Recovery (1)
ANNETTE TELLS TALES These Indigenous People Are Among the First to Get Back Their Land. Prepare to be amazed.
There’s a voiceover at the top of this post, done by Annette, which can only be seen and heard by Nonnies, annual and monthly subscribers to Non-Boring History. Join us!
A Wand’ring Minstrel, I: Sometime in the 1980s
“So that’s the land and the house,” the lawyer said at the closing on the property, and then shuffled his paperwork. “So let’s turn now to the other land.”
The astonished buyer thought he had heard wrong. “I’m sorry . . . What other land?”
And that’s how he learned the crazy, unimaginable story of how his new property, which he had thought was only a few acres of land and a derelict roofless house, was much larger than he could possibly have imagined.
The only catch? His ownership of that other land was shared with everyone else in the village. He had accidentally become a member of what is called a co-op. And it was all the work of local Indigenous people, who had, he was told, held a revolution a century before.
The buyer was gobsmacked. And delighted. This would be his home, and it was vast. He would own much of it with his Indigenous neighbors, and—surprisingly— that appealed to him too. Two sides of one person: One modern and individual, who had roamed the world in his career in pursuit of profit, the other a traditionalist, who yearned to belong to the land and to a community, even one in which he would always be a bit of an outsider.
I learned this story from the buyer himself. And then, not long after, in 1988, Hoosen and I actually visited this place. That’s not an easy journey by car, a two-day journey from civilization.
Imagine young Hoosen and young Annette in a crappy little rental car that refused to go uphill on the road even in first gear. I was in gales of laughter as I struggled to get it to move. “What do I do now?” I remember asking Hoosen. He reckoned the gerbils powering the engine were tired. We made it uphill in the end.
I was fascinated by the property buyer’s story, but overwhelmed by the task of even starting to get to grips with it. I was just beginning a PhD course in what I thought would be either British (really English) political history or 20th century US history. This remote place was never mentioned in any of the books I was reading. I had no context for understanding any of it.
How could I ever do what academic historians must, unlike journos who just write about whatever and don’t have to embed their work in what other historians have already written? How could I find a place for a project in a historical literature that didn’t seem to exist? I was already feeling overwhelmed in grad school by what I did not know, exciting though it was. So I let this story go.
But then, on a visit back, in the 90s, I was listening in the car one day to a modern song performed by local Indigenous people, when I realized the singers were telling this very story. The band, which often sang songs in their own language, sang this one in English, about how people rose up, and won, and how moving it was for them.
Driving in rain through spectacular wild landscapes, I listened to this song of loss and triumph of hope, over and over. It made the place seem more magical than it had before: Before, it was bleak and beautiful, and mysterious, but a teensy bit boring for a historian who had found no useful hook on which to start hanging knowledge. I couldn’t even tell who was Indigenous, and who was not. They all looked white to me, and when they spoke their own language, and saw me listening, they switched to English, to be polite.
Now, from this song, I was starting to learn that this was not the wilderness it appeared to be, but a place full of the living presence of people full of love for each other and this land, people who were polite, warm, and welcoming, but who worried that they were losing their culture and becoming like the rest of us.
Now, in 2024, I’m well aware of movements among American Indian people to get back their land, by purchase and donation and negotiation. But I wasn’t aware of such a thing among Indigenous people until recently, except for this one very early example of a Land Back movement.
A book, by a journalist, on this pioneering Land Back movement finally appeared in 2015. When I was visiting this wild place—once so remote, now overrun by Instagram tourists—I stumbled across the book in a gift shop. 2015 doesn’t sound long ago, but this was six years before Non-Boring History.
I didn’t get very far in my reading. Written by a local non-Native journalist, the book was well written, and, most impressively, it was good, thoughtful history. The problem was that the author asked too much from this reader.
Much of the account was a cut and paste job, quoting long passages from 19th century newspaper accounts. Like most readers, I want to relax and read a story, not be expected to write it for myself. Without NBH, I didn’t have a professional reason to subject myself to that, not in 2015, and so I put the book away.
Then, early last spring, Hoosen and I returned once again to this place, and this time, we had tea with local Indigenous people. These are people who had never left, who had never been driven out, unlike so many others. They are still here, despite all the efforts to get rid of them—which continue, by the way. But these people had got their Land Back, sooner than any Indigenous people I could think of apart from the Meskwaki people of Iowa. I found I wanted to know more. So I picked up the book again. This time, I persisted, and saw the brilliant story the author was telling between all his document quotes.
The Mesas
I started this Non-Boring History post by popping that photo at the top of the page. Then I showed it to Hoosen. “Do you recognize this place?” I said. He peered at it. He should know it. We both know those mountains well, those stunning flat-topped mesas.
But he was drawing a blank. “I don’t know,” he said. “Utah, maybe?”
Noooo, I crowed triumphantly, tracing a line across the mesa mountaintops with my finger. “That’s McLeod’s Tables.”
Hoosen did a double-take.
Oh, didn’t I mention? This story is set in Scotland. On the Isle (Island) of Skye.
The book I mentioned and on which I am riffing today is Roger Hutchinson’s Martyrs: Glendale and the Revolution in Skye (story not depressing as that title implies!)
The mesas that look like they belong in the US West? MacLeod’s Tables, a distinctive feature of the remote Diurnish peninsula on Skye.
And the Indigenous people? Native Skye islanders, Gaelic speakers, otherwise known as Gaels. Yes, they are Indigenous to Skye.
I have not tricked you. You read what you expected to read, because to many, many people, “Indigenous” mostly means Native people, people of color, in what’s now the United States and Canada, maybe Australia and New Zealand.
Those wokey, mostly white Americans who have been shouting at me these past few years for being white, female, short, and handy to abuse, those annoying people who are instant “allies” without, you know, reading a book or having a conversation with the people they purport to support, don’t think white people can be Indigenous.
Having a racist understanding of the word Indigenous, they often are also flummoxed when they meet modern north American Natives who appear to be white. Or when they learn of, say, 18th century Creek leader Alexander MacGillivray, and 19th century Cherokee chief James Vann, among many Indians of Scottish descent.
There are Indigenous people around the world. And amazingly and wonderfully diverse though they are (and they really are), they also have a lot in common.
And wokey people, now you know. Oh, and by the way? See me after class. I want a word with you.
This story has taken more than a month, six or seven days a week, to produce. I need your financial help to do this work. An annual or monthly membership makes a bigger difference than you can imagine.
The people who rebelled in Skye were Indigenous Gaelic-speaking Gaels, or Scottish Highlanders. They lived on tiny rented farms, called crofts. Their rebellion, long forgotten, even by historians, happened in the 1880s. It wasn’t caused by “outside agitators” or the theories of Karl Marx. It was about Indigenous people asserting their ancient rights to the lands on which they lived and worked.
This rebellion in a remote part of Scotland is a story in itself. And what a story, a story that begins in outrageous theft, exploitation, stunning cruelty and tragedy, in people being forced out of their homes for the sake of profit, and shipped thousands of miles away to places that might as well have been Mars.
But it is also a delightful, triumphant, and often funny story, with amazing characters, villains and heroes, and especially one hero, John MacPherson, who turned out to be a master of modern media. You can’t beat that.
Note: Fans of Gilbert and Sullivan may not believe your eyes at some of my headings, but, yes, that’s W.S. Gilbert’s awesome lyrics, because guess who was hitting the big time in London while all this was going on?
And if you’re not a fan of Gilbert and Sullivan (not to be confused with the whiny bloke who played piano and sang in the 1970s), well, we’ll be working on that in coming months.
Over the Sea from Skye: The Highland Clearances
Scottish Highlanders once belonged to clans, often more a shared identity than actually about being blood relatives. For centuries, clans fought each other for survival over scarce resources and out of grudges in a barren, treeless, mountainous, and rocky land, an environmental wasteland we have come to think of as beautiful.
Fighting over scarce resources is why there are so many bloody ruined castles in the Scottish Highlands, and not much else of interest to see for people like me who love history. Most of the trees were gone by 1746. Most of the big wild animals, like bears and wolves, were long gone. What was left in 1746 were a lot of people used to war.
And now war was over.
Scotland had became part of Britain in 1707, via the Act of Union. Rich Lowland Scots signed the Act of Union joining them to England without consulting anyone else. With the Americas generating huge riches, wealthy city Scots saw a chance to make lots of money from trade with England and its growing American empire, including the fantastically profitable West Indies, where addictive sugar came from, and Virginia, with its equally addictive drug, tobacco.
