Mightier Than a Lord: The Struggle for the Scottish Crofters' Act of 1886

By Iain Fraser Grigor

Near the end of the nineteenth century, the Gaelic-speaking crofters of the Scottish Highlands rose in revolutionary struggle against their English landlords for the right to live in security on their own ancestral clan lands.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AUK Authors
• Release date: Jun 17, 2014
• ISBN: 9781781660683

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1988.

Introduction

The departure of the redundant part of the population is an indispensable preliminary to every kind of improvement.

The Economist.

IN THE YEAR 1603 James VI of Scotland added to his titles that of James I of England; and the century was scarcely gone when the Parliaments of both countries were likewise voluntarily merged to provide an adequate governing instrument for the united and increasingly great kingdom of Britain.

For the Scottish Parliament, it was, as was said at the time, the end of ane auld sang, and for the English it was a fine success, a union, as was said later, suggestive of that which voluntarily unites a small boy with an apple; while for the rich and powerful, whether Scottish or English, is was merely another stepping-stone on the path to even greater riches and power. The Union brought together the landed and commercial interests of Scotland and England in the pursuit of a common interest: and the Union was to advance that interest in not a few ways – not least as a important factor in the emergence of what would come to be known as the British Empire.

In all of these developments the common people were not consulted, for the common people, as such, had no concerted voice with which to speak. Popular insurrections there had been over the centuries, but always in strictly local and limited contexts. In 1707, the forces which would later support the emergence of effective popular resistance to oppression, on a strategic and national scale, were still some way in the future.

And of no area of Britain was this more true than of the Highlands of Scotland. Indeed, the very concept of popular political concern was largely irrelevant to the Highlands of the time. For in addition to the general considerations already noted, the Highlands had inherited attitudes going back to the rigidly aristocratic clan society of earlier centuries. At the same time, however, though the ordinary Highlander observed a custom of loyalty and service to a local superior or clan chief (which made him an outstanding soldier in the British Army from the later eighteenth century onwards), he knew of no such tradition of subservience to a distant, impersonal authority like central Government. Moreover, a tradition of intermittent warfare, albeit on a small scale, was part of the not too distant past in most parts of the Highlands. Factors such as these had helped to create, in English and Lowland Scottish minds, an ill-defined but profound sense of unease about the Highlands – an insecurity which was both justified and reinforced by the Jacobite risings of 1715, 1719 and 1745.

In 1715, the cause of James, the Old Pretender, attracted the support of many Highland clans. The rising, however, failed: and thirty years later, when his son Charles essayed a similar venture, it too ended in failure, with the destruction of the Young Pretender’s army on the bleak moor of Culloden, near Inverness. Then, as Charles took to his heels and the hills, and soon enough to permanent exile on the mainland of Europe, the British Government set about neutralising for ever the insurrectionary potential of the Highlands, and cast about to find ways of undermining the cultural and social identity of the Highland people.

As a result, the next century and a half were witness to great changes in the Highlands. The remains of the clan system were finally shattered by a combination of political and economic forces. The despised Highlanders were now to be brought within the compass of southern authority, for a very powerful reason. A surplus of monetary wealth, generated by trade and industrialisation, was now available for investment throughout the world, thereby to create even greater wealth; but before this new era could safely be introduced to the drawing-rooms of Empire, it was necessary to ensure the quiescence of Britain’s Highland back-yard.

It thus became an object of Government policy to destroy any potential Highland threat to the new social order – to extirpate Celtic barbarism and civilise the Highlands, as that process was called. And if, as they underwent this civilising process, the Highland land or people could be made to contribute to the common good, so much the better: for no two principles combined so harmoniously, to that progressive age, as those of profit and order.

And so, in the years from the Jacobite defeat at Culloden until the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the pursuit of profit and order were to underlie all change in the Highlands.

For the common people of the Highlands, of course, this policy and attitude had great and grave consequences, since they led directly to what are now known as the Highland Clearances – a time when, in the name of progress, and for the profit and pleasure of the few, men replaced Man with sheep and then (when the sheep in their turn became a liability) turned the sheep farms into deer forests.

