The History of Gaelic Scotland: the Highlands Since 1880
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The History of Gaelic Scotland: The Highlands since 1880. Chapter One: The Crofters’ Wars 2 Chapter Two: Land and Politics 47 Chapter Three: Population Matters 105 Chapter Four: Emigration 146 Chapter Five: Developing the Highlands 179 Chapter Six: A Martial Tradition 237 Chapter Seven: Language and People 281 Chapter Eight: A History of Highland Politics 325 Bibliography: 367 Chapter One. The Crofters’ War, 1882–8. The period from 1873 to 1888 is seminal in the modern history of the Scottish highlands. The first date marks the foundation of the Highlander by John Murdoch, followed in 1874 by the Bernera Riot and the election to Parliament of Charles Fraser Mackintosh. The second date denotes the end of the most active phase of the Crofter’ War with the conviction and sentencing of those involved in the disturbances at Aignish and Galson in Lewis. These years saw a series of concerted protests which brought the highland land question to the forefront of political debate.1 The protests which took place from the evictions at Leckmelm in Wester Ross in 1879–80 to land raids and riots in Lewis in 1887–8 were remarkable for their extent, concerted nature and political effects. This period also saw male crofters in Highland constituencies gain the right to vote and, initially at least, use this new power to elect representatives who highlighted their grievances. June 1886 saw the passage of the Crofters Holdings (Scotland) Act, which granted security of tenure and legal definition to the crofters. The 1870s and 1880s were also a period of growing cultural confidence and activity in the Highlands as the Gaelic Society of Inverness, the Federation of Celtic Societies and less formal groups of Gaels in urban Scotland developed political campaigns on linguistic and educational matters. The political campaigns in which the crofters engaged, their 1Andrew G. Newby, ‘Land and the “crofter question” in nineteenth-century Scotland’, International Review of Scottish Studies, 35 (2010), 7–36. evidence to the Napier Commission, the journalism and poetry stimulated by the protests brought the memory of the clearances to the surface of Scottish culture in a new way. Further, the events of this important period formed a new layer of memory and reference which later campaigners, throughout the period covered by this book, would draw on for inspiration and justification. New methods of political communication began to present themselves. Cheap newspapers such as John Murdoch’s Highlander and, in time, Duncan Cameron’s Oban Times advanced the cause of the crofters in polemical journalism. The highlands also became a subject of interest to newspapers from other parts of the UK, especially Ireland.2 The 1880s were also the decade in which the crofters found their voice and were provided with the ideal forum in which to make it heard. In the spring of 1883 Gladstone’s Liberal government granted the long-standing demand to appoint a Royal Commission to investigate the grievances of the crofters. This development might be viewed cynically, as an attempt to roll the issue into a siding. It did not work out this way. The Commission toured the Highlands, took evidence, largely from crofters but also from clergy and some representatives of the landed classes, and was widely reported in the press. This publicity, as well as the growing organisation of the crofters’ movement, and the widespread interest it generated, ensured that no siding was long enough to contain the question: a situation the advocates of a commission had hoped for and its opponents had feared. It is overly simplistic to draw a direct line from the Commission to the Act of 1886, as the latter was based on very different principles from those in the 2 Andrew Dunlop, Fifty Years of Irish Journalism (Dublin, 1911), 86–99; Dunlop reported on the aftermath of the Battle of the Braes for the Freeman’s Journal in Dublin, sending his report by telegraph from Portree at 4am on a Sunday it appeared the next day in the morning edition of his paper. idealistic report written by the Chairman of the Commission, Lord Napier. Nevertheless, after the effect of the crofter evidence on public opinion (and despite attempts to discredit it) it was difficult for the government to avoid trying to settle the issue somehow. Various stratagems were attempted between the report’s publication in 1884, the return (after six months out of office) of the Liberals to government in January 1886 and their successful effort to pass legislation. Even the short-lived Conservative government of late 1885 and early 1886 recognised this and took some steps towards legislation. So, it is clear that there is a broad interpretation of the