The Highland Clearances

by John Prebble

  It probably was a gentle, even humorous affair, but if it happened as Ross said it was not something that a Sheriff-Officer would care to admit to before a court. Two weeks later another attempt to deliver the summonses was made by a heavily-whiskered Preventive Officer called Dugald MacCaig, and his two assistants. Ross said that they were merely drunk, and that they sallied out of the Ardgay Inn and down the strath shouting that they were ‘sheriff officers on their way to warn out the tenants of Greenyards’, just for the joy of it. But in court later they were acknowledged as officers authorized to carry the writs. Whatever they were they, too, were met by women gathered by the whistles. They lost some of their courage then.

  ‘One of them, said Ross,’ ‘a long, ugly-looking fellow with huge moustacheos, confessed that they were only practising a small bit of imposition on the excited people and begged to be let away as they were excisemen.’ But the women, who were enjoying the encounter as much as the drunkards had hoped to, solemnly protested that this could not be so, for no excisemen would practise such a cruel trick. MacCaig offered them money which they gave back to him. Then he was fool enough to pull out a pistol, and a boy ‘seeing the gauger's pistol levelled at his mother's head, took out an old, rusty pistol he had for frightening away crows, and told the gauger that if he dare meddle with his mother he must stand the consequences’. The excisemen ran from Strathcarron, and when they reached Tain they told a story of riot and deforcement and retreat before heavy odds. In this account, and a later one which MacCaig gave to the Glasgow Herald, they appeared to be very noble fellows indeed. ‘Accordingly,’ said Ross… ‘private meetings were held in Tain, the great heads of the evicting firms and the great sheep lords consulted together, and it was resolved upon to go to the district with a strong police force in order, as they said, to uphold the majesty of the Law, and to strike terror if not into the hearts at any rate into the skulls of the opposing females.’

  These meetings, if they took place, were probably organized by the Kindeace law-agent. Certainly he insisted that when the writs of removal were again sent to Strathcarron they should be accompanied by a large body of officers and constables. And so it was. Early in the morning of Friday, 31 March, while it was still dark, twenty Ross-shire constables and fifteen from Inverness marched from Dingwall under the command of Superintendent Cumming of that town, and of Superintendent Mackay of Fort William. They came over the hills from Alness and down the Great Pass to Midfearn where they waited two hours for the arrival of Sheriff-Substitute Taylor of Tain, the Procurator Fiscal, and Donald Stewart the law-agent.

  After several bottles of ale, porter and whisky had been drunk, and the roll called, the police stood in a row and the sheriff administered the oath to them. Between Sheriff, Fiscal, Law Agent, Jehus and policemen, there were more than 40 men convened in this place on that dark and dismal morning, binding themselves under a great curse like the wicked Jews of old, that they would eat nothing until they had maltreated the women of Greenyard. It is presumed, however, that they excluded from the oath all reference to drink, for they brought with them large baskets full of alcoholic liquors, of which they drank copiously.

  By seven o'clock, in a water-colour dawn of blue and milky grey, the ‘baton brigade’, as Ross called them, entered Strathcarron by Gledfield. They heard firing from the hill above them, and whistles blowing, but Sheriff Taylor put his head out of his carriage and told them to be of easy mind, this was the Rosses' usual method of warning. Four miles down the glen, as they came through a wood by the march of Greenyard, their road was blocked by sixty or seventy women, with a dozen or less men standing behind them. The women had drawn their red shawls over their heads, and were waiting silently.

  Taylor, the Fiscal and Stewart got down from the carriage and walked to the head of the police. Taylor shouted to the women in Gaelic and told them that they must clear the way for the Law, and when they did not move he took out the Riot Act and began to read it.* Now the women shouted that Alexander Munro the tacksman had denied all knowledge of warrants issued in his name, and they pressed forward on the constables. Taylor thrust the Riot Act into his pocket, struck the ground angrily with his stick and looked over his shoulder to the police superintendents. ‘Clear the way!’ he ordered. Several of the women later said that he added: ‘Knock them down!’