In all this time, of course, the opinions of those most affected – the ordinary people of the Highlands – were not sought. And for a long time, any resistance on their part was inhibited by the strength of their own traditional attitudes, and by the supreme confidence with which the doctrine of ‘improvement’ was presented and applied to them by authority in all its forms.

And then, in the 1870s, when the Highlands were thought to have been long pacified, there arose a movement of a quite revolutionary character, which challenged not only the authority of the southern legislature, but also the credentials of the Highland landowning elite, by calling in question the then-sacred principle that it was the task of the poor man to create wealth and the task of the rich man to spend it: the lot of the small tenant-at-will (the crofter or the cottar) to work the land and that of the landlord to enjoy its fruits. This movement brought a new self-awareness, solidarity and confidence to ordinary people, and created an active association of the crofting population throughout the Highlands in a very short space of time.

This association, the Highland Land League, proposed changes which called in question the very basis of the Highland landlord – the right in law to own and dispose of land without reference to the interests of those who lived and worked upon it. In the course of this Highland land agitation, the law of the British state, and especially the law as it related to private landed property, was broken again and again. There were violent clashes between crofters and the landowning class and its law-officers; there were confrontations involving gunboats, marine task-forces and para-military occupations; but the popular will could not be thwarted, and in the end the landlords and their forces were compelled to retreat and at least partly capitulate, in what has since become known as the Crofters’ War.

This book tells the story of that war – of the land-war and class-war in the Highlands during the late nineteenth century, and of the manner in which the common people of the Highlands secured a signal victory against the power, wealth and authority of their landlords, and of the forces of the British state itself.

The Seeds of Revolt

A population numerous, but accustomed to, and contented with, a low standard of living for themselves , and yielding no surplus for the support of others, gives place to a population smaller in amount, but enjoying a higher civilisation, and contributing in a corresponding degree to the general progress of the world.

The Duke of Argyll.

FOR THE OLD Highland society the short and bloody contest on Culloden Moor in April 1746 was a cruel death blow. By the end of that eighteenth century great changes had made themselves felt in the Highlands. Profit and order, the ideals of the new Establishment, were now the standards by which good and bad were to be judged in the Highlands. The former Jacobite chiefs and their forces no longer effectively existed. For the sons and grandsons of the former elite the choice was now one of oblivion, or the service of the new order. For the Frasers of Lovat, and for many others, service in the armed forces of that new order was the route to survival.

And as the old Highland aristocracy found a new role to play in the army and the empire of the southern Establishment, so it was with the lesser men of the former clans. In 1813, for instance, Alex Morrison, the Kintail minister’s son, died in Java; and from Spain, it was reported that Lieutenant MacKenzie of Ross-shire had also fallen in the service of the Crown. On the bleak island of Heligoland, the tomb-stone of Lieutenant Gray from Inverness was under construction; Alexander Grant of Glenmoriston was dying in Canada, and on the last day of August John Ross from Ross-shire fell in arms in Mayo.

Meanwhile, on the Home Front, Glengarry was offering great tracts of the former clan-lands for sale as sheep farms, sheep being more fashionable and more profitable than human tenants. Many other landlords and former clan chiefs followed suit: and the people moved, or were moved, to the seashores, to the cities and to the far colonies. In April, 1821, seventy five years almost to the day since he had fought with the clans at Culloden, Alexander MacFarquhar died quietly in his native village; and within the decade the chain of events set in motion by the result of that battle would be entering its final phase.

In the summer of 1828 a brig left Harris bound for Upper Canada and two vessels left Lochmaddy crammed to the gunwales with 600 emigrants from North Uist. The following year there was a similar exodus from Skye to Cape Breton; and in 1830 nearly a thousand souls left the shores of Sutherland to sail for North America. On the island of Rum 400 people were evicted to make room for one sheep farmer and 8000 sheep. Two years later the island of Muck was similarly improved. By 1831 two-thirds of the inhabitants of the Uists were destitute, living on shell-fish scavenged from the sea-shore and a broth made of sea-weed and nettles; and this was but a hint, a foretaste, of things to come.

