry to landowning freeholder. In the whole of the Western Isles especially, hardly a croft was bought by its tenant. Ninety years after its passing, they still preferred William Gladstone’s Act to that of the son of William Grant.

  If rejection of the 1886 Act was unacceptable in 1976, in 1923 it was unthinkable. ‘The view of the crofters of Lewis,’ said the Aignish parish councillor George MacLeod in the days after Leverhulme’s offer, ‘is that they would rather be under the Crofters Act than be their own owners.’ MacLeod was himself an ex-serviceman who had been involved in reestablishing a democratic local grazings committee in 1919. ‘Under the Crofters Act,’ he explained, ‘the crofters have the power to rule their own villages, with regard to the grazings, by men appointed by the people . . . My idea is that when everybody will be his own master, everybody will put his cattle where he likes and when he likes, and there will be no law or order in the place. What I want is law. It doesn’t matter whether it is under Lord Leverhulme or anybody else, as long as it is going to benefit the poor as well as the rich.’ ‘There is doubt in some minds,’ agreed the headmaster from Knock in Point, ‘as to whether those accepting their crofts . . . will thereby continue to enjoy the benefits of the Crofters A
ct, and to have the status of crofters.’

  In the weeks that followed packed meetings throughout rural Lewis confirmed those sentiments. Even in the Stornoway satellite township of Laxdale it was unanimously agreed ‘that we should abide under the protection of the Crofters Act and not become owners of our own crofts.’ A massed gathering of the citizenry of North Lochs at Fidigarry School heard Neil Mackenzie of Crossbost disown any scheme, ‘no matter where it originated, that departed from the legitimate rights and privileges conferred on him by the Crofters Act’. Alexander MacRae of Ranish concurred: ‘I have not met any crofter yet who agrees to accept the proposed scheme. The Crofters Act with all its disadvantages is much better than individual proprietorship.’ Roderick MacLeod of Ranish ‘failed to conceive of any benefit to be derived from accepting the crofts as individual proprietors’. The meeting unanimously agreed that ‘we wish to remain within the four corners of the Crofters Act.’

  The country districts, the ‘outlander’ regions of Lewis which were being asked to form a trust through the District Committee, also carried the full weight of landlessness. This was no mean burden. There were perhaps 3,000 registered rate-paying, rent-paying and tax-paying crofters outside the burgh of Stornoway and Back, and an estimated 1,800 squatters or cottars who were unable to contribute at all to the common weal. In sharp contrast to the gas works and steam laundry, the rents from rateable businesses and individuals of Stornoway, almost all that the district parishes could depend upon for an immediate annual income was the letting of shootings and riparian rivers.

  Their answer clearly was to turn the dependent cottars into contributing crofters, but so little had been accomplished in this direction under the Leverhulme regime that, five years on, it represented a daunting problem. The crofters of rural Lewis were fully aware that a succession of previous governments and Scottish Secretaries had accepted that the responsibility for solving it lay upon their own varnished desks, and not with the hard-pressed neighbours, relatives and friends of the landless. It appeared now as though they, the crofters of Lewis, were being asked not only to resolve but also to subsidise a monumental failure of official policy and landowning philosophy.