The Canoe Boys

by Alastair Dunnett

  It is in the scale of this movement that the most confidence is wanted. The petty patching and scraping, which has been all we have to show for Highland planning, must be altogether laid aside. The scene is set for a great, costly, and early-profitable investment. Camping in lost and lovely sea valleys, Seumas and I used to envisage (in those days of great unemployment) an army of men moving over the land; fitted with mechanical weapons of reclamation, and all the other needed tools; clearing the jungled ground, road-making, draining, ditching, fertilising, fencing, improving, setting the soil in order; building the houses and the byres; moving on, and dropping behind them, into restored and present-day communities, men from this rescuing army. It seemed reasonable to imagine that thus could have been created probably the most efficient and profitable food production countryside in the world. It was then, to many, a wild and romantic dream. Since then, proofs are ample that there is no practical impossibility in all this; and if it be still a dream, whoever says so must be prepared to explain away a plan of neglect to a defrauded people. Too many have witnessed immense dubious schemes, sponsored by government for food development abroad, to believe that there are no resources to invest in food production on a big scale at the back door.

  So far as the Highlander is concerned, there will be a need to move him towards the state of mind where he can readily take part in co-operative enterprise for the district and the national weal. He is not yet ready for the setting of a modem community. One finds oneself using the word ‘modern’ with insistence. It is not a modern world in which the Highlander lives. I have explained most of the reasons for this. Very little of the fault is his. But he will quickly and willingly learn, given the right start. The right start will be a double process of education.

  In the first place, he requires to see demonstrated under his eyes the practicability of the new methods by which all his standards can be raised. Demonstration farms and crofts, electrical gadgets worked with power from the new hydroelectric schemes, trial forestry plantings – all on his own soil and not in some distant agricultural laboratory – these are the constant need.

  There is also the difficult process of putting the Highlander’s inward temperament in tune with the march of events. We have here something to learn from the field work of the St Francis Xavier University at Antigonish, which, aided by the Canadian government departments, has carried out some valuable experiments in adult education among the crofting-fishing communities of Nova Scotia. This province has had much in common with the recent history of the Highlands. Its small villages and hamlets have been subject to constant economic pressure from the more populous areas, and for the past several generations, active young people have been creamed off by the attractions of employment in distant industry, leaving an ageing and not over-enterprising population. The self-help schemes initiated by the St Francis Xavier instructors took the form of preparatory village discussion groups, from which rose a recognition of the need for faith and investment in the local resources. Communal savings schemes led to the founding of such schemes as co-operative buying agencies, or canning factories, where surplus fish or fruit – previously waste – could be prepared for a non-perishable market. It is claimed that not only have the resulting schemes prospered and flourished, bringing morale as well as profit, but that local leaders have emerged in all communities, among young people who could not make themselves felt in the old state of society. There is enough evidence to warrant a study of this work with an eye on Scottish application.

  A constant need is to keep up the standards at which the Highlands should aim in selling what they have to offer. The large tweed industry was forced to high standards through competition in world markets. In other directions there has been no improvement over the years. Those who deplore the loss of the former enormous overseas markets for barrels of cured salt herring never mention what seems to me the most prominent feature of this product – that an open barrel of salt herring is one of the most repellent spectacles in the whole range of human food. The herring industry is only now painfully catching up with modern canning and processing methods without which it will simply not live.

  This is a factor to be borne in mind by the well-meaning organisations which are doing good enough work in finding market outlets for the spare-time work of crofters – knitted goods and the like. The tendency has been in the past to organise these on a charity basis, so that the public might respond to appeals to buy the output of the struggling crofters. Under such a system, standards are no higher than might be expected. Hand-knitted socks and hose, for example, will be ill-matched in size; made from coarse yarns, and drab in colouring.

  We believed that this was the wrong approach, to this as to most other Highland problems, and we set out to prove it. We were sure that Highland women could knit more attractively than they were asked to do under the system, and that their dyes could also be made in gay colours which would not require a charity incentive in the public which might buy them. If the standard could be pushed up, there would be no need to sell the articles on a charity basis. Among the five of us who formed the original Claymore band we scraped together a tiny capital which enabled us to set up a non-profit-making marketing organisation with an attic office in Glasgow. We offered to the crofter-women prices which were at least double those which were offered elsewhere. More than half of the first lots had to be rejected out of hand.

  They had all the faults which went uncorrected by the patrons of the other system. The initial cost of return postage on parcels almost ruined us. But slowly, by degrees, standards went up. Socks grew to the same size of foot and leg – a novelty hitherto. We designed mountaineering, ski and walking and fishing socks and mitts, with what bachelor struggles may be imagined. Bright reds, greens, blues, they came at last – softly and expertly finished, with forgotten and complex decorations knitted into the tops. Modern sports stores were eager to have these. We sold as many as we could commission, and at prices more than double those which our competitors charged for their distressing products. All the profits went back into increased payments to the knitters. Into one tiny island of the Outer Hebrides went a steady flow of money during the last winter before the war. By the summer of 1939 our goods were selling in the leading sports shops of the West End of London, in direct competition against similar Swiss and Norwegian products, the expert output of the people who had invented this specialised market.