And while the people were impoverished – in the name of the prosperity of the Highlands – the great tide of sheep flooded north ever more strongly. In 1811 there were perhaps a quarter of a million sheep in the Highlands; by 1840 they numbered close to one million; and that number continued to grow relentlessly. For a century after Culloden, three factors of change operated in the Highlands: the cultural desertion of the old elite, the disintegration of the social framework of the common people, and the introduction of improving economics, as typified by the boom in sheep farming. To these, however, may be added a fourth factor – the infrequency and ineffectiveness of popular opposition to these great changes, at least until the 1840s. But towards the end of that decade, things began to change.

Those years began with a continuation of the earlier pattern of eviction and destitution. Overt resistance was still absent, though the desertion of the Established Church of Scotland for the new Free Church by many of the Highland people, after the Disruption of 1843, clearly indicated a profound dis-satisfaction with the way things were going in the Highlands. By that year, those who had not been forced to emigrate abroad or to the cities had been cleared to the margins of the land that they and their fathers had once cultivated, and were there compelled by force of circumstance to subsist almost entirely on the potato, which was by now the staple crop of the Highlander. And when in the mid-1840s that crop failed the people faced starvation.

There were riots the length of the east coast, in Inverness, Evanton, Avoch, Beauly, Dingwall, Invergordon and Wick; on the west coast conditions were similar, save that there were no meal ships to attack. The Sheriff at Fort William, reporting on the hunger in western Lochaber, revealed that of the 900 people in the Arisaig area, 700 were dying of hunger; and matters were no different anywhere else in the Highlands.

The response of the landlords was less than benevolent. They complained bitterly at being required (as rate-payers) to spend some of their money to preserve a population which they now considered to be quite redundant. Where they were obliged to provide such support, they made sure that it was earned, by enforced labour at starvation wages. In Arisaig, for instance, the hungry were employed under the Drainage Act, which enabled men with families to earn just as much as would buy them meal for one week. They must sow as much barley as possible, now that they have lost all hope of potatoes, reported Donald MacCallum, the young (and unusually radical) Church of Scotland minister in the district. But how are they to sow their land? Seed will be high and scarce here, and most of the small tenants cannot obtain it. Lord Cranstoun is most desirous that all able-bodied men go south. And in Sutherland, the Duke exacted work in return for bread, and his hungry tenants were despatched to drain uncultivated land. In winter, meanwhile, he allowed soup to be made from hundreds of the red-deer which wandered on his huge estate – a doubtful privilege, indeed, for the meat of red-deer, out of season, is rancid, and inedible to all but the starving.

Emigration, the landlords repeatedly cried, was the only answer; and the Duke of Sutherland actually paid people to emigrate to Canada. In three years, 1000 small tenants left the north-west of Sutherland alone, bound for the Americas. Five shiploads of emigrants sailed from Laxford; and though it cost the landlords £7000 to send them, they thought it money well-spent. In South Uist, the Tusker sailed from Lochboisdale for Quebec with five hundred emigrants; within weeks another 250 followed, facing a three-month voyage to make new homes as best they could on the far side of the Atlantic.

And to those who remained, the landlords recommended the virtues of sacrifice. As an example, the Lord Steward of the Queen’s Household announced that Her Majesty, taking into consideration the increasing price of provisions, and especially of all kinds of bread and flour, had been pleased to command that, beneath her palatial roofs, the daily allowance of bread would henceforth be restricted to one pound per head for every person there billeted.

Inspired by Her Majesty’s example, four dukes and ten other peers of the realm pledged to reduce in their households - as far as is practicable - the consumption of bread and flour. At the Lord Mayor’s feast in May, Lord John Russell discoursed on the moral value of eating less. And in the splendid Stafford House in London, with its tartan-liveried footmen, the Duke of Sutherland devised and publicised his own sacrifice in support of the starving northern natives: he pledged himself to eat not so much as one single potato for as long as the famine might last.

