McNeil’s mood had not been helped by news that while he’d been dodging bullets and bombs in Monte Cassino, Maggie Macpherson, the green-eyed, auburn-haired eldest daughter of Tam Macpherson of Balnasaig Farm, had become engaged to a Polish officer, an SOE demolitions instructor at Finnverinnity House.
“Shonnie MacDonald and Ali Mackenzie died fighting for the laird’s king and country while the laird quaffed Eiswein with Adolf,” said Hector McPhail,* another Killiebrae man, who had fought fascism in the Rhine as well as Italy.
Then, stirring from the shadows and rising from his usual seat in the darkest corner of the howff, the taciturn incomer—an SOE blow-in from the Big House who’d stayed on—spoke. “Dùthchas!” he declared. In addition to McWatt’s own record of the evening in Forby, we have a first-hand account of that speech from Roddy McIntosh, then a rookie fisherman of twenty, who was interviewed more than half a century later for Poet in a Landscape, the Auchwinnie Press Festschrift pamphlet marking McWatt’s eightieth birthday.
McIntosh recalled that the Gaelic speakers in the inn were shocked to hear this stranger, “a gall, a fella frae away,” use the islanders’ word for the ancient way of apportioning tenure according to clan birthright, in which the principle of kindness, to the land as well as the people, was sacred. “Wha loues the laun, awns the laun, an the laun awns him,” McWatt went on, in Scots rather than Gaelic, his voice trembling with conviction. “Montfitchett disnae loue the laun. He laithes it—an aw the fowk who bide here.”
It was late, much drink had been taken, and there were roars of agreement. Father Maclennan, acquainted with the inflammatory effects of the uisge beatha, held up his hand to silence the crowd. But if anyone thought he was trying to act as conciliator—for blessed is the peacemaker—they would have been mistaken. He had, in his former parish of Barrhead, Glasgow, once attended a meeting addressed by James Maxton and had been much taken by the socialist politician’s oratorical style.
“Brothers and sisters,” said the priest, though there is no record of any female presence in the pub at that time. “Men and women of Fascaray, we have on this fair island of ours, appeased the English lairds for too long. The time has come. Justice demands it…”
And so it was, that as dawn broke over Fascaray on 10 September 1946, five determined men, aided by a score of friends and family, women as well as men roused from their beds, grabbed shovels and picks and walked the length of Finnverinnity Bay, past the Big House where Mrs. McIvor, who had only returned the previous month from her Peebles exile, was already up clearing, as best she could, the debris left by the departed commandos and airing rooms in anticipation of the laird’s imminent return. Using hemp rope from the fishing boats and stakes hewn from Montfitchett’s trees, the islanders fenced off ten acres of fertile land, two acres each for the returning soldiers, and began to dig.
The Fascaray Land Raid became a cause célèbre—immortalised in McWatt’s song, of course, and later on stage (an agitprop hit at the Glasgow Citizens’) and screen (a cult seventies Canadian caper movie)—and though the five men’s test case was finally thrown out of the Edinburgh Court of Session in November and their subsequent appeal, financed by collections in pubs, shipyards and miners’ clubs throughout Scotland’s industrial heartland, was lost, it was, modern historians have argued, the spark that lit the flame that was to become, decades later, the conflagration of modern Scottish nationalism.
The Fascaray Five—Murdo MacDonald (brother of the late Shonnie), Hector McPhail, Angus McPhee, Neil MacEwan and Ewan McNeil—finally had no choice but to leave the island in search of work and shelter. Most of them headed south, to the shipyards and factories of Glasgow. But though Montfitchett, now widely ridiculed as Herr Montfitchett, had won, and the purloined land was restored to his estate, it was a pyrrhic victory for the laird. Even the minister, Ranald Paterson, turned his face from the laird’s entourage when it next disembarked at the pier—Montfitchett, Paterson was heard to say, had a “regrettably casual attitude to the Sabbath.” Sammy Nelson was refused service in store and howff and abruptly left his master’s employment to return home to Fife. Montfitchett imported a stalker from Gloucestershire and a factor from Hampshire, but neither stayed the course. The game shooting was never the same and the poachers always seemed to get the best bag.