The Highlanders, considered savages by the Lowlanders, were certainly not in the loop. And then many Highland leaders, the clan chiefs, finally backed the wrong horse in a civil war, fighting for Charles Edward Stuart (aka Bonnie Prince Charlie) the idiot grandson of the Scottish-descended King James II who had been kicked off the throne of England in 1688.
It all ended badly at the Battle of Culloden in 1746.
Now, Scots (and Americans of remote Scottish descent who think they’re Scots, no, you’re not, sorry, culture isn’t genetic, and thinking it is, frankly, is racism, please don’t hate me, but it’s true), listen up. Before we put on kilts, fire up a bagpipe video, and start singing one of our fight songs, like "Hey, Johnnie Cope, are Ye Wauking Yet?”* let’s get real, shall we?
*Video is not in Gaelic, spoken by Highlanders. It’s in Scots, which is the traditional dialect of Lowlanders. Isn’t it great that you now know about Highlanders and Lowlanders? Wait until you hear about Jewish Scots, Sikh Scots, Polish Scots, etc!
The British Army at Culloden was made up of a mix of English, Lowland Scots like me, AND ( I’M PUTTING THIS IN CAPITALS FOR A REASON) HIGHLAND SCOTS. Yes, some Highlanders fought against Bonnie Prince Charlie. They were led by clan leaders who were loyal to King George, the German dude from whom today’s King Charles is descended. So, no, the British Army was not just English. It included Lowland Scots. It included Highland Scots. Read that again. And again. Until it sinks in. Please.
The Battle of Culloden should really be called the Massacre of Culloden: It only took an hour for the British Army to wipe out up to two thousand of maybe five or six thousand of Charles Edward Stuart’s supporters at Culloden.
Things went downhill from there. About a thousand Highlanders were deported to America. Highland culture was pretty much banned, including bagpipes, plaids (traditional blankets carried on the shoulder) and the new fashion invention (by an Englishman) called the kilt. Losing chiefs had their lands confiscated by the British Government.
But the winning Highland chiefs, the ones who had backed the right horse? They really won! Now they decided they wanted a more cushy life, now that the clan era was over, and they no longer had to maintain castles and armies to fight Those Other Guys.
They started converting their castles into posh mansions. They bought second homes, in Edinburgh, in London, and increasingly spent their time in these exciting cities. They sent their lads to posh English schools, like Eton and Harrow. It was all very expensive, though.
The clan chiefs (increasingly known as lairds, or lords) didn’t need all those troops anymore. No need for newly posh Scottish aristos to hang out with the riff-raff, the former clan members, to actually care about them.
Where would they get the money to pay for the castle remodel, the second homes in Edinburgh or London, the posh education for the boys, though? The riff-raff paid rent on the land they farmed and occupied, they paid what they could afford, to live simply but not in dire poverty.
But this rental income wasn’t enough for a laird to live the life of luxury of which he dreamed.
That’s when the Highland elite realized that they could copy something the English rich had been doing for some time: Put up a fence around common land shared by the whole community for grazing, firewood, and foraging. Simply claim it for themselves. So that’s what they did.
In other words, the Scottish lairds, like the English before them, stole huge amounts of land from everyone else. They used it to graze their own sheep, to supply the profitable British wool trade. Better, instead of managing the sheep farms themselves, they rented or sold the land to wealthy tenant farmers who would pay a lot to buy into that profitable trade.
So—to repeat—the former clan chiefs started kicking their former clansmen off the land they held in common. This was land the people needed for their way of life built around the scarce resources of the Highlands and Islands, land they needed to feed and clothe themselves, land where they dug peat (like beginner coal, soft stuff) to heat their homes and cook.
And soon the lairds threw them off all the land they needed, for their very survival.
By the early 19th century, many of these ordinary people, Indigenous Gaelic-speakers, were being forced off the land completely in places like the Isle of Skye: They were evicted from their simple cottages, their cottages were burned so they couldn’t return, and they were shepherded away to make room for sheep farms. They often never even saw the ex-chiefs, because these guys were now posh blokes in Edinburgh and London, and so factors (agents) did their dirty work.
Where did people go? On Skye, many of the people thrown off their land ended up living—literally—on the beaches, collecting seaweed, kelp, to sell for fertilizer. And then the landlords tired of them being even there. They were untidy and embarrassing or, maybe, as my old Scottish granny would surely have said to the lairds, “Is yer conscience botherin’ ye?” The landlords sent ships to collect the people, and whisk them far away. Highlanders sometimes were dragged by the hair onto ships.
From places like the Isle of Skye, many of the Gaels ended up in a place that looked a lot like the Scottish Highlands: Canada’s Nova Scotia, meaning New Scotland. And places that didn’t look much like Scotland at all, like America and Australia. They found these new places disorienting: Sure, there were hills, but they were covered with trees, so they couldn’t even see their neighbors.
I remember my amazed and appalled Lowlander dad telling me in the 1970s about the Highland Clearances, after reading the (then) only book on the subject called, um, The Highland Clearances. It was written by journalist John Prebble way back in 1963, while academic historians either weren’t yet interested, or simply didn’t know. It took many years before the tiny number of academic professional historians of Scotland (led by Dr. Tom Devine) started looking into the Clearances. So despite the flaws in Prebble’s book, he did a great thing for us all by making people aware in the 1960s. Sadly, Prebble’s book is also, like, two inches thick, so teenage Annette Laing quickly lost interest when she tried to read it.
My PhD in British history (my second subject after early America), taken in the 1990s, was mostly taught by one American, a good man, who was in love with British (meaning English) political history. The other historian of Britain in my department wasn’t interested in teaching at all (a nice guy, but still, that was appalling, and shame on him for doing such a wretched job) So what this Scot read in British history for the doctorate, and this would have been true anywhere outside Scotland, was mostly about England.
Maybe you think the Highland Clearances were actually an awesome idea. Hey, I’m sure some people do, or would if they knew about them. I don’t think they’re among my readers, but I may be wrong, and if their consciences are panging right now, well, I urge you to listen to those inner voices. Here’s the message too many of us are getting now: Hey, get out of your houses and gardens, and move into little badly-built flats, with high and ever-rising rents! Don’t hesitate! Don’t be selfish NIMBYs, not when developers and property managers have kids they need to send to Harvard, huge multiple “homes” to maintain, and tickets to Mars they need to buy!
And once again, while that’s an opinion, it’s grounded in evidence, and it’s not a partisan comment. We certainly can’t ignore that revulsion is clearly not the only response: Right now, California has essentially made homelessness illegal, despite even a lack of beds in dreadful shelters, leaving many people nowhere to exist. The victims of the Highland Clearances knew about that.
And the landowners of Skye certainly thought the Clearances were a great idea. They could be shot of their poor tenants, of the need to collect rents, and they had long ago lost interest in them as people. Sheep were better. Sheep did what they were told. Sheep didn’t argue or protest. The best thing, if you were still stuck with tenants for whatever reason, was to treat them like sheep.
These days, when people drive on Skye’s single-track roads, with their turnouts to allow opposing traffic to pass, sheep often lie on the roadside to be close to the warm asphalt, watching stupidly, indifferently, chewing on cud like they’re chewing gum. Sometimes, parts of Skye are completely silent, except for the bleats of sheep. Last year’s lambs are this year long ago eaten, or in the freezer. Or their wool has been harvested at least once, and turned into Skye Weavers’ amazing blankets and other goods in Glendale (yes, that was a pitch, not a paid one, love Andrea and Roger), and the tanned skins of deceased sheep are on sale at SkyeSkyns in Waternish —not to be confused with Waterstein—(which I also recommend, again, no paid placements at NBH).
To wealthy landowners of the 19th century, sheep were the perfect Skye Islanders. Productive. Uncomplaining. Profitable. No trouble.
Who Gives Up Home, and Fortune Too
Not everybody was cleared from Skye. Those who remained absorbed at least some family, friends, and other refugees, crammed into ever-divided, ever-shrinking crofts (tiny farms to support life, not to raise stuff for sale). Note that word croft. The people who lived on and tended these tiny farms? Crofters. I’ll be using those words a lot.
By the 1880s, crofts, divided and divided again to accommodate more people kicked out from their own crofts, were simply too small to support the families who lived on them. Emigration tempted, but that was expensive, and meant leaving behind your family, friends, language, and entire culture for the unknown, for the snowy wastes of Canada, or the burning deserts of Australia, or the forests of America, where Gaels transformed into someone else, with different life experiences and priorities and beliefs, unrecognizable as themselves.