  The constables went forward with their truncheons lifted, and, according to the Inverness Courier (which got the information from Taylor), the Strathcarron men immediately ran for the hills, leaving their women alone. Although some men must have remained, for two were injured and one was later charged, the absence of all the others is hard to condone, as it was at Culrain, Gruids and elsewhere. The assault of the police was short, brutal and bloody. The Courier, again reporting Taylor perhaps, said that there were three hundred women there, and that they were armed with sticks and stones. If they were, they were remarkably inefficient in the use of them, for no policeman suffered more than a bruise or a dented hat. ‘The police struck with all their force,’ said Ross, ‘… not only when knocking down, but after the females were on the ground. They beat and kicked them while lying weltering in their blood. Such was the brutality with which this tragedy was carried through, that more than twenty females were carried off the field in blankets and litters, and the appearance they presented, with their heads cut and bruised, their limbs mangled and their clothes clotted with blood, was such as would horrify any savage.’

  Twenty women and girls were seriously wounded in the baton charge, and Ross interviewed all or most of them, putting their names and their injuries, the words that they said and the oaths that answered them into his letters. Christy Ross, aged fifty and the wife of John Ross at Greenyard, one of the four tenants to be warned out, stood in front of the women when the police came. ‘She was for showing the Sheriff a letter, signed by Munro and addressed to Major Robertson, denying that he had ever authorized these removals.’ She was immediately struck by three constables, knocked down by their sticks, kicked on the back of the head and, as she rolled over in pain, kicked again by nailed boots on the face, the breasts and the shoulders. ‘Reason had been thrown completely off her seat,’ wrote Ross sadly, ‘and the victim is now insane, in short a maniac.’

  When Ann Ross, a woman of forty, was knocked down she cried out ‘Murder!’ and another constable, coming up, said, ‘I'll put you from crying!’ and he beat her as she lay on the ground. Margaret Ross, the youngest daughter of Thomas Ross, tenant at Amat-na-tuath at the far end of the glen, defended herself with her fists. She was struck three violent blows on the breast with truncheons, and she staggered from the road to the field by the Carron, pursued by constables. She hid in a thorn-bush but the police kicked at her head until she crawled out.

  The police now proceeded to put handcuffs on her, one of them actually kneeled on her breasts while adjusting and holding up her hands, while another put them in irons. Margaret had no corset on at the time, and nothing intervened between her flesh and the hard ash batons of the police but her shift and thin cotton morning gown.

  Another Margaret Ross had her head split by two great wounds, and she was struck again when she fell. Losing a great deal of blood, she was taken in irons to Tain Gaol. ‘Alienation of the mental faculties very perceptible,’ reported Ross with clinical detail, ‘headaches, vomitings, cold and sudden perspiration.’ Elizabeth, her sister, was also knocked down and kicked on the breasts. The batons left a deep cut, 3% inches long on her head, tore away part of her scalp and shattered the frontal and parietal bones. The marks of hobnails, said Ross, remained on her breasts and shoulders for days. She was, or had been, a tall and pretty woman, but now ‘her long hair, clotted with blood, could be seen in quantities all over the ploughed land.’ Ross said she died later.* Another sister, Janet, running forward to protect Elizabeth, was struck on the shins and ‘then the policemen rolled her over into the ploughed land and there she was with her face in the earth and the blood gushing from the wounds in her head and s
houlders.’

  Broken by the baton charge, the women ran up the brae, pursued by the stumbling, swearing constables, who caught at hair, arms and legs, throwing the women down and beating them. Margaret Macgregor Ross, a woman of forty-seven and the mother of seven children, was hit on the shoulder and then on the left ear. Her skull was broken, said Donald Ross, and she died later, ‘as cruelly murdered as if a policeman had shot her on the links at Tain’. Ann Ross of Hilton by Langwell, a spinster of fifty-six, ‘had no more thought of resisting the police than she has at this moment of going to join the insurgents in Greece. Her linen cap was riddled with blows, her blue derry gown torn to ribbons. Her elbow was broken. Had she been attacked in a den of tigers she could not have been in a worse state.’