Lady Montfitchett’s programme of purge and redecoration at the Big House, embarked on the week after the Court of Session ruled against the Fascaray Land Raiders, seemed to the defeated islanders shivering in their damp, insanitary blackhouses, a sinfully extravagant act of spite from a doomed tyrant.
The Gothic candelabrum, which in the glory days of Finnverinnity House illuminated the ballroom with forty candles and had during wartime service been used by a high-spirited Norwegian officer for late-night shooting practice, was dismantled and replaced by a vast bouquet of glass lilies, illuminated by 120 electric lightbulbs, which arrived by boat from New York in a crate “as big as the village school,” said Effie MacLeod. A “society artist” was brought up from London to paint a fresco—lightly clothed muses cavorting in a Cretan grove—in the ballroom. The cellar, depleted by officers with a taste for expensive champagne, was restocked, and crockery, glassware and cutlery—irreparably soiled in Lady Muriel’s view—were dumped at sea while new French china, Waterford crystal glass and Portuguese silver were bought and shipped from Harrods in London.
Bedding and furniture, also “contaminated” by vulgar use, were burned in a pyre that lit up the skyline and smouldered for ten days. Again, Harrods was called in to provide replacements.
Outside, the lawn—battle-weary from the passage of a thousand army boots and scarred by a patchwork of pale rectangles on which the now dismantled tents and Nissen huts had stood—was dug up and resown. The antlers and bones of dead stags, illegally poached from the hills and barbecued to supplement mediocre canteen food, were retrieved from the rhododendron shrubbery and a new planting scheme, based on an Elizabethan knot garden with box hedges and topiary, was devised by a fashionable French garden designer.
In the stables, a grimmer modernisation programme took place when the Clydesdales and Shires that had been used by troops for exercises were dispatched, under laird’s orders, with the returning groom’s service pistol and sold for horsemeat. (The groom, an Irishman who had served in the Cavalry Division during the war, left his job at the Big House, and the island, the following day.) But despite all the cleaning up, clearing out and re-equipping, the scarifying fires, purifying submersions and ruthless eliminations, the shipments of furniture, hectares of cream paint and bales of pink toile, this was not a restoration of the ancien régime but its last hurrah—“Marie Antoinette rearranging her lingerie drawer at Versailles in 1792,” wrote McWatt.
This was, of course, poetic hyperbole—no “National Razor” ever grazed the neck of the Montfitchetts, though late-night talk at the Finnverinnity Inn suggested that the popular will might have been there, if not the means. Nor were the Montfitchetts instantly stripped of their status or wealth. But the old order had suffered a blow and would never be the same again.
Grigor McWatt’s song, “Hame tae Fascaray,” written in a half-hour fever of inspired indignation, was first performed in the Finnverinnity Inn during those darkest days, and for the next few years it was played and sung, like the English national anthem on the Home Service, to round off the evening’s programme at the pub. Set to the traditional tune of “The Hills of Tranalla,” “Hame tae Fascaray” was played feelingly at its first airing by Murdo “the Fiddle” McIntyre, vibrato throbs richly ornamented by grace notes. Solo vocal parts were taken by the formidable amateur baritone and professional poacher Dougal Mackenzie, whose brother had died in the Burma campaign, and by young Hamish McIntosh, whose tremulous voice had a chorister’s plaintive purity, giving the combative lyrics a paradoxical edge.
Montfitchett rages
In his lair.
Sassenachs beware!
An end tae clearance
We’ll soon be there.
The chorus, a bellowed anthem more heartfelt and menacing than the most pugnacious football stadium chant, set the crowd swaying. They were spoiling for a fight.
A Granite Ballad—The Reimagining of Grigor McWatt, Mhairi McPhail (Thackeray College Press, 2016)
* * *
* Grandfather of the author.
Hame tae Fascaray
Blaw winds,
An dae your warst!
Stormy seas rise up!
Spite lashin rain
An England’s shame,
We’re comin hame.
Chorus:
Hee-ra-haw, boys,
We’re awa, boys,
Gangin hame
Tae Fascaray.
Howl gales,
An screech gulls,
Let the haar descend.
Let thunder crack,
But dinnae fash
We’re headin back.