Meanwhile, the remaining crofters had to put up with ever-increasing rents, and with abusive and degrading treatment from the factors, the landlords’ henchmen. Factors collected rents, which also included payments in kind: Crofters were expected to put a couple of weeks each year—unpaid—into working on the laird’s own land.
Crofters were rural people, hospitable, peaceful, kind, devout Christians, conservative monarchists who loved Queen Victoria. They weren’t rebels.
Until they were.
The rest of this post is my riff on Roger Hutchinson’s Martyrs: Glendale and the Revolution in Skye. Then I ask you, please, wherever you are, to buy this book, Kindle or paperback. Let’s get this story some notice. I want to see Mr. Hutchinson get a movie out of this. You will too. Let's get him some sales.
I Have a Little List: MacTavish’s Errand
Behold the Lord High Executioner A personage of noble rank and title — A dignified and potent officer, Whose functions are particularly vital! Defer, defer, To the Lord High Executioner! —W.S. Gilbert, The Mikado (1885)
In January, 1883, judges in the Court of Session sat in Edinburgh. The city was Scotland’s official capital, although, honestly, everything in Scotland was ultimately led from London, and had been since 1707. But the Court of Session was in Edinburgh, and so it was there that the judges now learned a surprising and disturbing thing: In faraway Skye, Gaelic-speaking crofters, normally polite, gentle, and humble people, were causing trouble.
Five crofters had been caught repeatedly trespassing on Waterstein Farm, on the Glendale Estate that had belonged to the late Sir John MacPherson MacLeod, who had died two years earlier. They even attacked the shepherds.
The Court agreed that these five men had to be brought before them, 250 miles from Skye. We’re talking 1883, and 250 miles was a hell of a long way. Even notifying the men that they were expected to appear was a tricky and expensive business.
The lawyer for the the Trust that had run the Glendale Estate since Sir John’s death suggested sending court orders to the naughty crofters in the regular mail. This was unusual: Normally, summonses to court were served by hand. But there had been three previous failed attempts to serve them orders by hand, costing £40 each time. That was a lot of money in 1883. The lawyer asked to serve the summonses the cheap way, instead.
Sending court orders through the Royal Mail was indeed cheap, but it was not normal, and the judges were reluctant to do it. They asked if any official messengers were stationed near Skye, and were told that the closest were in Glasgow and Inverness. Take a look at Google Maps and you’ll see the problem. Even today, thanks to rural roads, such a journey takes a long time by car despite the Skye Bridge. In 1883, it was a very long way from Glasgow or Inverness to Skye, including a boat trip to the Island.
But in the end, the judges decided that, no, using the Royal Mail to send summonses was not acceptable. So the lawyer asked if he could save money by using a cheap freelance Messenger-at-Arms to do the job. The judges agreed.
You don’t have to memorize the names of all five accused crofters: Malcolm Matheson, Donald MacLeod, Donald Ferguson, John Morrison, but here’s the big name to know, and I’ll help you not to confuse him with other characters who have similar names because there were only about five names on Skye: John MacPherson. The accused men ranged in age from 22 to 59, and they all lived in two townships (another word I will use, meaning what we might call hamlets, tiny settlements): Upper Milovaig and Lower Milovaig. Both townships and many others belonged to the spread-out village of Glendale.
I mention the Milovaigs because we will hear about them again, especially Lower Milovaig. And yes, you can look them up in Google Maps, and drop the little guy from the lower right corner right on a road, and see the place for yourself. I recommend it, just as I like to visit places I write about, no matter how much they have changed.
A Messenger-at-Arms named Donald MacTavish, in Glasgow, was quickly hired in 1883 to serve the summonses in faraway Skye. While MacTavish was a Lowland city bloke, he was a native Highlander and a Gaelic speaker. Since the men he was to serve with summonses might not speak English at all, his fluency in Gaelic mattered. It helped that he had visited Skye before.
MacTavish took the train from Glasgow on the evening of Monday, January 15, 1883, headed for Glendale. By the next night, he was staying in a hotel in the village of Dunvegan, the nearest hotel to Glendale. The following morning, MacTavish set off for Glendale itself, on foot.
Today, by car, traveling from Dunvegan to Glendale is at least a twenty-minute drive, but count on longer, what with the sheep skittering about, the cars traveling in opposite directions on the single-track road, the idiot tourists who bring RVs (ffs), the locals who drive with abandon around blind corners, and more delights of that ilk, all while (count on it) driving in rain and maybe wind.
Traveling on foot from Dunvegan to Glendale, Messenger-at-arms Donald MacTavish avoided these modern problems, except the weather, of course. Across his chest he wore his badge of office (his ID, as we would say today) and he carried a small stick representing his authority, called a Wand of Peace. And MacTavish wasn’t walking alone: A local official, sort of an unarmed sheriff’s deputy named Angus MacLeod, had joined him in Dunvegan.
I warned you Skye names are often the same. Even now, Highlanders address this problem by handing out nicknames. On Skye, in years past, I’ve heard of Donalds called Donnie the Post (the mailman), Donnie the Coal (you can guess what he delivered) and Donnie Dangerous (a local wildlife handler, who carried a rifle) among others. So Angus MacLeod’s nickname in Gaelic was Aonghas Dubh (pronounced Angus Doo), or Black Angus. He had been asked to be a witness to whatever was going to happen when MacTavish served his summonses. Black Angus was pretty nervous. He was right to be. This simple errand was going to be anything but.
It’s a long way from Dunvegan to the remote Glendale hamlet of Milovaig on foot, like I said, maybe three hours today on sort-of paved roads, and very likely longer on unpaved tracks in 1883. By the afternoon, however, the two men finally were well inside the boundaries of the Glendale Estate, and had reached a township (hamlet) called Colbost.
Here, the MacRaild family lived, in a large house (now gone) called Colbost House. Norman MacRaild, now 80 years old, and native of Colbost, was retired, but had long been employed by the late landowner Sir John MacPherson MacLeod as a factor (manager) at a property elsewhere. Norman’s son James, aged 48, was Sir John’s factor in Glendale. Stopping by Colbost House, MacTavish and Black Angus learned from old Norman that James was waiting for them at the bridge that crossed the River Hamara to the very center of Glendale.
However, Black Angus and MacTavish also learned from old Norman that Black Angus was “threatened by the tenants” for participating in MacTavish’s errand, the summonsing five popular local men to court. Learning this, Black Angus McLeod suddenly changed his mind: He would wait at Colbost House while Donald MacTavish did the job without him, and James MacRaild could serve as witness instead. Black Angus, despite his impressive nickname, was not the sort of sheriff you would want on your side, really, was he?
So Donald MacTavish, clutching his Wand of Peace, headed alone uphill on the final trek to the heart of Glendale. He didn’t see anyone. But all around him, from the hills, he heard the creepy, spinetingling sound of hand-blown horns, sirens warning of his approach. At the summit of Colbost Hill, he could now see a huge mass of people assembled at the bridge over the Hamara.
Only one policeman was on duty in Glendale today, or any day: Constable Alexander MacVicar, aged just 29, and he was very worried. Earlier, walking around the village, he had seen a strange sight: Around eighty locals, armed with sticks, gathered outside Glendale’s tiny Post Office/General Store, awaiting MacTavish’s arrival. And the crowd was growing.
MacTavish, now joined by James MacRaild, walked down the hill from Fasach, the first hamlet past the summit. The crowd, still blowing horns, walked to the bridge, waving their sticks and yelling “You shall not pass!” Okay, I pinched that line from Lord of the Rings* they didn’t actually say that, but you get the idea.
*Not a fan, but Madison’s venerable Professor X is, not that he has a hope in hell of getting me to read LOTR, or even The Hobbit, but now I have JRR Tolkein dancing in my head. Cheers, Professor X. Thanks a lot for that. Huh.
MacTavish was wearing his chest ID and still holding his little wand of peace, but neither of these things was going to help him. The crowd met up with him. One man, telling him that no way was he going to get any closer to Milovaig, held a serious stick across MacTavish’s chest. With a couple of other men helping, he started shoving MacTavish backward.
MacTavish, as he walked backward, bravely and unnecessarily announced that he was a messenger from the Very Important Court of Session in Edinburgh, planning to serve the Court’s summonses on some crofters in Milovaig. He then read aloud the court’s orders. This was quite courageous, actually, since the whole time, while he read aloud, MacTavish was still walking backward, as he was literally pushed back toward Dunvegan. He was also hit with sticks, and hit with flung rocks, lumps of dirt, mud, and animal poop. He tripped and fell several times on the way back up the steep hill to Fasach, and beyond.