  The wife of William Ross Greusaich (a cousin of the Glencalvie Shoemakers) was on the other side of the river when she ‘heard the awful moaning and groaning of the bleeding and wounded females’. She waded through the Carron where it was knee-deep, tearing her apron into strips for bandages. Two constables charged her, and she ran from them, stumbling across ditches and drains. The policemen struck her on the shoulders, the head and the back, but she continued to run until she fell into the river. The water carried her down toward Gledfield, where her husband (one wonders where he had been all this time) pulled her out.

  Catherine Ross also came over the ford to help the wounded. She was the young wife of a tenant at Langwell. Two policemen seized her as she came out of the water, and she fought with them. They knocked her down with a stone, and one constable put a knee on her breast as he tugged a pair of handcuffs from his pocket. ‘Leave her alone,’ said the other. ‘She's dead.’ But she was not, and when they were gone she crawled into the bushes. Grace Ross, the daughter of a cotter at Ca-dearg, was well-known for ‘her clean and tidy appearance as well as for her good conduct and amiable disposition’. A policeman ‘struck her a savage blow with his baton on the forehead, which felled her as if a cannon-ball had gone through her heart’. When she recovered, she was attacked again, and she ran into the river and stood there, blood running from her forehead to the water. Naomi Ross, another young girl, ‘was most violently kicked on the breasts and also in the most delicate part of her person. Had poor Naomi been wandering on the banks of the Danube and been ill-used there, I could understand it; but in Christian Scotland to be butchered alive, who can think of it without a blush of shame?’

  And so it went on. Ann Munro, ‘a stout and active woman of Cornhill by Langwell’, twisted a baton from one constable's hand and pitched it into the Carron. Pursued by three others, she swam across the river. Helen Ross, of Wester Greenyards ‘was brought home on a litter, and for the space of eight days thereafter she could not move her hands or feet’.

  Two men and two boys seem to have been all the male population to stand with the women. Donald Ross, sixty-eight and a Waterloo veteran, was beaten down by batons and kicked as he lay on the ground. ‘The old man declares that although he was at nine battles on the Continent he never saw such treatment of wounded soldiers or prisoners of war as he saw of the helpless and inoffensive women of Greenyards.’ There were two ‘poor lads’, George and Donald Ross, who went to help the women and were quickly knocked down. A policeman from Inverness, a Maclean or a MacLaren, stood over the boy yelling obscenties, ‘Marbh as am b – r righinn dubh!’ David Munro, a man from Culrain, gave the police the only serious resistance they had to meet. He was attacked by three constables. Struck on the head by the first ‘he seized the policeman by the waist and pitched him five yards’, and then the other two beat him into insensibility.

  Then it was over. Sheriff, Fiscal, law-agent and police marched over the bloody earth and executed their summonses. They refreshed themselves with whisky in the house of Alexander Munro, and went back to Tain, dragging with them four women who, to give the dirty little affair some dignity, were referred to as ‘ring-leaders in the riot and mobbing’. They were: Margaret Ross, twenty-five, daughter of Alexander Ross, Amat-natuath; Margaret Ross, eighteen, daughter of Thomas Ross, Amat-na-tuath; Christy Ross, fifty, wife of John Ross, Greenyard; and Ann Ross, forty, Greenyard. Two days later, upon the intercession of Gustavus Aird and others, including Dr Gordon, who came from Tain to care for the injured, the women were released on bail.

  The Northern Ensign, though it was an opponent of evictions, shared its readers' refusal to believe all that Donald Ross wrote in his reports. ‘We think it right to state,’ said the editor in a postscript, ‘that we have considerably modified some of the statements in the foregoing, as they represent the conduct of the Sheriff and its results in such a light as to be almost incredible, and require the strongest testimony before our readers could be induced to read them.’ No more than any journalist then or since, Donald Ross could do little against sub-editorial caution and scepticism, but he took with him from Strathcarron ghoulish relics of the battle, ‘patches or scalps of skin with the long hair adhering to them’,* which to his mind were testimony enough. ‘Dirty work,’ he said, ‘must be done by dirty hands, and a cruel business is most generally entrusted to cruel hearts and to ferocious dispositions.’

