The Soap Man

by Roger Hutchinson

  The fishing township of Cromore in Lochs was reported late in 1923 to be in a condition of ‘destitution . . . there is no place, even in Lewis, where things could be worse’. A meeting at Back Free Church warned of ‘starvation in many homes. The people have nothing to fall back upon owing to the failure of the fishing industry, the complete failure of the potato crop, and the lack of work of any kind.’

  At Westminster in the new year of 1924 the freshly elected radical Liberal MP for the Western Isles Alexander MacKenzie Livingstone pleaded urgently but in vain for a Commission to be appointed to investigate ‘the exceptional economic conditions prevailing in the Western Isles’. The first Labour Scottish Secretary, William Adamson, who took office following the December 1923 General Election, acknowledged the ‘exceptional distress in Lewis this winter’ and announced that the government would be supplying the Highlands and Islands ‘at a reduced cost [with] seed oats and seed potatoes for use this spring’.

  Across the other Hebrides land raiding resumed. In Lewis a generation continued to emigrate. On Saturday 26 April 1924, the Canadian Pacific Railways liner Marloch put into Stornoway and carried away with her to the New World 290 young Lewis men and women. Most of them travelled on the government of Ontario’s Assisted Passages Scheme. The men were bonded to become farm labourers until they had repaid the debts of their passage; the women to be domestic servants. They left amid the precedented noise and bustle of southern reporters, pipers, prayers and weeping relatives. ‘A greater number,’ opined the Stornoway Gazette, ‘will certainly follow.’

  9

  THE REQUIEM

  The proprietor had attempted to leave that sorrow behind. He would return like Banquo’s ghost just one more time to Lewis.

  Leverhulme planned at the end of 1923 to winter in Australia, but before doing so he made a well-semaphored further visit to the Hebrides. On the afternoon of Thursday 25 October 1923, he arrived by train at Kyle of Lochalsh. He stayed overnight at the railhead, and at 6.00 a. m. on Friday morning he boarded the SS Plover, which made straight for Tarbert, Harris.

  As the Plover entered the long sea roads of Kyles Scalpay rockets were sent up into the sky from the surrounding shores. When she approached the pier at Tarbert flags were seen to be waving and a crowd was cheering. As the small ship berthed more rockets were despatched from the Tarbert waterfront and from her own decks. A piper played gaily at the harbourside, and the little old man was escorted to his car beneath a banner which read: ‘Ceud Mile Failte do Viscount Leverhulme’.

  The local steamboat agent John Mackenzie, who would be dubbed ‘the Tarbert Demosthenes’, then put in a deliciously composed public plea for North Harris. They had waited too long, he said, to offer such a greeting to their landlord. They had watched with interest his proposals for South Harris. Now, surely, it was their turn:

  Robust Calvinists that we are, we cannot help believing that in these dark and cloudy days when unemployment with its attendant evils, hardships and distress, roams rampant throughout the length and breadth of the land, and when we ourselves are faced this winter with a situation – created by the failure of the sea and land harvests and other causes outwith our control – such as the oldest among us never encountered the like of before, we say, we cannot but believe that Providence has so ordered it that we should have as our laird one who has brains, heart, and wealth, and further we have cause to raise our Ebenezer to that kind and benevolent Providence that these three powerful attributes for good are, as they happen to be in your Lordship’s case, beautifully blended and actively engaged for the material welfare and comfort of your tenantry.

  That remarkable sentence won, as well it might, a round of applause on the Tarbert harbourside. Leverhulme thanked the gathering for their memorable greeting, assured them that given ten years’ grace he could transform their island, and warned them sternly not only against taking part in land raiding, but also against letting anybody else do any land raiding (‘I would take that as a sign that you were not sufficiently interested in my schemes to justify my staying in Harris’). Just before getting into his car he remembered exactly where he was. ‘My developments at Leverburgh do not mean that I am going to neglect Tarbert,’ he said hurriedly, to another round of applause. He asked them to have faith, and was driven away to Borve with a chorus of ‘For He’s A Jolly Good Fellow’ ringing in the wake of his exhaust.