Constable MacVicar was bravely watching, from the Glendale side of the bridge, but he later confirmed MacTavish’s account, also noting that the people were emptying buckets on MacTavish’s head. Buckets of water, household waste, mud, and maybe human waste. Not shockingly, MacTavish didn’t include the buckets in his account—too embarrassing.
The postmaster in Glendale, Peter MacKinnon, 55, a local, and a veteran of the British Army’s campaign in the Crimean War, also witnessed. He claimed that people didn’t attack MacTavish until he “lifted a stick”. That stick was probably his “Wand of Peace”. So that’s a bit sad, really.
The crowd was now about two hundred men and boys. When they noticed James MacRaild trying to pretend he wasn't there, they yelled in Gaelic, “Let him be caught alive so that we can put him in a peat bog.” They didn’t do that, but MacTavish and MacRaild together were now forced all the way to Colbost. James MacRaild just wanted to go home now, to Colbost House, but the crowd were determined to push both men off the Glendale Estate, all the way back to the lands belonging to MacLeod of Dunvegan Castle (the former local chieftain, known as the MacLeod of MacLeod, who had carved out the Glendale Estate from his own land, and sold it to Sir John). However, the crofters did invade Colbost House, and yanked Black Angus MacLeod outside, as he begged old Norman MacRaild for help.
The three men, MacTavish, James MacRaild, and Black Angus, were pushed and shoved at least four miles, until they finally arrived at the bridge that marked the boundary between the Glendale and MacLeod estates. There, they found that the Dunvegan Hotel had thoughtfully sent a carriage to collect them. Somehow, the hotelkeepers had had a hunch this might be needed.
That night, Donald MacTavish was in pain on his whole right side from being hit by sticks and stones. James MacRaild was also a bit beaten up, but not as badly as MacTavish. Only Black Angus MacLeod was pretty much ok, but then he had valiantly sat out most of the action in Colbost House.
Young Constable MacVicar of Glendale later courageously claimed he did not recognize anyone involved in the incident. But James MacRaild helped Donald MacTavish put together a list of their attackers, including some from Milovaig, two of whom—Malcolm Matheson and John Morrison —were named in the summonses MacTavish carried.
Poor Constable MacVicar also mentioned in his report to the chief constable in Inverness, the Highland capital, that one of the crowd had stuck a stick in his face and threatened to kill him, but MacVicar had decided it would be best to say the guy was just joking. Ha ha ha.
Glendale people, Constable MacVicar said, were now pledging that they would fight up to 600 policemen to the death to keep them out of Glendale. Young MacVicar would be allowed to stay, he was told, but there would be no more police.
No wonder the lawyer in Edinburgh had wanted to mail the summonses. A normally peaceful bit of the remote and beautiful and friendly Isle of Skye had become, in mid-January, 1883, and in Mr. Hutchinson’s words, “a no-go zone.”
Introducing Titipu* Glendale
*A reference to the allegedly Japanese town in which Gilbert and Sullivan set The Mikado, which was actually a massive satire of the British establishment, tapping into Brits’ current fascination with Japan, but not about Japan at all. Pay attention, wokesters.
In 1883, everyone on Skye identified as belonging to Skye, but people in Glendale, in the remote northwest of the island, almost certainly had never been to Sleat. They might never have even have left Glendale in their lives.
I can explain that: Little reason to go anywhere on Skye, even today. Skye on a wet day (and there are many of those) can challenge tourists, especially those with kids in tow. There’s not a whole helluva lot to do, unless you’re a mountaineer (a fancy and scary modern hobby), and most tourist attractions are united in their mediocrity. Sorry, Skye.*
*Are you someone who wants to make a lot of money from tourist attractions on Skye? Do you wish to complain? Gnomish MacGnome, the NBH Complaints Gnome, at the NBH Branch Office in Glendale, is happy to read your note, so long as its in Gaelic. Oh, you don’t speak Gaelic? Oh, dear.
Skye is and was a large island with isolated tiny communities. Most travel to and from Glendale, for centuries, was done by sea, and made the Glendale folk closer to some of the islands of the Outer Hebrides than to Portree, the capital of Skye. We think today of Glendale as a village, but it’s actually about a hundred square miles of grazing land, with lots of little townships (hamlets) dotted about. These townships still have their own identities, even though, to the naked eye, they all look the same.
So we already trotted though the story of the Clearances. Let’s do a quick look at the history of Glendale, since it’s the focal point of our story.
Glendale is a lovely place of mountains and glens (valleys), of burns (streams) a river (the Hamara) and waterfalls and cliffs. People have lived here, Mr. Hutchinson says, for 9,000 years, not long after the last Ice Age ended. But its recorded history begins in the Middle Ages, when Skye belonged to the Kingdom of Norway (which is pretty far from Skye, have a look).
The first MacLeods who had charge of the majority of Skye, including Glendale, were Norsemen, or Vikings. If it helps to understand, Mac- simply means “son of”, so “son of Leod”. These first MacLeods built a fort that’s today Dunvegan Castle, and is home of the former leaders of Clan Leod. The chief is still weirdly known as the MacLeod of MacLeod.
The MacLeods of Dunvegan were locals by the time Norway gave Skye to the Kings of Scotland in the mid-thirteenth century. The MacLeod chiefs owned Glendale until the 19th century. Today, they still own a fair bit of land, and, of course, Dunvegan Castle, which offers tours, teas, and a gift shop. But before you rush to visit, I honestly suggest it’s not all that thrilling, and profits go to the MacLeod of MacLeod, the descendant of those who did the clearances, the villains of our story. The most recent chief tried to sell the Cuillins, the mountains in the center of Skye, to fix up his decrepit house, Dunvegan Castle.
Back to Glendale. Even when, in the early 1840s, Skye got turnpike roads (maintained toll roads, tracks by modern standards) Glendale did not, and remained hard to reach. Mr. Hutchinson notes, though, that there was, for a long time, a big attraction north of Colbost that brought determined visitors to Glendale, to the hamlet of Borreraig.
What You People Call Work
The tale of the MacCrimmons of Borreraig is a great story for showing the fundamental and stressful change in Glendale, and the Highlands, starting in the late 18th century, after the Battle of Culloden.
The hamlet of Borreraig was home to the MacCrimmon family. They were the official bagpipers to the Clan MacLeod chiefs: Nothing puts fear in enemy hearts like the screeching din of the pipes. So the family had been blasting the pipes here for centuries. In return, amazingly, they weren’t chased away for disturbing the peace, but were given a free farm by the chief. The MacCrimmons once operated a piping school at Borreraig that was known throughout Scotland.
By the early 18th century, the MacCrimmons, who had made a lot of money from making an unholy racket, were considered posh educated people. But by the end of that century, with the clan system gone, the MacCrimmons were in trouble. It was now 25 years since the Battle of Culloden ended Highland warfare. MacLeod chieftains had lost all interest in war, bagpipes, and their former clansfolk. So they kicked the MacCrimmons off their farm.
Some MacCrimmons joined the British Army (which still has lots of bagpipes as you may have noticed). Some MacCrimmons moved to Lorgill, a Glendale township. Later, in 1830, the people of Lorgill were forced onto ships with just 24 hours notice, and deported to Nova Scotia, Canada. Some MacCrimmons just became ordinary Skye crofters like everyone else.
But I’m ahead of myself. In 1790, 3,000 people lived in the Diurnish area. That, Mr. Hutchinson notes, was up by almost five hundred people from forty years before, despite the fact that hundreds of people had voluntarily boarded ships to America (I’m thinking North Carolina, because I know many people ended up there from Skye) Smallpox immunization had apparently helped, and better obstetric care. Children were surviving infancy, and elders were living longer.
What did all these people do? There was a blacksmith in every area, plus carpenters and boat-builders. Weavers and tailors produced clothes, and every man had some land to raise flax (to make linen) and raise some sheep for wool, for those clothes. To eat, everyone grew oats and barley and potatoes, plus they fished for protein. In the 19th century, Glendale even became famous for its own variety of cabbage, which grew extra-large. Not a thrilling diet, is it? I mean, it is what we call subsistence farming, and it’s what you do when you’re poor. But it was enough. For now.
Come, Friends, Across the Sea
Come friends, who plough the sea
Truce to navigation
Take another station
Let's vary piracy,
With a little burglary!