But despite such deprivations and the unsightly stain of hunger at the castle gates, the status of Highland landowner had its compensations. A generally romantic image of the Highlands, and of the new-style Highland chieftain, was beginning to enjoy an increasingly popular status in the eyes of Society. The Duke of Sutherland was transforming his Highland mansion, Dunrobin Castle, into a princely residence: the work would take five years to complete, at enormous expense. Deer-stalking was growing in popularity; in Badenoch, of Cluny MacPherson’s £2000 rental income, £1360 came from the deer forest. Prince Albert himself visited Inverness to attend the functions and Grand Balls of the northern Season, and later expressed himself much gratified with the romance and colour of the whole visit.

In August, 1847, the Queen and her party came to Loch Laggan for their holidays, the estate having been lent to them by its owner, the Marquis of Abercorn. The royal party entertained itself with the new fashion of Highland Games, and the children particularly enjoyed sailing in the barge that had been carried over the hills for them, with its handsome brass fittings and tasselled silk canopy. It also came with six sailors, who attended to the rowing. Her Majesty planted two trees to commemorate her holiday in Abercorn’s corner of the romantic Highlands. And on her way back to London she visited Cluny Castle, where the tartan-clad chieftain had his son present the Prince of Wales with a ring containing a miniature portrait of Charles Edward Stuart, the Young Pretender – or Bonnie Prince Charlie, the Young Chevalier, as fashionable opinion was now choosing to remember him.

For some Highlanders, then, if not for the native Highland population, the 1840s had been a splendid time. But by the of that decade, signs of open opposition to the new order were increasingly evident. For some time past Highland society had been resolving itself into a mass of impoverished and land-hungry crofters on the one hand, and an elite of wealthy and often-absentee landlords on the other. And by the middle of the nineteenth century this inequity of wealth was in the Highlands – as elsewhere - growing increasingly obvious. In 1847, the shoe-makers of Inverness formed a trade-union, demanded better wages, and announced that they would no longer work with anyone who was not a member of their union. Four of the ringleaders were arrested for breaking the law and challenging the rights of property and the liberty of enterprise to pay them no more than the rate that the market for shoes would bear. Thereafter, the new trade-unionists disappeared into the northern mists of working-class history.

But two years later the rights of property were to come under further attack, this time on Lord MacDonald’s land at Sollas in North Uist. Over the previous half-century, many Hebridean landlords like MacDonald had made fortunes from the seaweed, or kelp, industry. In the cause of a plentiful supply of labour, some landlords for a time even discouraged emigration. The crofters’ smallholdings became ever smaller, and rents were continually driven higher, in the cause of forcing tenants to work at gathering kelp. By 1800, MacDonald himself had been getting £20000 a year from his tenants’ exertions on the sea-shore. But with the collapse of the Hebridean kelp industry, the islands were abandoned to the mercies of the open property market, and the new breed of Highland landlords had no need for a population of natives encumbering their properties. In Skye, for instance, a thousand people were evicted or threatened with eviction every year for the next forty years; and things were little different in much of the rest of the Highlands.

Thus it was in Sollas in 1849. In that year Lord MacDonald announced his intention to evict 600 people from Sollas, and replace them with sheep. He offered to pay their way to Canada and promised that, once they were there, he would no longer pursue them for rent-arrears still owed on their former crofts in distant Uist. The people, however, refused his lordship’s terms, and ignored the advice of the local clergyman that they should accept them. And then, that July, MacDonald’s factor, or estate manager, brought a sheriff-substitute to Sollas, to tell the people that if they did not get out of their own will, then they would be thrown out by force. The factor and the sheriff-substitute returned three times in the following weeks, with twenty constables, and each time they were turned back by a crowd of hundreds. Lord MacDonald asked the authorities for soldiers with bayonets. The authorities suggested that he try once more with the police, and this time sent thirty-three of them to Sollas, along with the Sheriff, the procurator fiscal, a police superintendent, the minister, and MacDonald’s factor.

The party of