  When he arrived in Strathcarron, Ross went to see Alexander Munro at Braelangwell. He found the tacksman (in whose name, as tenant, the warrants were issued, and who played an equivocal role in the whole business) still maintaining his innocence. ‘He summarily declared in the presence of witnesses, and he also stated, that he always told the tenants that he did not authorize the application for warrants against them.’ But his name was on the warrants.

  The Inverness Courier, upon which Ross had wasted no paper, ink or postage, refused to believe the stories which its rival, the Ensign, was publishing. It said that unnecessary violence would not have been permitted by Superintendent Cumming, ‘whose services as an officer on many occasions have proved invaluable; he acted with great tact and caution and succeeded in suppressing the formidable attempt at deforcement’. It fairly reported the story that many women had been badly injured (it could scarcely do otherwise, since two doctors had been called to the glen), but it also quoted unidentified witnesses as saying that the police were only doing their duty, ‘less firmness might have proved fatal to themselves’. It then lectured the sub-tenants of Greenyards, and through them all Highlanders who were reluctant to make way for sheep, improvement and the Law: ‘The people of Strathcarron are evidently not guided by the best advice, but are deluded into the belief that the law is tyrannical and ought to be disregarded – a dangerous doctrine of which the clergy and influential persons in the district should seek to disabuse them.’

  On Wednesday, 12 April, the Messenger-at-arms in Tain went to Strathcarron with two policemen. Of the four women arrested, only one was to be charged, Ann Ross, alias Taylor. The Messenger had come to look for a ‘ringleader’, a man. They arrested Peter Ross, alias Bain, and took him to the gaol at Tain. Donald Ross made no mention of his part in the battle, but he was involved in the deforcement of Sheriff-Officer Macpherson, and in what was now known, with amusement or indignation, as ‘The Gauger Affair’.

  Home again in St Enoch Square, Glasgow, Donald Ross wrote to the Lord Advocate on 19 April, urging him to call ‘an immediate inquiry into the conduct of the police force and of the Sheriff’. He sent a copy of the letter to the Northern Ensign which printed it in full under the headline ‘SLAUGHTER IN STRATHCARRON’. Ross said that an inquiry was necessary for the sake of good government, ‘for independent of the rash and reckless conduct of the Sheriff, and the brutal and savage conduct of the police, people are labouring under the impression that Her Majesty sanctions, nay, encourages and authorizes, these evictions, specially as the batons broken and left on the battlefield have the letters V.R. painted in large characters on them’. He did not defend the women for obstructing the police, and he said that had he been there at the time he would certainly have advised them ‘to allow the Law to take its course’. In this he was being more than tactful. All of those who wrot
e against the inhumanity of the evictions (with the exception of Donald Macleod of Strathnaver) believed that cruel though they were, resistance to the Law which supported them was unpardonable. Though it was three-quarters of a century since the American colonists had fought in defence of the principle that men should make the laws that govern them (and two hundred years since the English Levellers had done the same), even the friends of the Highlanders demanded that they should obey a Government which neither consulted nor represented them.

  Despite his respect for the Law, however, Ross did not believe that its instruments were ennobled by it, and he told the Lord Advocate that ‘the local authorities are in a league with the proprietors for the expatriation of the people’. What other explanation could there be for the behaviour of the police?

  Such indeed was the sad havoc made on these females on the banks of the Carron on the memorable 31st of March last, that pools of blood were on the ground, that the grass and earth were dyed red with it, that the dogs of the district came and licked up the blood; and, at last, such was the state of feelings of parties who went from a distance to see the field that a party (it is said by order or instructions from headquarters) actually harrowed the ground during the night to hide the blood!

  My lord, I have every reason to believe this statement… for there was shown to me in Strathcarron two table-cloths filled with clothing which the unfortunate victims had on them at the time, and these were completely dyed red with their blood. There were caps with holes on them where the batons tore and carried the thin cotton with them into the skulls of the women; and there were pieces of the cotton of the caps afterwards abstracted by the doctor out of the heads of these unhappy sufferers. There were several strong ash batons left on the field, broken with the blows which the police gave with them. There are pieces, or patches of the skin, which the police with their batons stript off the heads and shoulders of the women when they were beating them.