The Highland Clearances

by John Prebble

  To the honoured memory of

  JAMES LOCH

  who loved in the serene

  evening of his life

  to look around him here

  May his children's children gather here

  and think of him

  whose life was spent in virtuous labour

  for the land he loved

  for the friends he served

  who have raised these stones

  In time Mrs Stowe published her account of her visit to Europe, calling it with some aptness Sunny Memories. That section which dealt with Sutherland was a loyal defence of Improvements, and leant heavily upon Mr Loch's book, and on letters from Loch which Lord Shaftesbury had allowed her to copy. It referred, obliquely, to Donald Ross and to Donald Macleod's pamphlets which the Glasgow lawyer had sent her. ‘What led me more particularly to inquire into these facts was that I received an account containing some of these stories which had been industriously circulated in America. There were dreadful accounts of cruelties practised in the process of inducing the tenants to change their place of residence.’ She was happy to say that such stories were mostly slanders put about by Sheriff MacKid, and that Mr Sellar, against whom they had been directed, had been exonerated before the Court. She did not say that forty sheep-farmers occupied land that had once supported ten thousand people, and she did not think it necessary to repeat what Donald Ross had written to her: ‘Upon the top of the hill, Crockan-a-choillich, you can set a compass, with 25 miles of a radius upon it, and go round with it fully-stretched, but, mark what I say, within this broad circumference you will not find a single human habitation, or one acre of land under cultivation, save that occupied by shepherds belonging to some sheep-farmers. With regard to this very district Mr Donald Macleod in his book, which I sent you, says, “And I recollect when 2,000 able-bodied young men could be raised within the same circuit in 48 hours!”.’

  She defended her friend the Duchess with vigour and passion. Since the publication of the Affectionate and Christian Address some Americans had been asking why they should be lectured by an Englishwoman who ‘turned her tenants out into the snow, and ordered the cottages to be set on fire over their heads.’

  As to those ridiculous stories about the Duchess of Sutherland, one only has to be here, moving in society, to see how excessively absurd they are. I was associating, from day to day, with people of every religious denomination and every rank of life. I have been with dissenters and with churchmen; with the national Presbyterian church and the free Presbyterian; with Quakers and Baptists. In all these circles I have heard the great and noble of the land freely spoken of and canvassed, and if there had been the least shadow of a foundation for any such accusations, I certainly should have heard it.

  Mr Eric Findlater was one Free Church minister whom she had obviously failed to consult. On National Fast Day at Lochearnhead, shortly after Loch's death, he had preached a windy but impassioned sermon against the proprietors, against sheep-farmers, against factors such as Evander MacIver of Scourie who was now serving the second Duke of Sutherland as ably as Patrick Sellar had served the first, against eviction, and against the Godless substitution of men by sheep. Mr Findlater was naturally overconfident of the Judgment awaiting the landlords (‘Already may they discern the forth-putting of the hand that wrote on the royal palace walls of Babylon the ominous words Mene, Mene Tekel Upharsin!’) but the theme of his sermon was so popular that he was encouraged to publish it, in green covers, price sixpence.

  A ravenous spirit of avarice seems to have spread like an epidemic and seized on all those who were the owners of property in the Highlands. They hastened to be rich, and in the determination to succeed they cast away all claims of gratitude and justice. They became so blinded with this lust after riches that the strong bond which had for ages knit chieftain and clan became as withes which were broken in a moment – ancestral associations were cast to the winds – those whose fathers had bled and fought and died for their fathers were henceforth to be cast out – and a sheep was now to rank higher than a man.

  But to Mrs Stowe what had taken place in the Highlands was ‘an almost sublime instance of the benevolent employment of superior wealth and power in shortening the struggles of advancing civilization’. Had not Mr Loch written that Sutherland farmers now desired hot baths and water-closets in the houses which the Estate built for them? Were there not eight bakers in the county, and forty-six grocers nearly all of whom sold shoe-blacking, ‘an unmistakable evidence of advancing civilization’? If there had been abuses in the early days of Improvement, the Duchess Harriet could scarcely be held responsible for them now. ‘Everywhere I have heard her kindness of heart, her affability of manner, and her attention to the feelings of others spoken of as marked characteristics.’ No one apparently, none of those churchmen and dissenters, those national and free Presbyterians, Quakers and Baptists (where had she found nonconformists in Sutherland?), none of them had told Mrs Stowe what her dear, dear friend's son and daughter-in-law had been doing on their Ross-shire estates in 1852.

