The Canoe Boys

by Alastair Dunnett

  Reviews of previous editions of The Canoe Boys:

  One of the most unusual travel books published in a long

  time ... Only those who have sailed among the Western Isles

  in substantial craft can realise the full implication of a trip there

  in a frail canoe. Such a method of voyaging in these waters seems

  fantastic. Yet it was done ... absorbing reading.

  Glasgow Herald

  A daring feat.

  Sunday Times

  ... spacious, humorous, penetrating log-book ... the

  observant eye as well as the racy pen.

  New Books

  Adventure surely was part of the story, and that aspect of it is

  given full prominence. But there was more to it than adventure;

  there was a purposeful determination to discover personally the

  causes contributing to the depopulation of the Highlands.

  Sunday Mail

  The purpose and spirit of the book stand forth inspiringly.

  Daily Record

  A memorable cruise ... he hotly denies that Highlanders are sly

  ne’er-do-weels; he rails at authority for its neglect of Gaeldom.

  Evening Dispatch

  As a record of what must have been a very hazardous

  voyage, this is first-rate and exciting reading. It is, in the

  highest sense, a fine travel book.

  Evening Citizen

  The charm of the book as a record of experience does not

  obscure the value inherent in its assessment of conditions and

  potentialities in a beautiful but long neglected area.

  Scotsman

  To

  James S.Adam (Seumas)

  who went further

  and to those of the Claymore

  John Scott Burt

  James Brown MacDougall

  Robert MacLean

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  1 FAILURE

  2 CHANGE!

  3 THE START

  4 JOURNEY WITH A MELON

  5 THE KINSMAN

  6 THE DORUS MOR

  7 THE ISLES

  8 SEA CANOEING

  9 THE SPANISH ARMADA

  10 FAMILY FARM

  11 ARDMORE

  12 THE FORBIDDEN ISLAND

  13 THE HIGHLAND PROBLEM

  14 THE HERRING FISHERS

  15 NORTHWARD

  16 THE HIGHLAND PROBLEM RESOLVED

  17 IT’S TOO LATE IN THE YEAR

  NOTES

  COPYRIGHT PAGE

  INTRODUCTION

  Late in the 20th century, an elderly Scottish journalist found himself welcoming a new sort of visitor to his Edinburgh home. Every so often, there would appear on the doorstep a particular breed of far-flung adventurer. They were travelling (perhaps surprised to find from Neil Wilson’s 1995 reprint of this book that the opportunity was still there) in the hope of meeting a figure of legend: one of the canoe boys.

  There was something of a full circle in this, for it was as ‘canoe boys’ that my father and his friend James Adam had first known celebrity, among the Hebridean community who watched for their paddling silhouettes on the horizon more than 70 years ago. To be graced with the title once more, near the end of his life, was for him as fine an accolade as the late knighthood, honorary doctorate and other tributes which rounded off a life of achievement.

  In fact, the three-month journey undertaken by two men in their mid-twenties had been a touchstone throughout their long lives.When Alastair Dunnett wrote this book at the mid-point of the 20th century it was a reaffirmation of the values underpinning a career as one of Scotland’s most distinguished newspaper editors. Even then, though, most of his adult life separated him from the remembered events of the narrative. The world had changed, the war years had taken their toll and personal nostalgia was already one of the elements of the story.

  So there was much to talk about to the young voyagers who settled themselves in the cosy Merchiston sitting-room with a glass of Famous Grouse. Often they brought their own stories, like Brian Wilson, whose Blazing Paddles: Scottish Coastal Odyssey was published a few months before my father died. But they all came to listen, too. The sporting achievement of James (‘Seumas’) and Alastair’s trip during a stormy autumn, with negligible experience, equipment now seen as primitive and no precursors for reference or encouragement, has made it a milestone in British canoeing history.

  The Canoe Boys has earned its place in the literature, too. In the years it has been out of print, its incarnations as Quest by Canoe (1950) and It’s Too Late In The Year (1969) have been highly prized, and its reputation nurtured by reference and quotation in other canoe books like Robin Lloyd-Jones’ Argonauts of the Western Isles (1989). At the time of writing it has a lively presence among enthusiasts on the internet: you will find its recipe for brose at www.canoecampingclub.co.uk, or get access to the book itself through the library of Ribble Canoe Club.