--W.S. Gilbert, The Pirates of Penzance By the early 1840s, Skye’s lairds were charging high rents, and growing poverty had increased crime. For a while, collecting kelp from the beaches of Skye helped people feed and clothe themselves and their families. This seaweed was processed into fertilizer, and could also be used in making gunpowder, so it was in big demand during the Napoleonic Wars in the late 18th and early 19th century. The MacLeod of MacLeod paid his former clansfolk low wages to collect it, then he sold it to the South for massive profit.
But the kelp industry died when war with France ended in 1815. By the early 1840s, people were going hungry. Many people in Diurnish were eating shellfish (not a luxury food then), and adults were leaving to work in the south, likely the horrendous factories of Glasgow and Manchester. Begging and stealing were also happening.
And then it got worse: With the kelp profits gone, the MacLeods of MacLeod at Dunvegan Castle realized they had no more use for the people.
The family began selling off huge amounts of land. Confiscating the farm from the MacCrimmons of Borreraig in 1770 was just the start. In 1810, Chief John Norman MacLeod sold 48,000 acres to a London banker for £98, 500,which Mr. Hutchinson suggests would be £5 million today.
The MacLeods of MacLeod were also starting to rent a lot of land to middle-class locals, tenant farmers called tacksmen, who in turn rented smaller tracts of land to smaller sub-tenants. Tacksmen were usually local men, Gaelic speakers, and, Hutchinson writes “with a sense of social or clan responsibility”. That didn't last when they left, and non-locals took over.
A lot of Native Skye tacksmen saved up money to emigrate to America in the late 18th century. The land they left behind? Much of it was bought by farmers from the south and east of Scotland, speakers of Scots and English, not Gaelic. Unable to speak with the majority of the people, these new buyers didn’t care about ordinary Indigenous Gaels’ identification with the land, or their interest in simply making a living, not a fortune.
One sheep farmer could make about as much from sheep as from the rents of 300 crofters, with a lot less trouble.
And there was a propaganda war against the crofters. Even a local minister, Archibald Clerk, scorned the crofters’ supposed ignorance, and their “blind . . . powerful attachment to the rocks and glens amid which they were brought up, an almost invincible aversion to abandon them.” Well, yeah.
Clerk thought extreme poverty was making the people depraved, like animals. That they were criminal, even stealing sheep. All of Rev. Clerk’s stereotypes were also thrown at Africans and Indians in America. Just as they had been against people in England who were judged surplus to requirements. Hope you’re paying attention, folks, in case that’s us tomorrow. Oops. Sorry. I digress.
But the Skye people had another interpretation: The problem wasn’t their ignorance, and it wasn’t their attachment to the land. It was that the land was being taken over by sheep farmers, to profit greedy lairds, and that they, the Indigenous crofters, were ending up crowded together in rural ghettos, on land that could not support them.
A Line 'Twixt Rich and Poor
The large parish of Bracadale, east of Glendale, had plenty of pasture land, so the crofters there in the 1820s were well able to support themselves, grazing sheep and cattle. The land was (surprise) owned by the MacLeods of Dunvegan Castle.
But then the laird, John Norman MacLeod, who had made a huge profit from selling land a few years earlier, evicted practically everyone in Bracadale. Now, the land was to be rented to tenant farmers, who raised sheep.
Over and over, people were made homeless. Everyone in Bracadale who could and was willing left for America. And people who were in good health, but who either couldn’t emigrate or refused? They were sent to Glendale.
In Glendale, Bracadale people were sent to the hamlets of Ramasaig and Lorgill. Later, in the 1840s, those people from Ramasaig and Lorgill who weren’t forcibly deported to Canada were resettled in the Glendale hamlets of Fasach, Upper Milovaig, and Lower Milovaig. Upper and Lower Milovaig’s native populations had already been evicted to make way for a profitable sheep farm in 1840. But the native people of Milovaig were allowed to come back five years later, if they would agree to pay higher rents.
Parts of Glendale were now massively overcrowded. As Mr. Hutchinson points out, this was deliberately caused by the landowners who then claimed that Skye was overpopulated, and that people needed to emigrate.
In 1883, the Gaelic-speaking Lower Milovaig crofter, a gifted speaker called John MacPherson, spoke for these people. He proposed that the crofters be allowed to buy the land. And he said, it was the people, not the lairds, who owned the land, which they had bought by the blood they had spilled to defend it over the centuries.
Emigration, MacPherson asked? Sure. The tacksmen— the sheep farmers— could go to America and Canada, and not have the crofters coming between them and profit. In a nutshell, MacPherson was suggesting that the land belonged to the people, that the middle class should be forced overseas. This sort of revolutionary proposal has always frightened the ruling class, all the way to now.
The difference in 1883? When John MacPherson spoke, someone in London, the center of capitalism and empire and business and banking, was listening sympathetically. In politics, timing is everything. And the time was now.
So Gallant a Hero: John MacPherson of Lower Milovaig, Glendale
Glendale crofter John MacPherson was born in 1834, in Lower Milovaig. He saw the village change from a place with decent rents of £7 per good-sized croft (£56 altogether for the whole hamlet) and modest but comfortable living, to a place where nobody could make a good living, and rents per acre were high. Eight crofts were now divided into sixteen crofts. Individual rents for these tiny half-crofts now only cost £5 each, but notice they had half as much land as before. By packing people in, the landlord now collected a total of £80 rent for Lower Milovaig. I mean, my math is lousy, but even I can see what was going on here.
By 1883, John MacPherson only had three acres of thin and rocky land to support his family, and this was typical. The men and women had to plough using the crudest of tools. There wasn’t enough land for them to leave any part of it unplanted and give it a rest, so the already thin and rocky soil was becoming less and less fertile. There was less shared grazing land for the animals, too, because under the grazing grassland was peat, a sort of pre-coal needed for heating and cooking, and all the families needed to dig peat. Without enough grazing land, they couldn’t keep enough milk cows, so now, instead of milk, they were drinking commercial imported tea from India sweetened with molasses or syrup from the West Indies—when they could afford them.
The Milovaig crofters’ diet otherwise was oatmeal, potatoes, and whatever fish they could catch in season. Their homes had turned into hovels: They didn’t have enough land to produce straw for their thatched roofs. They asked the the MacLeod of MacLeod to allow them to cut some of the abundant heather for roofing, but he refused. Their roofs leaked badly, and they often had to leave their beds to find a dry spot on the floor on which to sleep. They had no room for barns, so the cattle lived in their one-room homes with them. As John MacPherson observed, the living conditions in Lower Milovaig put the lie to all the talk of 19th century civilization.
Eight hundred acres of good land to the west of Glendale, formerly used by the people of Milovaig for either grazing or growing, was now Waterstein Farm, a massive sheep farm, producing £140 a year in rent for the MacLeod of MacLeod.
The owner of Waterstein Farm was Dr. Nicol Martin. He was from Skye, a primary care doctor (UK: GP) who spoke Gaelic as well as English. By the time he bought the land from the MacLeod of MacLeod, and owned Waterstein Farm outright, he already owned Husabost Estate in Glendale, 5,000 acres that included what had once been the piping MacCrimmons’ farm. Dr. Martin had, of course, also bought that land from the MacLeods. Dr. Martin moved into Husabost House, and served the community as a GP and pharmacist, so that was at least something.
But Dr. Martin began to look down on his crofter neighbors. As a grumpy old man who thought everyone should be ambitious like him, ignoring that this wasn't even possible. He complained that crofter women bought fancy hats and scarves with their money, and sold the eggs they raised and should have been feeding their kids for “tea and sugar and tobacco”, so their children were sickly. He thought all the crofters should go to Canada and America, and get cheap land. Dr. Martin offered “£500 today if all the crofters on my place went away.”
As Mr. Hutchinson crisply explains, the crofters didn’t see the point of going all that way for land. Not when Dr. Martin’s Waterstein Farm and Husabost Estate held all the land they needed.
So here’s the kicker: By the 1840s, the current MacLeod of MacLeod, Norman, despite all the rents he was collecting, and the land that had been sold, was broke, having spent the money. He rented out decrepit Dunvegan Castle, put his sister in charge of the family business in Scotland, moved to London, and became a civil servant (government worker). From London, he now sold a huge piece of MacLeod land, 35,000 acres. This land was what became known as the Glendale Estate, and it’s very important to our story. It included all the places you have heard about—Colbost, Ramasaig, Lower Milovaig, Fasach- and more.
A More Humane Mikado Never Did Exist: John MacPherson MacLeod
The buyer of the Glendale Estate in the 1840s? Hoo, boy. Here’s where there’s a danger of name confusion. His name, you see, was John MacPherson MacLeod, and he was not related to the MacLeods of Dunvegan Castle, or the Lower Milovaig crofter called John MacPherson.