  In March that year forty people, eighteen sub-tenants and their families living in Coigach at the mouth of Loch Broom and at the western end of Destitution Road, heard that they were to be served with writs of removal in the names of the Marquess and Marchioness of Stafford. Young Lord Stafford, who was twenty-three, had ambitions to be as great an Improver as his grandfather and Coigach was his first attempt at clearance. The sub-tenants were paying rents to William Mackenzie & Company of Ullapool, two merchant brothers who held a lease on Coigach from Stafford and who now wished to be relieved of it. He proposed to remove all the people because his factor said they were ‘altogether unable to occupy beneficially the large extent of hill-pasture attached to their little allotments of land.’ There was, of course, another sheep-farmer waiting in the wings to take possession as soon as lease and land were vacant.

  At the beginning of March the Mackenzies told Sheriff-Substitute Cameron in Dingwall that the people were threatening to resist the writs and to deforce any officer bringing them. Cameron asked the Lord Advocate for soldiers, but was told to test the strength of the resistance first, and then rely on the County Police. If this failed, then might he have bayonets. He went to Ullapool with the Procurator-Fiscal, with Stafford's law-agent, and with a body of Sheriff-Officers. William Mackenzie advised him against going by road to Coigach, ‘so hostile are the inhabitants of Ullapool and the surrounding country’. He offered the use of his boat, and even here there was a difficulty, the wives of the crewmen pleading with their husbands not to take the oars. ‘The wife of one,’ Said the Inverness Courier, ‘finding her appeals ineffectual, placed an infant, which she held in her arms, on the beach and walked away, leaving the little mortal crying bitterly in the hearing of both parents!’

  On the shore at Coigach the boat was met by the people, standing in the now customary battle-order, the women and boys in the van, the men to the rear. They were civil and threw no stones, but refused to let the Sheriff pass to the township. Another boat now came from Ullapool, with Andrew Scott the factor, and with the writs of removal. When Scott joined Cameron, shouting threats against the wind, a group of women and boys ran to his boat, took the writs from the thwarts, burnt them and dragged the boat two hundred yards up the beach. One of the Mackenizies, Alexander, liking none of this, and feeling that the responsibility for violence might be his company's told Scott that he and his brother wished to withdraw their renunciation of the lease. Though he was in a fury, the factor had to accept it. ‘The Messrs Mackenzie being then the tenants for another year,’ said the Courier, ‘the service of the summonses became unnecessary. Mr Scott and his crew were carried back in Mr Mackenzie's boat with the Sheriff's party to Ullapool, where they arrived about midnight.’ The people had won, and Andrew Scott gave the young Marquess what comfort he could. ‘It was a distinguished triumph of brute force over law and order,’ he said, ‘and while it continues in the ascendant the rights of propr
ietors must remain in abeyance.’

  Sunny Memories provoked a long and bitter reply from Donald Macleod, then in exile in Canada. He made selections from his earlier writings, polished them and improved them, and published them as Gloomy Memories. He said that he could prove his facts with ‘a cloud of living witnesses’, Sutherland emigrants living near him in British North America. And he would allow her no pardon for her friend.

  I agree with you that the Duchess of Sutherland is a beautiful, accomplished lady who would shudder at the idea of taking a faggot or a burning torch in her hand to set fire to the cottages of her tenants, and so would her predecessor, the first Duchess of Sutherland, likewise would the late and present Dukes of Sutherland. Yet it was done in their name, under their authority, to their knowledge, and with their sanction. The dukes and duchesses of Sutherland, and those of their depopulating order, had not, nor have they any call to defile their pure hands; no, no, they had, and have plenty of willing tools at their beck to perform their dirty work.