  He returned from the Southern Ocean in May of 1924, this time anticipating a later vehicular ferry service by driving to Uig in the northwest of Skye and having one of his own steam drifters carry him from there to Harris. He examined the slow but steady progress at Obbe/Leverburgh, where a concrete pier and wooden wharf had been completed, two lights had been put up in the Sound of Harris, a coaling hulk moored offshore, twelve drift-netters were almost ready to go, and a posse of fashionably dressed young female office workers imported from the south were of absorbing interest to the community.

  Tarbert began to get restless. After a week of glancing fruitlessly down the southern road the village was relieved to see Viscount Leverhulme arrive to open their new Recreation Hall, which he had subsidised. Once more there were rockets, and John MacKenzie once more assured him of the fealty of the people of Harris. Leverhulme once more replied in vaguely disconcerting terms, by praising the immense potential of the fishing parish of Leverburgh and barely mentioning North Harris.

  He did, however, agree to meet half of the costs of the Scalpay and Scarp roads. Until 1924 the westerly route ended at Amhuinnsuidhe Castle. The isolated township of Huisinish and small inhabited island of Scarp, six miles to the west, were consequently isolated. There was no passable road east from Tarbert to Kyles Scalpay, leaving that island similarly cut off. Leverhulme helped to finance the extra lifeline stretches of tarmacadam which would connect them to the rest of Harris. This delivered to him another extraordinary example of Hebridean courtesy. On a morning in June 1924 the 82-year-old Angus MacInnes left his home in Scarp, took a boat to the Harris mainland and then walked over 20 miles to Tarbert. He was waiting at the door of what had become known as the Leverhulme Recreation Hall when the viscount and his party arrived for a meeting. The old man jumped the queue of dignitaries and launched into an exposition – in English, the quality of which impressed Lord Leverhulme – of the difficulties of life in Scarp without a road. His proprietor was much affected, and wished Angus MacInnes a safe walk back to Scarp.

  He returned for a third time at the end of August 1924, to open the annual sale of work of the Tarbert Branch of the Women’s Rural Institute, and afterwards to attend to graver matters further north.

  A year had passed since his eve-of-birthday address in 1923, when he had proposed to give his bigger island to its people. He had tidied up some affairs and left the castle in October, never since returning. But in September 1924, on the cusp of his seventy-third birthday, he was still the proprietor of Lewis, and the proprietor of Lewis must attend the unveiling of the island’s war memorial.

  This striking 85-foot high cenotaph had been, of course, funded by Lord Leverhulme. It was erected atop a small green hill to the west of Stornoway, so situated that from its summit could be seen portions of every parish in Lewis.

  He was due to preside over its inauguration on Friday 5 September 1924. His final appearance and his final speech in Lewis would be in memoriam of the blasted hopes of a generation, at a service which united the entire community in stoical sadness. On the morning of that Friday Stornoway once more asserted itself as the natural capital of a great island. As they had done so many times before for so many different reasons, people from the country districts poured into its grey streets from north and west and south and east, not this time carrying placards, red flags, or luggage to stow in an emigrant ship, but plainly dressed, soberly mannered, and finding their eyes constantly drawn up and out of town towards the monument above the road to Marybank.

  In the early afternoon a long procession wound its way up that road from the town to the
memorial hill. The Girl Guides led the Seaforth’s Pipe Band, who were followed by a detachment of soldiers from Fort George on the east coast of the mainland. Then came the Sea Cadets with their pipe band, a guard of honour from the Royal Navy, and the innumerable ex-servicemen of Lewis, their honours from the war attached to their civilian clothes and glittering in the bright sunlight.

  Among them all, scattered here and there on the fringes of this slow and purposeful procession, small groups of dignitaries made their way towards the hill. Three chairs were laid out beneath the memorial. Lord Leverhulme took the central seat, with the Provost of Stornoway Kenneth Mackenzie on one side and the chairman of the Lewis District Committee, Murdo Maclean, on the other. Councillors, ministers, businessmen and other worthies were assigned their lesser places on the pantheon, and the great mass of the general public covered every square foot of ground on the crest and spilling down the sides of the mound.