So, to make things easier for you, let’s call him JMM.
JMM was born in the Lowlands, near Glasgow. But his dad was descended from Skye’s middle class, and the family had been tacksmen in Colbost. Some of the family had since become rich and famous in Britain’s Army, serving in the Empire, especially India, and they then bought a lot of the land near Colbost.
When JMM’s dad died in 1813, JMM himself was only 21 years old. He graduated from Edinburgh University, then went to Haileybury College in Hertfordshire. Today, Haileybury is a posh boarding school. But it started as a college to train British bureaucrats for India. It was founded just a few years earlier by the East India Company, a private company which controlled large parts of the subcontinent, long before it dumped India in the lap of the British government after Indians rebelled against Company rule in 1857.
John MacPherson MacLeod’s economics professor was the famous Rev. Thomas Malthus, who thought that the population needed to be reduced (by whatever means), or Brits would starve. This is not good news for the people of Skye, if you stop and think about it.
After his time at Haileybury, JMM moved to India and lived there for all his working life. He only went to Scotland, and Glendale, once, to rent out his properties. Fifty years later, in the early 1850s, he now owned almost all of Glendale, as well as the island of St. Kilda. Retired from the East India Company, he lived in a house in a wealthy area of west London. He had a posh wife and several servants, including a cook, butler, and footman.
In 1852, JMM was shocked to discover that one-third of his crofter tenants on the islands of St. Kilda had announced that they were moving to Australia, and would soon be leaving from Liverpool via Glasgow. JMM took the train to Glasgow from London and met the crofters there, begging them not to leave. He even offered to pay their way home to St. Kilda, and help them when they got there. But they had said goodbye, and they weren’t going back. They had had enough. And, they said, they expected the rest of St. Kilda to follow them soon. JMM gave up. He even funded tickets to Australia for those who were struggling to afford the fare.
JMM’s chats with the departing St. Kilda crofters brought him more disturbing news. Norman MacRaild, his factor (managing agent) in St. Kilda, and a native of Colbost on Skye, had treated the St. Kilda people like crap. The St. Kilda emigrants, like many working people throughout Scotland, had all resigned from the establishment Church of Scotland, and joined the new Free Church of Scotland, which was much more friendly to working people. But MacRaild wouldn’t let the people hold Free Church services in the only church in St. Kilda. He tried to force them to return to the Church of Scotland, threatening to evict them if they didn’t. This, the St. Kildans told JMM, was an abuse of power.
JMM agreed. He overturned MacRaild’s judgment. When JMM sold St. Kilda in 1871, MacRaild retired to live in Colbost House, which is where we first met him at the start of the story, in 1883.
One of JMM’s neighbors in London? Norman MacLeod, the 25th MacLeod of Macleod, formerly of Dunvegan Castle. [Update: This next bit is corrected]Norman MacLeod now bought St. Kilda from JMM.
The Pirate King: Donald “Tormore” MacDonald
There are and were a gazillion people called Donald in Scotland, and many of them are and were called Donald MacDonald. THIS Donald MacDonald is a big part of our story, though. So we will call him by his local nickname, “Tormore”, so-called because he was from Tormore Farm in the southern part of Skye.
Donald “Tormore” MacDonald was born in 1835 into a family of the tacksman middle class, who were related to Lord Macdonald, owner of the southern part of Skye. Tormore’s family did well enough to have servants, and a governess (in-house tutor for the kids). They spoke Gaelic at home, but a Lowlander tutor was hired to teach them in English.
As a kid, Tormore was raised in a society that still believed privileged people should look after the people under their power. In return, common folk thought they should look after the local landowners (upper class) and tenant farmers (middle class), by giving free help as needed (without pay) on their lands.
But Tormore’s own adult values were different. He acquired mid-Victorian values. He was very ambitious for himself. He didn’t want to look after his people. He wanted wealth. And that meant property. By 1861, Tormore’s dad was dead, and although Tormore was still in his mid-twenties, he was expanding the family farm, buying up land. He also bought land on the mainland, and that made him a pretty important landowner. So Tormore rose in society: He was made a Justice of the Peace (a local judge/administrator),and became a factor (estate agent) for Lord Macdonald and other major landowners on Skye and the mainland.
So it’s not surprising that John MacPherson MacLeod (JMM) had asked Tormore to be factor for the huge Glendale Estate. Although Tormore spoke Gaelic, he was socially closer to the lairds (big landowners) of Victorian Skye than to the crofters.
At first, the ordinary people liked Tormore anyway, seeing him as a straight shooter. At the end of the day, though, he didn’t take his orders from them. He took instructions from the landlord class to which he now belonged. His job, as Mr. Hutchinson notes, was to do the landlords’ dirty work, things they wouldn’t dream of doing themselves. Hey! Kind of reminds me of University presidents, who typically swan around like butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths, and leave things like firing faculty enmasse or threatening students with lawsuits to the lesser administrators or the public relations guy. And you wonder why I have zero respect for them . . . But I digress.
Tormore was Mr. Nice until people didn’t just do what they were told. Then he turned into Mr. Nasty.
Crofter John MacPherson Again (not to be confused with JMM, John MacPherson MacLeod)
Born in Milovaig in 1834, John MacPherson the Gaelic-speaking crofter, was about the same age as Tormore. His family was steeped in tradition, in folklore and poetry. But when John was six, Milovaig was cleared of people, and the family had to move to Lephin, still in Glendale, but east of the Hamara bridge.
John’s family were among those allowed to return to Milovaig in 1845, but their croft was now only four acres in Lower Milovaig, and newly evicted people were still arriving. They all grew a lot of potatoes, because you can feed a lot of people on a wee bit of land if you grow potatoes. Then, in 1846, the Highlands had the same potato crop failure as the famous one in Ireland. About 80% of Skye’s potatoes rotted. People went hungry.
The potato disaster even affected the MacLeods of Dunvegan Castle. Norman MacLeod of MacLeod, the chief, and his English wife had been working to turn their draughty old castle into a proper big Victorian home.
When the famine hit, according to MacLeod family lore, Norman sold everything he had bought for the fancy new house, including furniture and paintings. He put the money into building infrastructure, roads, on Skye, to employ hungry crofters. He also fed six or seven thousand people for free. He wrote: “Ruin must be faced rather than let the people die.” Good for you, your lairdship, I thought! This is how mid-19th century aristos started to redeem themselves in the 1840s! Consciences at last!
Nah, says Mr. Hutchinson. That’s a bit of BS. While Ireland was left to suffer famine unaided, British churches, societies, and the British Government itself did a lot to relieve the famine in the Highlands. They not only sent food, but even organized public works programs (like the New Deal in 1930s America) so Highlanders could be hired to build roads and whatnot.
The London government had told MacLeod of MacLeod and other landowners that they were expected to do their bit—hence MacLeod’s road-building programme. And even if he fed all these people, Chief Norman MacLeod wasn’t alone, and he wasn’t doing this from the goodness of his heart. All the rich people he knew were pressuring him to do the right thing. Plus, after he sold all his stuff from Dunvegan Castle, he and the wife and kids moved back to London, to a townhouse with servants. He had been to Harrow himself (like Eton) and he now went to work in the national government as a civil servant.
His challenges were not even remotely comparable to the hardships the crofters were going through. Young John MacPherson, his parents, and his seven brothers and sisters were living in only two rooms in Lower Milovaig. The kids had some education thanks to their parents and the Glendale church Sunday school: John could read in Gaelic and English fluently. But there wasn’t much time for education: It was all hands on deck to stay fed on a tiny four-acre croft. John both fished and ploughed.
Unlike tens of thousands of other Gaels, the MacPhersons did not migrate to Glasgow’s factories or to Australia, Canada, or the US. By 1862, John MacPherson (aged 26) and his younger brother were still fishermen. Their dad was dead, and their younger brother helped their mum, Flora, on the croft.
In 1865, John married Margaret Maclean, who, along with her parents, had been expelled from the sheep farm at Bracadale and moved to Fasach, a hamlet in Glendale. Now, Margaret moved into John’s family’s home (yes, still crowded). John gave up fishing and took charge of the family croft, to take the burden off his mum and younger brother. After giving birth to five kids in this tiny crowded hut, Margaret died in 1876, aged only 36. No wonder. Poor woman.
With kids to raise, John soon remarried, to a widow named Mary MacDonald. They had two more kids together, as well as his two teen daughters who helped on the croft, and three sons (ages seven to eleven) who attended school: Elementary education was now mandatory, and provided by the government.
