The people were driven out of many of the Pairc townships by the Stewarts. At the end of the century the sons of the cleared crofters, by then old men, still burned with resentment at their treatment. In June 1883, John Smith, from Balallan, giving evidence to the Royal Commission under Lord Napier, said that the people of Pairc had been ‘dealt with as a herd of sheep driven by dogs into a fank.’ He thought a hundred and eight families had been cleared from thirty-four townships, something approaching seven hundred people.
Nine years later, the Gaelic monoglot Alexander Maclennan, from Marvig in Lochs, gave evidence to a second Royal Commission, examined through an interpreter.
Chairman: Do you yourself remember when any part of the land [in Pairc] was occupied?
Maclennan: I recollect seeing the men coming from there with their furniture. When they were flitting.
Chairman: Do you know what was the occasion of their being removed from Park?
Maclennan: In order to make it waste for sheep.
Chairman: Was there a house erected for the Stewarts?
Maclennan: They had a white house at Valamus, which was the principal house in Park at that time. Eishken is the principal house now.
These Royal Commissions were some of the most admirable instruments of liberal social policy in the nineteenth century, but they were formal and alarming occasions. The full loathing of the Stewarts survives more in the court records and the remembered slights.
Hughie MacSween told me a story, which, he said, ‘still makes my blood go cold’. What he didn’t say, but what I know to be true, is that the experience of uprooting, of being subject to the deep uncertainty of placelessness, and the power of the landlord to decide your fate, remains close beneath the surface. He and his wife Joyce and son Iain live at the foot of the huge glaciated valley of Scaladale on the borders of Lewis and Harris. Iain is one of the great sheep men of the islands, quicker than anyone in Harris or Lewis to identify which lamb belongs to which ewe at the summer gathering, and at the same time Head of Mathematics at the Nicolson Institute in Stornoway. The Shiants were his for the asking when Hughie retired. His father tried to encourage him. I have heard Hughie saying to him: ‘I enjoyed every moment I was there.’ It was no good. Iain doesn’t like boats or the sea. He can just about cross Loch Seaforth to the island in the middle, but the Minch is another question. He ruled himself out.
Their house is on the shores of Loch Seaforth, opposite the rounded heights of Seaforth Island. Hugh’s grandfather arrived in Scaladale from Scalpay in 1885 (the family had already been cleared once from the west side of Harris) ‘because there was no room on Scalpay. He had to leave.’ Scaladale, given the option, would be one of the last places anyone might choose. On a winter’s day, it can feel like the end of the world. Cold winds funnel up Loch Seaforth and down from the cragged hills around them. The steep sides of those hills block out all sunshine from November to February, ‘although,’ as Joyce told me, ‘we do see the sun over there on Seaforth Island.’ By 1901, Hugh’s grandfather had built them a big house, with byres behind it and they had claimed the place as their own.
It is this near-personal experience of uprooting and struggle which animates the stories of the Stewarts. Hughie tells them with the rolled cigarette between his fingers, the smile just beneath the surface of his long, expressive face and that half-questioning manner of talking, as if always waiting for the other to interject.
The pack of sheepdogs growls and grumbles around us and all three of the MacSweens growl and grumble back at them.
Hugh: Go on now.
Iain: Get down now.
Hugh: Get down with you.
Joyce: Out with you.
Iain: Get on out.
Hugh: Be quiet now.
The dogs are as much part of the family as the human beings: Meg and Gail who are both working; Phil who will work for Hugh but won’t work for Iain; Barry who will only work with the sheep in the immediate area of the house and Penny who won’t go on the hill at all; and Young Fly, who had a hysterectomy a year or two ago and now won’t shed her coat. Joyce says ‘she stinks as she’s got two or three fleeces on her and she always will.’ Young Fly is twelve or thirteen now, past anything. ‘We don’t like to put her to anything.’ It was another Fly that went over to the Shiants, in DB Macleod’s day, and jumped off the fishing boat to save some sheep stuck on rocks off Eilean Mhuire. This Fly’s mother was Lassie Brown, who would work in the Shiants but not in Scaladale. They also had a Lassie Black at the time. She would work in Scaladale but not in the Shiants. ‘We’ve never really trained the young ones properly,’ Hughie says, looking at them like his children around him.