  Seventy-five years ago, the canoe boys’ experiments on the water had begun as an extension of their forays into the bens and glens. These were the days when the hordes who had flocked to industrial Glasgow to bend their shoulders for ‘the second city of the Empire’ were beginning to rub their eyes and discover the fabulous landscape on their doorstep. Alastair Dunnett and Seumas Adam were among them as they hiked, hitched and bussed out of the city to Loch Lomond and the Highlands. Here the pair joined the work of establishing camps like Auchengillan, where the wide-eyed new ramblers could make the most of often frugal resources.

  The hills, though, were also a deeply personal matter. As a junior bank clerk unhappily trammelled by the bowler-hatted urban grind, Alastair would escape to the Highlands with just a heavy canvas backpack, tent and blanket. His journal entry for the final night of a lone and snowy May hike from Balmaha to Bridge of Orchy in 1926 youthfully frames the lament of all those whose wings are clipped by circumstance:

  Tomorrow my feet will walk a city’s pavements. Tomorrow I shall know again the full horror of respectability.

  Tomorrow, pilloried in collars, surmounted by unyielding headgear, I shall prepare to shoulder again my infinitesimal burden of responsibility in the financial transactions of a wearied world. But tonight – tonight I am free. I am cold. I shall probably soon be wet. But I am happy. And to the servants of nature who have made me so – to the rain, the snow, to the smoke of my fire, to the sun’s brief appearance, to the cuckoo, whose song has haunted me since my start – to them all, my heart sings ‘Good night’.

  On this trip, moved by his first sight of the view from Ben Lomond (he wrote later) he had pledged a sort of commitment to the landscape, and, aged 17, ‘became knit forever to my native land’.

  ‘I had tears to shed,’ he recounted, recalling that early ascent more than half a century later, ‘just as women do at weddings and probably for much the same reason.’

  It was rare though, in the years that followed, that Alastair would travel alone. The scout movement had been a welcoming escape route from the city for a generation of working class kids in the Depression, and though he joined it reluctantly and eventually repudiated it, it was where he would meet the closest friends of his life, and develop some of its guiding ideas. Over the next 10 years, this tight-knit band would be his allies on some of its greatest ventures.

  In his early twenties, Alastair had begun to explore new ways of travelling, hitching rides on early-morning cargo tugs from Kingston or Queen’s Dock down to Greenock in time to get the bus back to work, or overnighting on herring drifters from Highland ports. The farthest-flung of these coastal hikes was by steerage on a tramp steamer from Glasgow to Oban and the Hebrides. F
or a few shillings, it was a cheap way of accompanying the cargo going to the remote islands, sleeping on benches and cooking your own food in the ship’s galley. Trips on the SS Hebrides became a familiar journey to the scouting friends who were then beginning to plan a new weekly publication for Scottish boys.

  At Auchengillan. From left: Robbie Maclean, John Burt, AMD and Seumas. Picture: Jim MacDougall

  In the spring of 1934, with the Claymore well into its 10-month run, it was the ‘Heb’ which carried a group of its editorial stalwarts (including Robbie MacLean and Jim MacDougall, whose names you will see in the dedication) to Loch Skipport in South Uist. Here these pioneers began the voyage reported by the paper as ‘the most adventurous canoe trip ever made in Scottish waters.’

  This trip through the Atlantic fords at Benbecula to North Uist in boats of Lochaber design ended at the little island of Grimsay, where the canoeists were picked up by another, south-bound steamer. Alastair and Seumas had been too tied to publishing deadlines to join the expedition, but they travelled to meet the returning party in Glasgow. They had a plan: to paddle two of the new boats back to their maker in Fife, using the Forth and Clyde canal and then crossing the estuary. As it turned out, this inland navigation was to be virtually the entirety of their canoe training for the epic voyage which absorbed them just three months later, and it proved to be far from straightforward.

  ‘A canal wind seems fiercer and nastier than most other winds,’ Alastair reported. ‘That’s the way it was this weekend … and for two days it blew out of the east and made us fight for every inch.’