  Reverend Kenneth Cameron of Stornoway Free Church led them in a Gaelic prayer, and Reverend Murdo Macleod of Uig Free Church read from the Book of Joshua (‘and these stones shall be for a memorial unto the children of Israel for ever’).

  Viscount Leverhulme spoke with so strong a voice in the sunlit silence that ‘even those on the outskirts of the crowd were able to follow clearly’.

  These outer islands, of which the Lews is the largest and most populous, provided a greater number of volunteers for service, from the very instant of the firing of the first gun in the Great War, in proportion to population, than any other part of His Majesty’s Empire . . . the men and women of these islands have proved for all time to be like strength of oak and granite rock, to withstand all attacks of storm and stress, and to resist without flinching all assaults of man.

  And the people of these islands have accomplished this in spite of the fact that no people so dearly love or are so deeply attached to peace and the arts of peace and to their beloved native island. Lewis men love their home, their wife, their children with a passionate ardour that few can realise who have not lived in these wind- and storm-swept isles . . .

  The author of the celebrated Canadian Boat Song, he said, must surely have been a Lewisman –

  From the lone sheiling of the misty island

  Mountains divide us, and the waste of seas,

  Yet still the blood is strong, the heart is Highland,

  And we in dreams behold the Hebrides.

  He turned to the ex-servicemen who stood bare-headed and proud around him, whose comrades’ desperation for housing and an acre of land had supposedly undermined his work in Lewis.

  You have returned from the War demobilised but not demoralised. You and we all must live our lives bravely and worthily of the sacrifice the dead heroes have made and set ourselves to perform our task . . . Farewell, brave dead! . . . With parting words we pray that your brave lives and noble deeds may for ever endure fresh and fragrant in the memories and lives of all living and of countless generations yet unborn.

  The memorial was then unveiled by two west coast veterans: Seaman Donald Macleay of Upper Shader in the parish of Barvas, who had lost his right leg and his right arm in the second month of the war, and Corporal Donald MacGregor of Tolsta-Chaolais, who had been been severely wounded at Beaumont Hamel on the Western Front in July 1916.

  They withdrew the white and red ensigns which covered the entrance door and the inscriptions whose dates acknowledged the wreck of the Iolaire – ‘Chum gloir Dhe agus mar chuimhneachan air muinntir Leodhas a thig am bhatha seaghad anns a Chogaidh Mhor. 1914–1919.’ ‘To the glory of God and in memory of the Lewismen who gave their lives in the Great War. 1914 – 1919.’

  Leverhulme was thanked by Provost Mackenzie. He replied solemnly, perhaps tiredly, that the invitation had been all the thanks needed. ‘Although I am not today as closely connected with Stornoway and Lewis as I was twelve months ago, my heart is in that Canadian Boat Song.’

  The pipers played ‘Lochaber No More’, the National Anthem was sung, and the gathering dispersed. A fitting sense of humility may be discerned in that valediction. Viscount Leverhulme left Lewis for the final time a sad and somewhat lonely figure. A story which may or may not be apochryphal, but which is certainly credible, was later told of him passing time before the Sheila left that night for Kyle of Lochalsh. He walked in the dark to the half-dismantled factory on the waterfront and looked emptily at the building which had been intended to provide a million Mrs Mary Smiths somewhere in southern Britain with ‘the best canned fish in the world’. His companion stood slightly behind him, and ‘suddenly saw the outline of the great shoulders trembling with sobs’.58 They then walked silently back to the mailboat and shook hands at the gangway. Leverhulme never again set foot in Lewis or Harris.

  He would spend the winter of 1924 and 1925 in the Congo, making regretful comparisons between the signs of progress at Leverville in Africa and his comparative difficulties at Leverburgh in the Hebrides. He returned to England in the middle of March and made plans to visit Harris for a fortnight on 11 May. In the last week of April he went down with a chill which developed into pneumonia. He died at his Hampstead home in the early hours of the morning of Thursday 7 May 1925. On 11 May, instead of crossing the Minch to Borve Lodge, William Hesketh Viscount Leverhulme of the Western Isles was laid to rest beside his wife at Port Sunlight.