‘The Stewarts are still remembered,’ he says,
for their cruelty and their shocking inhumanity. They were Skye men. They had a shepherd out in the Shiants and they didn’t get on. They had quarrelled. I don’t remember what it was. And I don’t think I ever knew the name of the man. Eventually, there was a ram trapped at the back of the big island, at Tobaichean Caola, at the point near Stocanish. They set out, the shepherd and themselves, to go and pick it up. The shepherd went down on the rope, a long way down, on the rocks there, where they are cut into by the sea, and when he was well down they threw the rope away. They thought that was the end of him and they took to their heels. They thought that was it.
‘So he died?’ I asked.
‘No, he didn’t. He got back up, and they had shipped out. He would have killed them. They had tried to kill him and he wanted to kill them.’
The story ends with a deep indraw of breath from Hughie. Disgust mingles with disbelief at the treachery two centuries old.
This was the world the tourists were gawping at, unaware of the criminal realities among which they were passing. William Daniell, here in 1815 to make the sketches for his aquatints, found the place intriguingly gloomy. ‘It is said that this cheerless spot is still the constant abode of a family;’ he wrote insouciantly,
but the only inhabitant we perceived on this visit was a shepherd tending some flocks. The isle, though to all appearances barren, produces exceedingly good pasture, and sheep thrive on it better than might be expected. It must be a lonely life for a man to dwell here for months together, with no other companion than his dog, and to be never enlivened by the ‘cheerful hum of men’, except at the periodical visitations of the kelp burners, who collect a very fair proportion of that commodity from these seemingly unproductive rocks.
In July 1823, someone finally dared take the bullies to court. Kenneth McIver of Kirkibost made his deposition:
Archibald Stewart residing at Vallamus did wickedly attack Bett and brusd the pursuer to the effusions of his Blood kill his dog and disabled his boat by taking away the rigging for having landed with his boat to take shelter in one of the Chant Islands, till the storm would abate that he might proceed on his intended voyage to the mainland and altho the pursuer has often desired and required the said Archibald Defender to make him proper reparation for his outrageous conduct upon him yet he refuses at least postpones.
As in Freyja, the mast, sail, halyard and stays can all be taken from a boat very simply, by detaching a couple of hooks and removing them. Archibald Stewart wrote in his defence to James Adam, Chamberlain of Lewis:
Valamus 23 July 1823
Dear Sir –
Kenneth McIver states that I have bett & bruised him in the Shant isles, but I have only defended myself he maintains that I have disabled his Boat by taking away the Rigging. I did not deprive him of his Rigging but all such time as he would [not] give me his name in order to get him presented [at the court] for trespassing. I hard the dog barking through the Island before I could observe the Boat.
Also he states that there was a Storm at the time that is a falsehood it was calm I desired him to come to Valamus with me and that I would give him anything he wanted or to go the herds house in the Island which I can prove.
It is no defence. He does not deny beating up McIver, n
or killing his dog, nor stealing the rigging. He was forced to pay fifty pounds’ damages and twenty pounds’ costs. In the same month, he had to pay the same again to Murdoch Macleod and Norman Macmillan, both of Eishken, for claiming that they had drowned one of his animals.
This is the degraded and brutalised world into which the Shiants had now entered: lies, violence, braggadoccio, attempted murder, cheating, bullying and an all-pervasive air of inhumanity. Donald Stewart had been accused of smuggling tobacco, when a boat of his containing a cask of it with no permit was seized by the Customs officers at Stornoway. Characteristically, he claimed ‘the Tobacco had been taken on board without his consent or knowledge by a woman who happened to take a short passage in the Boat.’ It was a forty-pound cask, not exactly a handbag-full; the Customs men at Stornoway didn’t believe him and kept his boat ‘with her Oars and Sail and the Tobacco’.
Conditions on the Stewarts’ Shiants were dire. Macculloch had seen the poverty and isolation in which the shepherd and his family – so casually patronised by William Daniell – were actually living. In the late 1820s, the isolation proved literally fatal. There was only one family living here, in the summer months, but the evidence of who they were is contradictory. A family called Munro was here as the Stewarts’ shepherds in the 1820s. Donald and his wife, Mary Mackinnon, had a son, Murdo Munro, born on the Shiants in 1829. He is the first islander born on the Shiants to have his name recorded.