  AMD (centre) on the Forth and Clyde canal.

  The central belt journey gave the two novices a chance to get a feel for the unfamiliar craft, at least. And it included some warning of the problems that lay ahead on the Crinan Canal, with a low bridge at the main road in Clydebank foreshadowing future difficulties in the north.

  ‘There wasn’t enough room to paddle,’ Alastair wrote, ‘so we lay backwards over the canoes and worked ourselves through with our hands on the girders that scraped our noses. A few inches above, tramcars, buses, horses and people kept the bridge shaking and roaring while dust dropped on our faces. In due course we emerged blinking on the other side, to the relief of a congregation of people, and were attacked by a flock of swans …’

  Wildlife was not the only hazard for the urban mariner in the 1930s. When Alastair subsequently tried the canoe in the centre of Glasgow, he discovered that for the local population of Townhead: ‘this idea was all too Venetian …

  ‘… from all the surrounding streets they came, bearing whatever missiles they could snatch up as they ran. I moved slowly up the first stage of the river under a creeping barrage …’

  If these early trials were hardening the canoeists to unexpected hazards, they were also building the foundations of a relationship for which Alastair and Seumas had high hopes. It was the Claymore’s discovery of North Queensferry canoe manufacturer John Marshall which had prompted all this waterborne adventuring, and by the time the pair set off from Bowling in late August 1934 they could begin to glimpse profitable opportunities. If Alastair and Seumas’s celebrated adventure was successful, a desperately-needed income awaited them as agents for the Lochaber in the newly-cultivated market. As the Sunday Express reported on their return: ‘They have received thousands of letters. The man who built their boat has taken on several men to meet the orders for boats, and expects to take on many more.’

  The reality, though, was less bright. Apart from a flurry of publicity and an order from Glasgow Corporation for 12 canoes to be hired out on Hogganfield Loch, the hoped-for boom never materialised.

  There is an irony in this, for in 21st century Scotland canoeing and sea kayaking are more popular than they have ever been. And the instructors recording year-on-year increases at places like Glenmore Lodge report that the great majority of the new canoeists are coming from a climbing or hiking background. The discovery of the hills which Alastair and Seumas fostered so keenly has, over the years, become a national enthusiasm which has induced many an independent spirit to seek wilder, less populated horizons. This is the turn of events, too, which has kept The Canoe Boys current.

  Back in 1934, though, the young pioneers’ appetite was not just for adventuring, or even for business. Alastair was described at the time by the Glasgow Weekly Herald as ‘a young man with very definite ideas about Scotland’, and there was a confidence – some might have said, an arrogance, were it not rooted in patriotic and creative fervour – about two little-known young Scots retailing their analysis of their native land. But Alastair and Seumas were setting off up the west coast at exactly a time when the chattering classes of industrialised Britain were in the habit of shaking their heads over ‘The Highland Problem’. With Gaelic-speaking forbears and Highland heritage, the canoe boys were taking this personally.

  Everything depended on a media presence, so that as the story unfolded Alastair and Seamas were not only engaged in an unprecedented sea adventure and a wide-ranging social study – they were also running a highly effective floating news agency. There was extensive coverage of the canoe boys’ trip through late August and September 1934 in all the Scottish national papers and some further afield. A great deal of this was actually written by and attributed to the canoeists themselves, and almost all of it was conveyed by their bulletins, parcelled up or stamped out by telegram at post offices in Tarbert, Oban, Tobermory, Mallaig and Dunvegan.

  The articles which began to spread their fame were broadly divided between breathless accounts of watery exploits (‘A thrilling battle with a gale,’ Evening News, ‘daring feat’, Daily Record, ‘these two boys have the real stuff in them,’ Sunday Mail, ‘Adventure is not dead!’ Daily Express), picturesque accounts of the colourful Hebridean scenes they encountered, and forays into cultural analysis which went on for some time after the trip was over.