Chorus
Lassies waitin
On the pier,
While the gloamin falls
On knowe and brae.
We’re on oor way
Tae Fascaray.
Chorus
Montfitchett rages
In his lair.
Sassenachs beware!
An end tae clearance
An interference!
We’ll soon be there.
Chorus
Heather’s bloomin
On the braes,
This is oor ain land.
The bonnie hame
Where we belang.
Let’s stake oor claim.
Chorus
—Grigor McWatt, 1946*
* * *
* Stramash Music, copyright © 1952, 1972, 2016. Reprinted with permission of the Estate of Grigor McWatt and the Fascaray Trust.
It was another Scottish poet who evoked the double-edged “gift” of seeing ourselves as others see us. This gift, or curse, would, suggested Robert Burns, “frae monie a blunder free us / An’ foolish notion.” If McWatt had guessed at the scepticism with which he was viewed by his fellow Fascaradians in those early days, he might have turned his back on the isle and sailed away with his SOE comrades in 1945. And if he had done so, the cultural loss to the island, and to Scotland, would have been incalculable.
McWatt’s minute observations of the natural history of the archipelago, its fauna and flora—he gave his name to a rare blue winter-flowering form of the wild flower lady’s bedstraw (Galium verum), known as Galium McWatti, or McWatt’s mattress—as well as its folklore, have enriched our understanding of Scottish island life over the last half-century. His promotion of the Gaelic notion of dùthchas—the sense of belonging to the land, a relationship of mutual trust that entails responsibilities as well as rights—foreshadowed the modern ecology movement.
And then there were his translations, “reimaginings” or “owersettins,” as he called them, which he hoped would “stell [place] the Scots leid [language] at the hert of the warld’s literarie tradeetion.” Scholars and critics continue to argue over the degree of his success in this respect but at the end of the Second World War, to the islanders eking a harsh living from an unforgiving land, he was simply “a glaikit [foolish] wee man who wrote wan guid sang.”
If McWatt had sought a warmer reception at the end of the war than the suspicion and often frank hostility that greeted him, and all incomers, on Fascaray at that time, if he’d instead hankered after an Edinburgh flat handy for the pubs, if he’d married Lilias and set up home in the city and raised a couple of kids, or if he’d returned home to a bunk, unemployment and drink in a Glasgow model lodging house, our store of poetry and song would be immeasurably poorer and Fascaray would have been consigned to permanent obscurity.
A Granite Ballad—The Reimagining of Grigor McWatt, Mhairi McPhail (Thackeray College Press, 2016)
Everything is eternal, everything changes. The sandy sickle of coast west of the Calasay cliffs is gilded by strips of fool’s gold, copper and silver pebbles that from a distance look like scattered loose change—the leavings of a showy “scoor-oot,” in which coins are thrown to bairns after a wedding. Within a week, the glittering bounty is gone and the bleached crescent is pristine powder once more.
In summer, new islands rise up in the narrow straits between the skerries displaying, on their jeweller’s velvet of mossy rock, a shimmering hoard of seashells. Next day, the treasure is nowhere to be seen—buried again. Some mornings offer up a quivering cargo of jellyfish, blue filaments glowing through their translucent mass like a heap of gelatinous lightbulbs. By evening, the jellyfish are gone and the beach is ankle-deep in purple seaweed streamers, like the residue of a forgotten Christmas party. Another dawn yields a splendid harvest for the impecunious crofter as the strand turns green as a meadow with edible seaweed—bright skeins of samphire woven with darker threads of dulce. The crofter knows he must busy himself and gather this bounty, for the next day it will have vanished.
On those occasions when my eyes become too dazzled by the infinite beauties of sky and sea, I turn my gaze downwards. Scoop up a handful of shells and you hold in your hand a glowing galaxy of stars, each tiny calciferous flake and whorled chamber, gaudy bivalve and mother-of-pearl fan with its own secret, tumultuous history far older than our own.
Some shells, like the stones at Ruh beach, are stitched with the curious calcareous hieroglyphs of the serpulid tube-worm. Look closely and they seem to spell out an urgent message in the alphabet of an ancient, obsolete language. Warning or imprecation?