events of the 1880s which stressed their novelty, singularity and significance. * Although there were novel elements to the protest of the 1880s, not least its organisation and politicisation, protest was not a new phenomenon. The idea of the passive Gael responding in a submissive manner to the forces of dispossession which swept the region has long been recognised as a caricature.3 The process of clearance had been punctuated with violent protest from the attempt to drive the sheep from eastern Sutherland and Ross in 1792 to the riots against eviction and food exports in the 1840s and 1850s.4 The latter episode provides a precedent for the 1880s: it saw soldiers being ferried around the north- east coast in ships and landed at the places of protest, such as Wick, where in February 3 E. Richards, ‘How tame were the Highlanders during the clearances?’, Scottish Studies, xvii (1973), 35– 50; E. Richards, ‘Patterns of Highland Discontent, 1790–1860’, in R. Quinault and J. Stevenson, (eds), Popular Protest and Public Order: Six Studies in British History, 1790–1820 (London, 1974), 75–114 4 Eric Richards, A History of the Highland Clearances: Agrarian Transformation and the Evictions, 1746– 1886 (London, 1982), 249–83; Eric Richards, The Last Scottish Food Riots, Past and Present Supplement 6 (London, 1982); Ewen A. Cameron, ‘Internal policing and public order, c.1797–1900’, in Edward M. Spiers, Jeremy A. Crang and Matthew J. Strickland (eds), A Military History of Scotland (Edinburgh, 2012), 446–7. 1847 troops fired on rioters, an act which was widely criticised.5 Although there was an episodic element to these protests there were other themes which recurred in the Crofters’ War. Perhaps the most important was an ambiguous attitude to landlords. The targets of protest were the agents of the landlord, the factors and estate managers who were either directly in the employ of the landlord or who jobbed in such a capacity for a variety of landlords.6 The second target was the Sheriff Officers charged with carrying out the decisions of the civil courts in cases where interdicts had to be served on crofters.7 The case of the unfortunate man sent to the Coigach peninsula in Wester Ross to serve summonses of removal on crofters who was stripped of his clothes, perhaps by the women of the place, and despatched back to Ullapool in a wretched state, is the best documented of attempts to humiliate the forces of the law.8 This pattern would be oft- repeated in the 1880s and there were many deforcements (the prevention of an officer of the law from carrying out his duty). There was often a sense that these functionaries misrepresented the landlord, who was often seen as a higher court of appeal in the interests of justice and equity. This was a theme of the events at Bernera in the west of Lewis, on the estate of Sir James Matheson, in 1874. The subsequent trial turned into an attempt to expose the regime of a tyrannical factor, Donald Munro.9 A Gaelic poem about the events at Bernera brings out 5 NRS, Lord Advocate’s Papers, AD56/308 contains extensive material about this episode; Parliamentary Debates, 3rd series, vol. 90, cols 832–4 (4 Mar. 1847). 6 Annie Tindley, ‘“They sow the wind, they reap the whirlwind”: estate management in the post-clearance highlands, c. 1815 to c. 1900’, Northern Scotland, new series, 3 (2012), 66–85. 7 Recently identified as the forgotten element of the crofters’ war, see letter from Roderick MacPherson (Sheriff Officer, Glasgow) to Herald, 25 April 2012, 15. 8 Eric Richards, ‘Problems on the Cromartie Estate, 1851–3’, SHR, 52 (1973), 149–64. 9 Report of the So-Called Bernera Rioters at Stornoway on the 17th and 18th July 1874 (no place, 1874); James Shaw Grant, A Shilling for Your Scowl: The History of a Scottish Legal Mafia (Stornoway, 1992), this theme. After lamenting the ‘tyranny of one of Satan’s black angels’ Murdo MacLeod of Glasgow goes on to discuss the interaction of the men of Bernera with Sir James Matheson: Nuair a chunnaic e tre uinneig Na bha muigh ga iarriadh De threun-fhir throma dhèanadh pronnadh, Nam bu chron bu mhiann leibh, Thàinig agus dh’èisd e ribh ‘S am Beurla rinn sibh sgial dha, Mar bha sibh air ur sàrachadh Fo làimh a dhroch fhear-riaghlaidh (When he saw you through the window/those who were seeking him –/all those heavy warriors who could crush bones/if they had an evil intent – he came and listened to you,/and in English you gave him your account/of how you had been oppressed/under the hand of the bad administrator.)10 The estates of the dukes of Sutherland and Argyll were characterised by similar local dictatorships. In the former case this was in the form of the remarkable Evander McIver, 137–58; John MacLeod, None Dare Oppose: The Laird, the Beast and the People of Lewis (Edinburgh, 2010), 196–249.