  There were pictures of Mallaig kippering and Mull ceilidhing, but there was also a creeping and persuasive challenge to urban orthodoxy on the social issues. Alastair’s mother was a Gaelic speaker from Loch Fyneside, and the strictures of Highland Calvinism, the vicissitudes of fishing, the marginalisation of Gaelic and depopulation were all subjects he understood intimately. Perhaps his references to the character and potential of ‘the Highlander’ sound unsophisticated today, but he was taking on the sceptics in their own idiom, and the debate reverberated long after the canoes were dry.

  One of the notable aspects of The Canoe Boys is its modesty about the perils of the Hebridean journey. Without question there were times in the wild and unpredictable seas when Alastair and Seumas feared for their own lives, and each other’s, and they were journalistically educated enough to know that the possibility of their watery deaths was one of the main draws for the pressmen who reported their progress. But you will search the narrative in vain for words like ‘danger’ and ‘brave’. This should not be taken as a failure of courage (which is measured by the presence of fear, not its absence). In his autobiography (Among Friends, 1984) Alastair wrote of childhood sufferings:

  ‘… my early upbringing and my father’s expectations had developed in me a spirit of diffidence and shyness – frankly, timidity … toward the end of my teens, I took this sense of apprehension in hand and, I think, overcame it. The canoe trip and other ventures were part of this exercise.’

  The completion of the trip in late autumn 1934 was a triumph of what Alastair refers to in the poem prefacing Chapter VIII as ‘heart’. But it also symbolised, vitally, that it was going to be possible to make things better in Scotland. The naysayers and ‘too late in the year’ gang had been defeated – and there was a great deal of heart to carry the adventure forward.

  When this book was first published 16 years later, much had changed not only in Alastair’s life (he was now in his forties, married, and editor of the Daily Record) but in the landscape he had surveyed as a 25-year-old. He was able to show in pictures how the deserted hamlet at
Ardmore had deteriorated, and to work into the story some sense of the Highlands’ ongoing progress. Press and public reaction was encouraging and enthusiastic: there had been changes in detail, but the ‘Highland problem’ remained an issue, and reviewers were supportive of the book’s approach:

  Mr Dunnett writes with a great dash, a pleasant humour, and a nice facility for sketching scenery. He has not confined himself to the adventure and has much to say of the people and the life of the Inner Isles.

  SUNDAY TIMES

  About the best reading that has come my way for some time … all through the book Dunnett preaches the gospel of Scottishness – not the Scottishness of the Celtic Twilight but of a new awakening in industry and agriculture.

  THE BULLETIN

  Its views will be studied with thoughtful care by those who are concerned with the welfare and the happiness of the people of the Highlands.

  THE SCOTSMAN

  Today, in a new century, so much has changed in Scotland that many of the ideas floated by the canoe boys seem simply commonplace: the extension and expansion of the short tourist season, the multi-tasking of the crofting lifestyle, better roads, bridges and ferries, hydroelectric schemes, the fight against bad land laws, resistance to the institutional obliteration of Gaelic and the development of tweed and cheese, kelp and mineral reserves for export. The days of the herring fleet are long gone, and instead of ‘the endless goodwill required to mend a long-depressed industry’ our fishermen have been sacrificed to the same bullies in Brussels who have turned the business of agriculture into a profligate sham. But the lovingly-described delights of Calve island’s native foodstuffs sound like an advertisement for the sort of naturally grown and reared fresh produce which might be the 21st century Scottish farmer’s best chance.

  And if the view from The Canoe Boys is distinctively Dunnett’s Scotland, a place of limitless potential and precious humanity, it must also be said that its originator – in faith, loyalty and tireless striving for his native land – had already proved himself to be wholly Scotland’s Dunnett. The themes developed in those early days were to be nurtured through 60 years of public life, with his hero Tom Johnston in the Scottish Office, with tycoons like Paul Getty and Armand Hammer in the development of Scottish oil, in plays, songs and books, and above all in the press. Alastair’s 1935 post-canoe survey of the Highlands in the Scottish Educational Journal, ‘A New View of the West’, became a model for subsequent newspaper analyses of Scotland’s future which reached ever larger audiences as his journalistic influence grew. By the time he was editor of the Daily Record (1946–56) and particularly The Scotsman (1956–72), these ideas were to play a central role in the shaping of educated opinion as Scotland moved towards control of its own affairs in the second half of the 20th century.