  The union flags which flew over Lews Castle and Leverhulme Hall were lowered to half mast on 7 May, giving many in Stornoway and Tarbert their ‘first intimation of the sad intelligence’. On the Monday of the funeral all shops were closed in Lewis and Harris. Shortly after midday the Nicolson Institute sent its students home, and the Lewis Pipe Band paraded on the terrace before the castle playing the laments ‘Lochaber No More’, ‘The Flowers of the Forest’ and ‘Cumha nam Marbh’.

  Stornoway’s United Free English Church hosted a joint religious service. Reverend Donald John Macinnes told the congregation:

  Our chief interest in Lord Leverhulme is the connection he had of late years with ourselves as proprietor of the Long Island. His schemes and ideals for Lewis miscarried, and there may be differences of opinion as to the causes of failure. A man of his career and experience would be more than human if he did not sometimes want his own way and a free hand; but no one can imagine that he had selfish ends in view. He was genuinely anxious to do the best he could for the people. There is no reason to doubt the sincerity of his words when he said that he loved the Lewis people.

  Leverhulme had made no provision whatsoever for the future of his substantial holdings in Harris and Lewis in the event of his death. There was to be no bequested body devoted to the care of the islands and the continuance of what developments had survived. On the contrary, he had signed an agreement with Lever Brothers which absolved them of any responsibilities in the Hebrides. As part of his estate they would be inherited by his son, the second Viscount Leverhulme, who, as his father knew, had no affection for them.

  Lever Brothers and the new Viscount Leverhulme instantly pulled the plug on Lewis and Harris. All developments at Obbe/Leverburgh were halted and all employees were given a week’s notice. The new chairman and board pounced with almost indecent haste upon their opportunity to consolidate their real assets. As the old man himself had foreseen, the time for the company to relax and cease from adventurous enterprise arrived with his death.

  Lewis and Harris were sold off piecemeal over the next few years, successfully this time, for Knight Frank and Rutley were under instructions to consider even the most negligible offer. The port installations at Obbe/Leverburgh were bought and scrapped by a demolition company. The crofting estate of South Harris was sold for £900. Amhuinnsuidhe Castle, the Harris Hotel, 6,000 acres and all the policies of North Harris went for £2,000. The country areas of Lewis became a jigsaw of privately owned sporting and crofting fiefdoms, each answerable to a different laird and each subject to the whims of the open market.

  Both Colin Macdonald of the Board of Agriculture and the travel
ling doctor Halliday Sutherland returned to Harris in the years after Leverhulme’s death. ‘Leverburgh never attained the status of a town,’ Macdonald would observe. ‘Just a score or so of houses and some scars on the moor (now healed by kindly time and vegetation) where streets and buildings were meant to be. And the pier – that imposing structure of piles and planks that seemed to cover acres. Three years ago, when I landed there off a motor boat from Berneray the piles were rotting and the planks sagging to such an extent that we were glad to get off them onto firm land.’59

  ‘At Obbe,’ reported Sutherland in the 1930s, ‘there is now no industry, some of the houses built by Leverhulme have been bought by retired officials, others are occupied by squatters, and one of the half-built villas is used as a cow byre by a crofter living in a black house.’60

  ‘Those who believe,’ a later chronicler would conclude, ‘that Lewis would have been transformed if Leverhulme had been left alone to get on with his plans, have not looked at Harris.’61

  By the time that Sutherland and Macdonald wrote those words the demands of those who wished for crofts in Lewis and Harris were beginning to be met. The Board of Agriculture requisitioned several sporting estates on the west coast of Lewis and in South Harris, and brought them into the Crofters Act. In the early 1930s the Anglo–Irish poet Louis MacNeice travelled the Hebrides from Barra to Lewis. (‘You seem to have a mania for going north,’ rebuked his infamous friend, Anthony Blunt.) He was subsequently provoked to write a lengthy piece of doggerel about Lord Leverhulme’s Hebridean escapade.