  He accused Harriet Stowe of being paid by the Duchess to write ‘your panegyric’. This was unjust and untrue. She was a simple, impressionable woman, an amateur reporter who did not know how or where to find the truth. She could believe no evil of a woman who so admired Uncle Tom and so passionately supported the abolition of slavery. Shoe-blacking, savings-bank, post offices, fifty thousand barrels of herrings and forty thousand fleeces were civilization, and the Gaelic tongue was an obstacle to them, if Mr Loch said so. In his efforts to persuade her (or, rather, his readers) Macleod foolishly exaggerated the happiness of the Sutherlanders before the Improvements began. ‘Now, Madam, I can tell you, and hundreds will back me, that before 1812 there were thousands of bakers in Sutherland. There were 26 shops in the county, and 31 blacksmiths. The Sutherland people never knew what want was until they became subject to Loch's iron sway.’ This was nonsense, of course. More accurately, he reminded her of the crimes against humanity that had been committed in the county during the responsible lifetime of her Duchess. He told her of houses dragged down, townships destroyed, families separated. He told her that armed men had guarded the Duke's salmon and trout rivers during the Famine, when the people had lived on sea-weed. More armed men, with Newfoundland dogs, ‘watched the mussel scalps to preserve them from the people, and to keep them to supply the fishermen on the opposite side of the Moray Firth’. Men could not work, marry, or worship except by the delegated authority of the husband of a woman ‘who is so religiously denouncing the American statute which denies the slave the sanctity of marriage, which separates, at the will of the master, the wife from the husband, the children from the parents.’

  The results of James Loch's Improvements were not to be read in his book, or seen from the windows of Dunrobin. ‘If you took the information and evidence upon which you founded your Uncle Tom's Cabin from such unreliable sources, who can believe one-tenth of your novel? I cannot.’

  ‘Send your deer, your roes, your rams to fight!’

  AT the beginning of the Crimean War, General Officers in Whitehall turned instinctively to the Highlands for the blood and the bone to expend upon it. They remembered the Napoleonic wars (much too well and much too often, some of them) when the mountains had been a prodigal source of superb foot-soldiers. In his feathered bonnet, tight red coat and black Government tartan, the Highland soldier had been present in company, regimental or brigade strength at every battle from Walcheren to Waterloo, and in every country where this first world war was fought. Highlanders were the earliest native regiments raised by imperial Britain, and like all such levies they had first been used for the subjection of their own people and then for the defeat of others. Their history and their pride committed them to war as the proper realization of man, and they went into battle shouting slogans that had been heard at Harlaw, and to pibrochs that had been played at Culloden. In 1815 it was stated in Scottish newspapers, and generally believed, that 14,000 men of the Black Watch alone had been killed or disabled since 1803, and that casualties in other Highland regiments had been equally bitter. ‘So firm and prevalent is this belief,’ complained David Stewart of Garth, ‘that when young men enter those regiments it is considered much the same as if a sentence of death had been passed upon them.’*

  But the dead of one war are used to inspire recruits for the next, and in April 1854, the lairds of Sutherland, Argyll, Seaforth and Gordon were asked to muster their young tenantry in new battalions of the regiments that carried their names. On the evidence that lay in War Office files, there was reason to believe that the response would be as bountiful as it had always been. During the American Revolution more than eleven thousand men had been raised for the Fraser, Argyll, Macdonald, Atholl and Seaforth Highlanders. Two thousand of them had been Frasers from Lord Lovat's country. In thirty years the Seaforth family filled five battalions with the sons of its tenants. Between 1793 and 1815, 72,385 Highlanders served in forty line, fencible or reserve battalions, seven regiments of regular militia, and a number of companies of local militia. ‘Moral, well-principled and brave,’ said David Stewart, ‘they have never failed in any kind of duty entrusted to them.’