Apparently overlapping with the Munros (an impossibility) are another family, the MacAulays. The shepherd despised by Macculloch may well have been Murdo Macaulay, Murchadh Ban, ‘Blond Murdo’. He and his wife and family came to the Shiants from Bernera on the Atlantic side of Lewis. On arrival, at least according to a story remembered in North Lochs, Murdo made himself a coffin. Throughout their time there, it sat in the corner of the house by the shore. When asked why, MacAulay said that if he died, there was no one to make one for him ‘as there was only his wife and young family with him.’ Isolation distorts existence.
When Murdo eventually left the Shiants in 1827, his brother, whose name is not remembered, took his place there.
Murdo’s brother was in the habit of lowering his wife down the cliffs on a rope to gather sea fowls. She killed the birds and hooked them by their necks, into the rope around her waist. One day, whilst harvesting the birds in this manner, the rope broke, and his wife fell into the sea, where, because of the number of fowls hanging from the rope around her waist, she did not sink, but floated out to sea watched by her husband, who could do nothing to help her. And in this awful manner Murdo MacAulay’s sister-in-law met her demise.
Seen by the Shiant Islanders themselves, these are, of course, desperate conditions. The single family here is debilitatingly alone. There is no one on whom they can call to help. When the horsehair rope frays on the stepped rocks at Tobaichean Caola at the north-western corner of Garbh Eilean, where the Stewarts had attempted their murder, and where Mrs MacAulay has gone down to collect the guillemots that still cluster there in their uncountable thousands, there is no one who can help the husband out with the dinghy to save her. The children have been left behind in the house. They are too small to push the heavy boat down the beach. He can only watch as his floating wife is swept away on the flood tide into the Sound of Shiant, the two of them shouting to each other and the voices growing fainter until the wind tears the words away.
Few things on the Shiants have seemed more pitiful to me than the suffering of these stories, with families stuck right out on the edge of a viable existence. They are symptoms of modernity and of the death of community. These are aspects not of a profoundly ancient culture on which the modern world is at last throwing some light, but of a system drastically distorted by the change of the preceding decades.
In 1828, for an instant, the two Shiant worlds merge: an English traveller comes out to the Shiants in the company of one of the Stewarts. Lord Teignmouth was no ordinary tourist. As Sir John Shore, he had been Governor-General of India in the 1790s and for many years had been a leading member of the Clapham Sect, the group of powerful, cultivated, evangelical Christians, all of whom had chosen to live near each other in the small village of Clapham south of London. They were clustered around the central figure of William Wilberforce, and for decades they campaigned not only for the abolition of slavery but to ban bull fighting and bear baiting, to make gambling on lotteries illegal and to reform prisons. They were the first to advocate Factory Acts to improve working conditions for the poor and, at their instigation, Sierra Leone was founded to provide a home for refugee slaves. Its first governor, one of the Claphamites, was Zachary Macaulay, grandson of the Reverend Aulay MacAulay, the Minister of Harris, who had tried to arrest Bonnie Prince Charlie on Scalpay, and father of TB Macaulay, the Whig historian.
It may have been that Macaulay connection which drew Teignmouth north on the journeys he described in Sketches of the Coast and Islands of Scotland, published in 1836. When he came to the Shiants in the summer of 1828, he was seventy-seven and perhaps a little more gullible than he had been when younger. One has to look a little carefully through his mandarin prose to detect the truth behind it. Teignmouth and his companion, ‘a gentleman of Ross-shire’ had walked overland from Stornoway, an exhausting journey over ‘one vast moor’, before coming down to the house at Valamus, then occupied by Archibald Stewart.
Stewart sailed the ancient peer out to the Shiants and landed him on the beach where Kenneth McIver had been so brutally beaten and his dog killed five years earlier. Around the corner, they came to the shepherd’s house. Here, uniquely in the history of the Shiants, Teignmouth gives an account of people at work:
The shore of Akilly presents a striking contrast to the precipitous cliff of Garvailon: protected from the northern blasts by that island, it yields a considerable crop of good hay, which we found a large party of men and women busily employed in gathering in. The animating scene was exhilarated by the rays of a brilliant sun.