  On the outbreak of war we had to wind up the business, as we were all to be far sundered. It has not, of course, been possible to have a hand in any such undertaking since; and from what one can see the standards have lapsed to what they were at our beginning. To some, it will seem fantastic that the setting on foot of a brief practical experiment like this should be solely the spare-time task of a few young men without backing or authority. If that is the impression, those who have it know little of the major fantasies of the Highland problem; and of the studied neglect and betrayals which have gone to make it. For us the venture was valuable in that it showed the job could be done: and that the Highlander, given the goal and the impetus, could do it.

  All the proofs are there; the experiments are all done; there is a successful technicological answer to all the claims that ‘it can’t be done’: ‘the land is useless’: ‘the people won’t work’: ‘it’s too late in the year’. If the British people and their nourishment is a present concern, the proofs are overwhelming for a confident investment of faith and works. Not a tenth part will be necessary of the faith which inspired any one phase of the development of the empire, of which the Scotland of the Highlander is a mother country. There is not a part of this empire but would rejoice in its blood stream to see the Highlander, armed with the resource which he has displayed in every spot but where his heart lies, enter upon a new and splendid season of fruitfulness.

  CHAPTER 17

  IT’S TOO LATE IN THE YEAR

  No rest from restless will

  And hot desire,

  We take the tide at t
he fill

  Tho’ the gale’s higher,

  Knowing, when winds grow still,

  So does the fire.

  The ropes were stiff with ice as we coiled them aboard the Calve rowing-boat and pushed off into the Sound. I sat in the bow, holding fast the packed canoes, and Seumas and Calum had an oar apiece. It was black dark, with dawn more than an hour away. A mile over at the pier of Tobermory, with all her ports and decks lit, was the Oban steamer, the Lochinvar. We could hear clearly her engine-room telegraph as the bridge spoke to those below. She would sail in 15 minutes, taking us south.

  Calve dwindled astern, the kitchen light pouring on to the front grass, and the girls at the end of the jetty with the lantern waving. As we came alongside the Lochinvar, she swung open her side doors and hauled in Seumas and me, and then the canoes, with Calum boosting them up from the boat. The steamer was moving almost at once, so that we had time only to run to the top deck and hail Calum finally as the darkness took him. Once out in the Sound of Mull, the Lochinvar hammered down the strait to Oban, and the sky brightened towards the day.

  Waiting for the dawn, we found it took an effort to look ahead and speculate on what was next for ourselves. For months now, we had hardly looked farther into the future than the next day. We did not know that our immediate future was to be a hungry winter in London; but it was a prospect which would not have greatly troubled us.

  What we did know, beyond all uncertainty, was that not this nor any other dawn would ever show us here a profitless land – a permanently beautiful but barren waste. It was, on the contrary, a rich land, if neglected; fertile in all but faith. This was what we had set out, hopefully, to see. And the discovering of it, and the proving of it, at least to ourselves, and the telling of the story as we went, was gain enough. Even if there were never to come our way again a chance to carry the conviction a point onward, we should have something in our recalling of these days to answer any who might ask: ‘But what came of it?’

  It would be too extravagant, doubtless, to claim a large influence in the new mood which informs the whole question of rural, especially Highland, development. For all the neglect it has endured, there is almost enough strength rooted in our countryside itself to produce the seeds of its own salvation. But it is not ungrateful to think that, in those bankrupt times, we were at least in the right place.

  In a narrower field, there was clearly an achievement to be claimed – whether we were the whole cause or not. From the time of our endeavours, the fairy tale and clan gossip-monger as such has been discredited – or, at least, dismissed to his proper paltry position among the social literature of the times. It has become necessary to discuss the present-day country in terms of the modem citizens. It is a slow process; but the recording of the Highlanders and their activities as members of adult communities, and not as mere remnants and salvage of a past, is the first real step forward out of the fey background to which the guide-book romanticist damned them. This one step is more important than any other.

  Lest such thinking should make us preen, that morning on the way down the Sound of Mull, the sun spilled up into daylight, throwing gold ablaze on the sea and all the bracken hills. The steamer cracked the water, splintering it like a mirror, as it lay smooth and unmoved before our bows, and all round from shore to shore.

  It was the first windless day since we had started out from Bowling on the Clyde almost three months before. It was a day when a canoe could have gone anywhere. The middle of the Minch would be glassy, where we could have bathed and swum, and crossed at our leisure from side to side and back again in one sunlight.

  Such days come to the West late in the year, like opportunities; and when they come, he who has had patience will do everything. In these places, it is never too late in the year. Opportunities abound, and all things are possible, even to those who may not wait for calm weather.