By 1881, John and Mary were in their forties. John was a very intelligent, articulate, polite, tall, and good-looking man. He was tailor-made for modern 19th century media. He had much loyalty to his people, the Gaels of Glendale, and strong opinions on their future. He was not alone, but he was a perfect spokesman at exactly the right time. From the defeat at Culloden to the clearances and potato famine emigrations, the past century plus had been the worst time ever for the Gaels of Skye. Now, things were about to change. And the community’s focus in Glendale and beyond? Getting back the land on which they lived.
A Real Mikado
Our great Mikado, virtuous man
—W.S. Gilbert, The Mikado (1885)
What was happening had not gone unnoticed all the way down in London, because there were now people in London who cared. Britain’s many social problems arising from the industrial revolution had led to a new political party in the 1850s, the Liberals. They were determined to make life better for ordinary British people. Their leader was W.E. (William Ewart) Gladstone.
In 1880, W.E. Gladstone had just begun a second term as Britain’s Prime Minister. A wealthy man from Liverpool, Gladstone was so popular among working-class Brits that they called him “The People’s William.”
Please note: Over the coming decades, working-class Brits would get tired of the limited progressive measures the Liberals enacted (let’s improve things! Not too much though!) and started to move to the socialist Labour Party.
For now, though, the Liberals were a breath of fresh air to ordinary people. Gladstone himself was especially interested in returning the lands of Ireland to Irish people, and although the Liberals were divided on this issue, many MPs (Members of Parliament, legislators who sit in the House of Commons) shared his interest. That sympathy for Ireland would turn out to be important for Skye.
Even more crucially, the Gaels themselves were starting to become conscious of their own awful 19th century history, all the terrible things they had been through—it’s amazing how fast the past can be forgotten, and needs to be relearned. As early as 1870, the Gaels began to organize.
Organizing Gaels
By 1873, a magazine called The Highlander began publication in Inverness, the capital of the Highlands. Its editor was John Murdoch, a man with plenty of experience in the Lowlands and the North of England, but who had grown up in the Highlands and Hebridean Islands. We will hear a lot about John Murdoch, so good job his name is Murdoch, the only one in our story, and not MacLeod, MacPherson, nor MacDonald.
Murdoch wanted to get the Gaels’ lands back. He belonged to the new Gaelic Society of Inverness: There were now branches of the Gaelic Society in all the Scottish cities, and London, and in the 1870s and into the 1880s they were increasingly concerned with what I’ll call Land Back issues. Church of Scotland schools and new government schools meant that young Gaels throughout the Highlands could now speak, read, and write in English. They could read newspapers and magazines. Again, super important.
The Gaels of the Scottish Highlands weren’t the only Indigenous people who wanted their land back. So, as already mentioned, did the Irish: The Irish Land League started in 1879. So did Lowland Scots (the other Indigenous people of Scotland, with their own culture, who spoke Scots, yay us), who called for “restoration” of their land, meaning nationalization. So did the English.
The whole of the UK was made up almost entirely of Indigenous people, and they were fed up. While anger was directed toward immigrants, especially the Irish who came to Britain after the potato famine, the main resistance was directed at the real villains: The rich landlords who had been stealing the people’s lands at least since the English Enclosure Acts of the 18th century. These wealthy were not “job creators”, but people who, for their own selfish reasons, took away the ability of ordinary people to make a decent living off the land as they always had, people who had sent women and children into the hell of poorly-paid factory labor, and city slums, and emigration boats.
One publication by the English Land League that Mr. Hutchinson quotes summed up all these problems, and concluded: “It is therefore the duty of all Englishmen to secure the restoration of England to its true owners, the people of England.” Have Mr. Hutchinson and I got you to think more broadly about the word “Indigenous” yet?
John Murdoch was interested in land leagues and land issues in England, Scotland, and Ireland. He had worked as a taxman in Ireland, and gotten to know Irish Land Leaguers like Michael Davitt. Although the Highland Land League did not yet exist in the late 1870s, Irish and Scottish Highland/Island fishermen met as they fished, and they talked: Irish Gaelic (pronounced Gael-ick) and Scottish Gaelic (pronounced Galick) are two sides of the same language coin. Most importantly, the potato famine had led to thousands of Irish and Highlanders moving to Scotland’s industrial cities, especially Glasgow and Dundee, where they met the same fierce prejudice and discrimination, and each other. Remember my “Auntie” Peg McLean? Yup.
John Murdoch got to know Edward McHugh, a Catholic Irishman whose poor family left Ireland when he was eight, and had moved to the Glasgow area. McHugh’s dad was a laborer, but he himself rose in modern city life, and became a compositor, someone who set metal type in frames for printing while waiting for computers to be invented. Talking with Murdoch, McHugh realized how different were politics in the Scottish Highlands in the 1870s, compared with what was happening in politics in Glasgow and even Ireland.
Most crofters weren’t radical in the 1870s. They were Liberals, not socialists. They weren’t aiming to nationalize the land (have it be owned by the people, via their government). They just wanted their landlords to be more respectful and behave more decently toward their tenants: Fair rents, tenants who paid rent not being evicted at will, crofters being allowed to sell their houses, and to get compensated for any improvements they had made to a house or land if the croft was sold. They also wanted the land that had been stolen and rented to the big sheep farms to be returned to them. Basically, the goal was to go back to the acceptable and stable living conditions of a hundred years earlier, and stop more grazing land being taken from them.
But as early as 1874, Gaels were starting to get angry. Fifty-eight crofters on the isle of Bernera were ordered off their grazing land by their landlord that year. As the officials left after serving the summonses, they were attacked by adults and even children chucking lumps of dirt. When one man was arrested for taking part in this attack, while he was visiting Stornoway, the capital of the remote island of Lewis, it took hours for the police to hustle him through town, because hundreds of angry people tried to stop his arrest. At trial, he and two others accused were found not guilty, but the Sheriff Officer who served the summons was convicted of assault. The Bernera crofters did not lose their grazing land.
And on Skye, in Glendale, anger was growing against Donald “Tormore” MacDonald’s conduct as factor, and the sheep farm at Waterstein owned by Dr. Nicol Martin. In Milovaig, a hamlet packed full of people, the grazing land kept shrinking as more and more crofters cut peat to heat their homes and cook their food. Glendale folk watched Waterstein Farm shepherds drive huge herds of distinctive blackfaced sheep across areas that were formerly their own grazing land. Fishermen, used to tying up their small boats at sheltered coves on Loch Pooltiel during storms, were now told by Tormore that they were trespassing, and would be arrested if they continued to moor there.
And then Tormore banned Glendale’s crofters from owning sheepdogs, claiming they were harassing Dr. Martin’s sheep, and/or being used to drive the crofters’ own sheep onto the Waterstein Farm grazings. Glendale was just the start: More and more, in the 1870s and 1880s, crofters who lived next to the big sheep farms were banned from owning sheepdogs. And while these dogs were working dogs, they were also much-loved family pets. The cruelty is clear.
It gets worse. One Glendale crofter, Alexander Ross in Fasach, accused Tormore of poisoning the crofters’ dogs. His own dog was shot by Glendale estate gamekeepers, who also shot their guns dangerously near his wife. Ross won the case, and the gamekeeper was fined. However, Tormore was able to get a legal injunction forbidding the crofters from entering the Waterstein sheep farm, or the whole west coast of Glendale, under threat of arrest.
And worse. In 1878 or so, Tormore had started a shop in Glendale. He now raised rents on every shopkeeper in Glendale. There were between four and six shops in every township (hamlet), and he declared them a nuisance with the excuse that people were trading eggs and other produce in these shops to be sold south, and in exchange, they got whisky. He said anyone who opened a shop would have to pay an extra £2. He boasted later that this charge deterred wannabe shopkeepers, and he was probably right, Mr. Hutchinson notes. But the suspected goal, of course, was that Tormore planned to own the only shops in Glendale.
Meanwhile, the MacRailds in Colbost carried on ruling that township with an iron rod for their own profit. A crofter who lived until the age of 93, dying in 1969, remembered how, in around 1880, Norman MacRaild threatened his mum, her neighbor and their kids when they came to collect winkles (small tough shellfish) for dinner, accusing them of stealing “his” shellfish, and scattering the buckets they had collected. The old crofter angrily remembered the women and children, including himself, fleeing in tears and humiliation.