Can one really believe this bucolic picture? It is like a Stubbs in the sunshine, more Arcadia than Shiant. But there was a darker side to it:
The industry of the workmen was stimulated by their desire to quit the island, as during their stay they have no better lodging than that afforded by a single cottage and an adjoining shed, the women occupying the former, and the farmer and his men the latter. The cottage is the residence of a shepherd and his family during the summer months, but they were preparing for departure, and no consideration could induce them to remain there longer.
Teignmouth, who had no Gaelic, heard this from Stewart. Was it true? Knowing what is known about the Stewarts, it is easy to see this situation in another light. Without doubt, the accommodation for the ‘large party of men and women’ was atrocious. Photographs taken by Robert Atkinson in the 1930s show the modern house on the site of the cottage which Teignmouth mentions. Behind it, still just standing, is the shed in which the farmer and his men stayed, half-underground, trogloditic, looking more like a yak than anything else, with a makeshift chimney and a fishing net thrown over the thatch to hold it down in the gales.
The women are crammed in with the shepherd and his family and the men – how many? five? – in the shed behind. But these are conditions which it is in Stewart’s hands to improve. He could easily have roofed one of the other ruins here, but he chooses not to, presumably to save money and because he does not think his work-force deserve it. The people want to leave because Stewart is housing them in just the sort of cramped and verminous conditions which the newly industrialised work-force all over Britain was then enduring.
And what about the remark that ‘no consideration could induce [the shepherd family] to remain there longer’? You can hear Stewart saying it, confidentially to Lord Teignmouth in his ear, one man of the world to another, how difficult it was to find good staff nowadays. It scarcely rings true. No consideration? When Teignmouth landed back on the Lewis mainland at Loch Sealg that evening, hoping for a meal fr
om the inn there, he ‘found, save a bowl of excessively sour milk, the negative catalogue complete.’ They had to walk several hours to the manse at Keose to get any food. Famine was never far from the grotesquely overcrowded and under-resourced people in nineteenth-century Lewis and that has been true even within living memory. I know a woman living on the shores of Loch Seaforth whose mother used to say to her, ‘At least you never went to bed without the next morning’s breakfast in the cupboard.’ Her father was a fishermen and for fishing families in these islands a literally empty cupboard was never an impossibility. There are Scalpay families alive today of which the mother has picked winkles from the shore to feed the children. It is is inconceivable in the 1820s that any man offered a paid job shepherding on the Shiants during the winter would not have taken it.
There was another reason for the autumn departure of the shepherds and, as Teignmouth sailed away that afternoon (Stewart himself stayed with the harvesters but his boatmen took the guest to Loch Sealg), he encountered it: ‘We met on returning to the coast, a large wherry, proceeding to the island, to convey the shepherd and his family away after the harvest. No one can be prevailed on to reside permanently upon them.’
The large wherry was there to collect more than the shepherd. He and his family could have gone in a small Norwegian boat like Stewart’s. The wherry was coming to take back the hay harvest itself to the beautiful stone-floored and stone-walled barn at Valamus, which is still roofed and standing on the hillside above the loch. And why should the shepherd go back with the harvest? Because once the long summer grass has been cut, and the hay stacked and removed from the islands, there is no need for a shepherd. The shepherd’s principal role is to keep the sheep from entering the hay. He is a human fence. Once the hay is cut, he is redundant and that is why he leaves. The truth is precisely the opposite of what Teignmouth had been told. It is not that shepherds refuse to stay on the islands during the winter. The Stewarts will not pay them to remain there. It is a seasonal hiring. The sheep that die over the winter, or as Stewart told Teignmouth, ‘are lost, offering, as it is conjectured, an irresistible temptation to the crews of vessels passing’, are nugatory by comparison. They will only return when the grass begins to grow in the spring-time. Meanwhile, they may or may not find employment over the winter on the Lewis mainland, where they will have to shift for themselves.
Sea Room Page 29