  NOTES

  Most of the words I have glossed are Scots, though a good number are quaint or now antiquated English. Thanks are due to my brother Mungo Dunnett for his interpretive assistance, and apologies to the lexicographers: we have favoured our understanding of AMD’s intent over exact dictionary definitions. There are also idiosyncratic and onomatopoeic coinages which I am trusting, as did AMD, that the reader will intuit. – Ninian Dunnett

  Chapter 1

  page 1

  dunning letter: demand for settlement of debt

  stickit: failed, thwarted

  ‘our best chance of influencing anything at all’: in its ‘New Year Supplement’ of Jan 2, 1934 (‘Jobs you will be doing – soon’), the Claymore writers had set out their manifesto for Scotland’s journalists of the future: By their writings, they will mould the progress to be made, they will be the historians in the regeneration of a nation …

  page 2

  ‘opportunities for national fervour’: while international football and rugby games at Glasgow’s Hampden Park and Edinburgh’s Murrayfield were passionately followed (none more than the annual football match against England, which every two years also turned Wembley stadium and the centre of London into Scottish enclaves), Glasgow’s variety theatres were patriotic arenas of a different sort. Many a visiting English comedian had cause to fear his reception here, though the best of them earned respect. At the same time, Neil Munro’s comedic tales of one of the little puffer boats that used to transport goods up and down the West coast (in the Glasgow Evening News from 1905 to 1930) made Para Handy an unusually Scottish success in the popular media.

  page 3

  fag: public school junior boy who skivvies for a senior.

  page 5

  eisd (Gaelic): listen

  ‘on leaving we were able to tip the waitress’: years later, AMD privately bought eightpence worth of stamps and destroyed them to assuage his conscience; he had speculatively pressed the coin-return button in a York Place phone box during those hungry weeks of 1934 – and received a spectacular eightpenny bounty that allowed him to return triumphantly to Seumas with two pies and a loaf of bread.

  page 6

  benison: blessing

  page 8

  skilly: skillful

  Chapter 2

  page 11

  Charlie Cotter’s Gymnasium: Cotter was a legendary boxing teacher, running his gym at the top of Leith Street from 1895 until his death in 1950.

  page 12

  ‘gallery of famous pupils’: it was a formidable roll. Paisley-born James ‘Tancy’ Lee won the Lonsdale belt outright at the age of 37 and coached Johnny Hill of Edinburgh to Scotland’s first world boxing title in 1928. The 7th baronet Colquhoun of Luss, onetime lightweight boxing champion of the British Army, was twice awarded the Distinguished Service Order during the Great War (where it is said he kept a pet lion cub in the trenches) and became the founding chairman of the National Trust for Scotland. Lord Douglas Douglas-Hamilton was Scottish middleweight amateur champion in the 1920s, piloted the first flight over Everest in an open-cockpit biplane in 1933 and would lead Scotland’s air defences during WWII. Jimmy Guthrie, from Hawick, was one of the first international superstars of motorcycle racing, winning nine Grand Prix in a row before his death on the track in 1938.

  hirple: to walk in a halting, uneven way ‘It’s a’ hert thegether!’: it’s nothing but heart

  page 14

  fishery cruiser: the job of the Scottish fishery cruisers was – and remains today – the policing of domestic vessels and foreign intruders in the seas around Scotland. As a pilot for the Clyde Navigation Trust (whose preponderance of recruits with Highland roots earned it the nickname ‘the Hielanman’s Navy’) Captain Campbell’s later beat was the 18-mile span of the river to Port Glasgow.

  airt: direction, point of the compass

  ‘a Campbell at that’: centuries after their treachery to their hosts the MacDonalds precipitated the massacre at Glencoe in 1692, prejudice against the Campbell clan was almost as reflexive as nostalgia for Bonnie Prince Charlie in some parts of Scotland. But not
any more (or at least, not with rancour – see Chapter 10, p98); AMD’s reference is largely ironic.

  Chapter 3

  page 17

  Skerries: isolated and dangerous rocks or reefs at sea, perhaps most notoriously in the Pentland Firth.

  Kishmul’s Galley: in Gaelic song, the vessel in which the warriors of the clan MacNeil triumph over stormy weather to reach a heroes’ welcome on Barra.

  Macbrayne: the more prosaic (but still picturesque) Caledonian Macbrayne have been the chief ferry operators to the Scottish islands for more than a century.

  unbreakable wire: the binding cable round the canoe is referred to in later chapters as the ‘stranding wire’.

  ‘… about eighty pounds unloaded’: prefacing his description of the boat in his own book Canoes and Canoeing (pub Eneas Mackay, Stirling, 1937), Marshall cautioned: The constructional and practical pages may appear unorthodox … my deductions are entirely based on practical experience with many different sizes, shapes and weights of craft on smooth and rough waters. In truth the Lochaber was a brave late flourish of a pioneering age which was about to be swept aside by plastic and fibreglass technology (Marshall drew on his family background in the Fife linen industry for the boats’ skins, and built the frames with second-hand timber from the ship-breakers at Inverkeithing). He did not live to see his work celebrated in Quest by Canoe, dying of meningitis at the age of 49 in 1938.

  page 20

  JM Barrie: in Margaret Ogilvy by her Son, 1897, the author of Peter Pan recalled his mother’s fondness for biographies of explorers: Explorers’ mothers also interested her very much; the books might tell her nothing about them, but she could create them for herself and wring her hands in sympathy with them when they had got no news of him for six months.