—Grigor McWatt, 1946, The Fascaray Compendium
29 August 2014
In many ways, the MacRaes’ abandoned Museum of Island Life is my greatest problem here. It was set up in Finnverinnity’s derelict herring shed in 1985 by Padruig and Mikey, entrepreneurially inclined cousins from Lusnaharra whose track record for moneymaking schemes was patchy. Their projects, recorded by McWatt in The Fascaray Compendium, had included an ill-fated fish and chip takeaway van (“a salmonella outbreak was never pinned on a batch of their battered cod but suspicions were strong enough to kill the business”), and Paddie’s Peds, launched one summer to hire out plastic pedalos off Lusnaharra Strand (“the absence of tourists, the weather, high tides and the local coastguard—called out to rescue Padruig and Mikey when they were carried away by rip tides towards the Carracorry whirlpool on one of their own vessels—saw off that enterprise”).
No lives were jeopardised by the cousins’ venture into local heritage, though McWatt argued in the Auchwinnie Pibroch that it compromised the island’s credibility. The Fascaradian Museum of Island Life appears to have been an ahistorical emporium of tat offering tea, scones and tablet fudge to bewildered day trippers seeking shelter from the rain, with some loose change to spend and an hour to kill before the ferry back to the mainland.
Agricultural implements, rusted and mud-caked, salt-eroded maritime sundries and oxidised bric-a-brac are carefully, if unconvincingly, labelled by hand. The “Pictish hoe, about 5th century BC,” appears to be, beneath the dried mud, standard-issue garden centre hardware, circa 1980; “Viking fibula, 8th century” looks less like a penannular brooch or garment pin than a twentieth-century plumber’s pipe clamp; and a “Sgian-dubh dagger, once concealed in the sock of a kilted Jacobite,” dated 1745, is uncannily similar to the Jenners’ cheese knife Marco and I were sent from Blairgowrie with a plaid-wrapped log of Crowdie cheese as a Christmas present from my Aunt Bridie.
In one section of the museum, under a paper banner bearing the felt-tipped words “Peeps into the Past,” the walls are lined with acrylic-framed copies of old photographs—glum men, bearded and waistcoated, leaning against crumbling hovels; glummer women in shawls, arms deep in barrels of fish. They are identified in captions as Fascaradians but there are no recognisable landmarks and the images look suspiciously generic.
The MacRaes had applied to the then newly appointed Auchwinnie Regional
Development and Enterprise Board for funding. (It was the projected grant, local cynics said, rather than a passion for local history that induced the cousins to set up the museum in the first place.) Their proposal included plans for something called “The Clearance Experience,” in which tourists would be invited to wrap tartan shawls around their macs and plastic ponchos, swap their fleece beanies for woollen bunnets, and stand head-on to a wind machine (the fan) next to the stuffed sheep, enduring five minutes of audiotaped hectoring from an Englishman who exhorted them to get off his land.
But their most ambitious wheeze was the Clan Cubicle, fashioned from an old Woolworths photo booth, which invited visitors, for £2, to select their affiliated clan from a comprehensive list pasted next to the coin slot, to step inside, close the plaid curtains, take a seat on a height-adjustable stool, enjoy a soulful recorded skirl of bagpipes (performed by Donnie and Sorley MacDonald, son and grandson of the late piper Shonnie) followed by a five-minute audio-visual exposition of the key role played by the customers’ ancestors in the history of Scotland—“land of mists and monsters.”
In the MacRaes’ account of the national narrative, all roles were key and all popular surnames, no matter how ostensibly un-Scots—Evans, Garcia, Jones, Khan, Patel, Smith, Wang, Stein—had an affiliated clan. Insurmountable “technical problems” had finally scuppered the project and the prototype booth—my sarcophagus—looms at the back of the museum rusting under its canvas winding sheet.
The grant from the Auchwinnie Board failed to materialise, as did any day trippers, and the MacRae cousins abandoned the herring shed—on which they owed a substantial sum in rent to the Auchwinnie Council. McWatt reported the museum’s demise with satisfaction in his 21 June 1988 “Frae Mambeag Brae” column in the Auchwinnie Pibroch. “Here on Calasay, the only visitors who are welcome are the winged variety who fill the air with song, drop no litter and go about their own business, leaving us in peace to go about ours.”
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