  It was not only the great lords who were responsible for supplying the British Army with the equivalent of seven or eight infantry divisions during the French Wars. Sir James Grant of Grant raised a fencible regiment of five hundred men from his estates in Strathspey and Glen Urquhart, and in the following year he found another thousand for a regular battalion. Alan Cameron of Erracht mustered eight hundred men in Lochaber for the 79th, and the small gentlemen of Ross and Lewis provided the same number for a second battalion of the 78th. Tacksmen did the recruiting for the chiefs and the proprietors, gathering men by persuasion and by threat, and for every company of a hundred men they brought to the colours the laird was granted the right to dispose of commissions for a captain, two lieutenants and an ensign. Not only were Highland regiments of value to the Government as élite troops, they were also much cheaper to raise. ‘To the south of those hills,’ said David Stewart, ‘no recruits could be raised without money. In the north money had its influence, but, in raising soldiers, it was less regarded than the character and family of the person recruiting, and with whose fortunes the young soldiers connected themselves.’ An influence just as strong, of course, was the power which tacksman and laird had to evict or punish their tenants-at-will.

  Probably no one district made a greater contribution of men than the Isle of Skye. Four thousand were enlisted there between 1793 and 1805. According to a letter which Donald Ross wrote to the North British Mail in 1854, the island's roll of service by 1837 had amounted to:

  Lieutenant- and Major-Generals

  21

  Lieutenant-Colonels

  48

  Majors, Captains, Subalterns

  600

  Pipers

  120

  N.C.O.s and Men

  10,000

  Ross said that Skye had also provided the country with four Colonial Governors, one Governor-General, a Chief Baron of England, and Judge of the Supreme Court of Scotland.

  Though Highland regiments had their spectacular mutinies these were invariably over points of honour, or the result of broken promises. The stubborn discipline of British line regiments was created by the whip and the gallows, and English soldiers accepted this with a brute stoicism and a perverse pride. Outside their red ranks a man could be hanged for stealing five shillings, and armies have always reflected the worse features of the systems they defend. In Highland regiments, however, crime was uncommon and punishment rare. ‘To the young Highlanders,’ said Stewart, ‘the dread of corporal punishment not only checks their military propensity, and prevents their entering the army, but it conveys to their minds a greater deal of horror and shame than death itself. When a Highlander is brought to the halberts* he considers himself as having lost caste. He becomes, in his own estimation, a disgraced man, and is no longer fit for the society of his friends. To them, therefore
, or to his native countrymen, he can never return.’ A soldier who is docile in barracks and a fury in battle is an ideal, and the Highlandman of the French wars was unique. But if army commanders begin a new war with the tactics and weapons of the last, they frequently assume, also, that they will be employing the same type of man. In 1854 they were as mistaken in this as ever.

  Of thirty-three infantry battalions that were sent to the Crimea, three only were Highland – the 42nd, the 79th and the 93rd. By autumn, when Colin Campbell's Highland ‘Brigade’ at Balaclava consisted of the 93rd Sutherlanders only, a bewildered question was being asked in the Press, in Parliament, in pulpits, and, somewhat fretfully here, in Windsor Castle: Where are the Highlanders?

  There was no immediately apparent explanation for the failure of the recruiting campaign. In England it was difficult enough to get men for the Army, but this had always been the case. Figures published by The Times that summer showed that the population of the northern shires of Scotland had increased, and if the growth was not as great as in other parts of Britain quite clearly there were more men in Argyll, Sutherland and Inverness than there had been in 1793. An unconsidered fact was that districts where thousands of young soldiers had once been found were now empty except for shepherds and sheep. The parishes of Farr and Kildonan, for example, which had once supplied most of the men for the 93rd when the regiment was formed, could scarcely muster a company of young men now, even were they willing. The glens of Ross, where the 78th and the 42nd had found their battalions, were deserted, and there were few Camerons in Lochaber for the 79th. It was not realized, and could not be understood in London, that in the past the lairds had raised their regiments as much by threat of eviction as by appeals to clan loyalties, and that although their rents had been low their tenantry had been great. Now rents were high and the people no longer lived on the land. For fifty years eviction for profit had dispersed them, to the coasts or the colonies, and had destroyed the old influence of the chiefs. ‘My people have been set wandering,’ said the bard Calum Campbell Macphail, ‘many are the places to which they have been scattered…’