All around the Highlands and Islands, anger was growing, but Glendale was especially hardpressed. Skye had lost about 27% of its people to emigration between 1841 and 1881. Family, friends, and neighbors had waved goodbye, never to see each other again, while their former homes rotted. The culture was dissolving, while those who stayed saw rents go up and up, as factors like MacRaild and Tormore became more and more cruel and demeaning.
Trouble started. But not in Glendale. It started a five-hour walk away, on the North Skye coast, in the Kilmuir Estate on Trotternish, a peninsula which, appropriately, looks like an obscene gesture.
Misery on Trotternish
Kilmuir Estate on Trotternish was owned by William Fraser, a Lowland Scot, a retired Army officer from a wealthy family. He bought Kilmuir in 1855 off Lord Macdonald.
William Fraser and his Gael tacksman factor, Alexander Macdonald (yes, another Macdonald, sorry, and none of them sold hamburgers, and I don’t know this one’s nickname) wanted rid of all the people on Trotternish. Fraser wanted to turn the whole Kilmuir Estate into a giant sheep farm plus hunting resort for the rich. But forced clearances of people were now unfashionable, so they had to be satisfied with renting out the land as two sheep farms instead, taking crofters’ grazing lands for those farms, and raising the rents on crofters in the hope they would emigrate.
Mr. Hutchinson makes a really interesting point here: William Fraser and Alexander Macdonald didn’t see themselves as villains, but as people who were improving the land, the economy. One thing about history is that no villain I can think of saw himself as a villain. We all like to think our motives are good. Yes, even Hitler and Stalin. Another thing? Well, Fraser and Alexander Macdonald sound a lot like migrants to America and Canada, and I expect the Skye folk were among them: The Indians aren’t using the land! They’re lazy and useless! We’re improving it, making it better!
Fraser was a keen member of the Inverness-shire Liberal Association, who believed that the clan chieftains had ruined the Skye economy. Their goal was to make it profitable, and while they realized that a few eggs would get broken (i.e. virtually all the crofters would be hurt) they thought it was a necessary price to pay for the good of, well, all.
If they raised the rents, William Fraser told his factor in 1877, that would be great incentive to the crofters to work harder on making their lands viable. He pointed out how generous he had been: He had donated them a school, a shop, a blacksmith’s shop, and a mill for grinding oatmeal. In exchange, he expected to be paid whatever rent he demanded. Those crofters who were behind in rent were on poor land, yet he blamed them as lazy, as poor planners, although even he implied that the problem was partly the land itself. In his mind, he had addressed that problem, though: When he moved a crofter to that poor land, Fraser said, he gave him land, farming equipment, even a house, for a running start. Fraser did not tolerate “paupers”, the destitute, whom he pronounced “sickening.”
Sounds pretty sensible to my conservative friends. Fair enough, right? Personal responsibility? But, as is always the case, not everything was within any one person’s control, even setting aside the problems of the Skye weather, and this is why people had not traditionally lived as independent individuals, why they had always, across the centuries, lived and worked together.
In this new age in which people didn’t matter, rents could be jacked up (and were). People had come to rely on a single vegetable, the potato, as their staple diet, one that originated in the very different climate of the Andes Mountains, in Peru, and was not now being bred thoughtfully. Now think of the potato blight and famine, back in the 1840s. By the 1870s, a lot of people were thinking about how vulnerable people were in the Highland, even as life in Victorian Britain now seemed to be getting better for more and more Brits. One Glasgow newspaper described what was happening in Trotternish as “heavy rents that keep the people from ever getting out of difficulties.”
And then, in 1877, Skye weather struck: Heavy rain and flooding in Trotternish. A mudslide destroyed nasty landlord William Fraser’s house at Uig Lodge, and scattered corpses from a nearby graveyard all over his garden. Before my readers feel guilty for thinking such thoughts, journalist/activist John Murdoch (whom we already met) beat us to it: He reported in The Highlander that a lot of people in Trotternish saw this as divine retribution against Fraser.
Hoping to put Murdoch’s newspaper out of business, Fraser sued and won, but he won in that wonderful way that British courts now, in this increasingly moral Victorian age, liked to deliver to people like him: He asked for £1,000 but only got £50 plus £35 for legal expenses. Murdoch’s supporters paid the bill.
Fraser Raises Rents. Kilmuir Fights Back.
In the early 1880s, Norman Stewart, a crofter and fisherman on the Kilmuir Estate on Skye’s Trotternish peninsula, refused to pay landlord Fraser’s 60% rent increase, to nearly £8 for his half of an eight-acre croft. Stewart’s nickname was “Parnell”, a tribute to him and to the man for whom he was nicknamed: Charles Stewart Parnell (no relation), an Irish MP, advocate of Irish Home Rule (the first step toward an independent Ireland), and a committed activist for land reform.
Norman Stewart had previously spent time in jail for taking heather and rushes to repair the thatch on his house, no straw being available, because, strangely, he did not think the landlord’s meanspirited rules were more important than his family having shelter from Skye’s heavy rains. Landowners saw “Parnell” of Kilmuir as a troublemaker. His neighbors thought he was great, and later made him a representative. Stewart later explained that Kilmuir’s crofters didn’t have enough land to live on and weren’t allowed to keep enough sheep and cattle to make a living. Stewart himself only owned two cows and “seven or eight” sheep, and had only four acres to grow food. What a family in the rocky soils of Kilmuir needed, he said, was between 15 and 20 acres of land to grow crops, plus “ten cows, two horses, and fifty sheep.” The land was there, and the people would gladly pay a decent rent of up to £12 each to use it. That’s a big rent increase from £8, but it would not be a problem, because the crofters would get all the land they needed to make a decent living.
That was the goal. That was not what was happening on the Kilmuir Estate. Rent increases had plunged the crofters into dire poverty, what today we call absolute poverty: They didn’t have enough clothes to wear or food to eat. Some did not have blankets. There were kids who had no shoes, which meant they couldn’t attend school. And suddenly I think of kids in urban slums in the early 20th century, in places like my own Dundee and New York, where the children had to stay in bed while their only clothes were washed. I think of Eleanor Roosevelt teaching school, and Franklin helping her by carrying a sick child home to a squalid tenement, and saying to her “My God, I had no idea that people lived like this.” From now on, he did know that.
Norman “Parnell” Stewart led a group of crofters to Uig, to meet with factor Alexander MacDonald (the one without a nickname), and object to the rent increases, which were the third William Fraser had imposed since 1866, despite the absence of inflation. Alexander “No Nickname” Macdonald asked the crofters to see if they could manage with the increased rent for one year. But after three years, the rents were still the same, and still a crushing burden.
So some of the men, led by “Parnell”, went on a rent strike. By 1881, twelve crofters in “Parnell’s” hamlet of Valtos were on a rent strike and more were joining them. But Fraser told MacDonald to threaten the rent strikers with eviction. The strikers blinked, and paid some of the rent.
Now, unexpectedly THE Parnell stepped in: Not Norman “Parnell” Stewart, but Charles Stewart Parnell, MP and land reformer from Ireland. Speaking in Glasgow, he told his audience what was going on at the Kilmuir Estate, and they voted to help the Highland crofters. Three weeks later in Glasgow, the Federation of Celtic Societies voted to offer support to the Kilmuir crofters.
Alexander MacDonald, William Fraser’s factor on the Kilmuir Estate, was in an awkward position. He was a local, a Gael, a Gaelic speaker, and he could find himself very alone in his community if he didn’t play his cards right. So he suggested to his boss that they issue a bunch of rent rebates and reductions, and that they spin these to look like huge generosity: Announce that these were support for crofters after bad weather and weak harvests, banks’ refusal to issue loans to crofters, that sort of thing.
Why did William Fraser even consider this plan? Well, he wasn’t the greatest poster boy for the Inverness-shire Liberal Association to which he belonged. Yes, Liberals believed in economic progress, but they were also starting to think that ruining lots of lives kind of missed the point. There was pressure on Fraser, conversations in corners, withheld invitations to parties. One thing that really frightens rich people? Other rich people not inviting them to parties.
After negotiations, every crofter on the Kilmuir Estate in 1881 got 25% off the rent. Norman “Parnell” Stewart was not impressed. “We got a slight reduction,” he said. It wasn’t the end of the story. But this was seen by a growing public as an important victory, in which militant crofters won. And that it could be the start of something. It was.
Don’t miss part 1.5 this Saturday, on Victorian satire (like Gilbert and Sullivan) which helped set the stage for what was happening on Skye, Part 2 next Tuesday, and after that, Part 3, in which I give you great background stuff and photos.