by John Prebble
The continuous wasting of his command greatly distressed Colonel John Hill, the English Governor of Lochaber during the last decade of the 17th century, even though he thought his soldiers were mostly an undisciplined mob of rogues. He came here first in 1654, a major of a Cromwellian regiment, with instructions to build a fort and keep the clans at peace. He did so with firmness, fairness and understanding, and was respected by the Highlanders. Six years later, at the Restoration, he surrendered his keys to Ewen Cameron of Lochiel, and when he was gone from Lochaber the Highlanders razed his fort stone by stone and burnt its timber. Had that been the end of his association with the Highlands he would have been no more than a footnote to their history, but after the Revolution of 1688, when he was living at the door of poverty in Ulster, he was given a commission to rebuild the garrison fort of Inverlochy and become Lochaber’s governor once more. He accepted the post with enthusiasm, believing that the Revolution had affirmed the libertarian principles for which he had fought in his youth. His masters in Edinburgh and London neglected and betrayed him. They ignored his good advice and rarely sent him the recruits, supplies and medicines he urgently needed. In his green-painted room at the fort, the panels of which are preserved in the town’s museum, he strove to serve his conscience as much as Crown and Government. This is an enduring and labyrinthine problem for honest public servants, as it sometimes is for the private citizens they are presumed to serve. In the end, John Hill’s conscience surrendered to what he believed to be a soldier’s inexorable duty, obedience to orders given him. After a week of evasion and inaction, he at last accepted the terrible instructions he had received by the King’s command. He signed the order which sent Argyll soldiers to murder his friend MacIain and the people of Glencoe.
It has been the belief of some writers that Hill was as much the villain of the Massacre as Sir John Dalrymple, the Secretary of State for Scotland who planned the extirpation of the MacDonalds. At one time I would have agreed, but piecing his life and character together from letters scattered through a dozen manuscript sources I came to understand him, and see him as the truly tragic figure of the story.
In most of the books I have written on Scotland there has been one man, and sometimes two, to whom I have responded in the same way. They were victims of circumstance and duty, and of their own natures as much as the events which briefly controlled them. Like John Hill, William Paterson was a shadowy figure for much of his life. His dream of a Scots colony on Darien, a great entrepôt that would be “the door of the seas, the key of the Universe” ended in a shattering disaster for his country, forcing it to accept the Treaty of Union. It robbed him of public respect for many years, but more than this – it took from him his wife and children, whose graves are somewhere on the mangrove shore of Caledonia Bay in Panama. Sir James Oughton, the commander-in-chief in Scotland in 1778, was a rare man, if not unique, an English officer with respect and affection for the clans whom he had faced at Culloden. So great was his willingness to understand and help them, albeit influenced by the persuasive fiction of Ossian, that he diligently studied Gaelic. But the four mutinies of Highland regiments in his command brought upon him the successive strokes that killed him, and before he died he rationalised his disillusion by concluding that the Highlanders were intractable, ungrateful, and beyond the tolerance of civilised men. In a more eccentric frame there was also Thomas Mulock, an obsessed Irish journalist and besotted father of Mrs Craik, the author of John Halifax, Gentleman, “a very celebrated writer, kind and obedient to me, and worthy of every respect and honour.” Mulock came to the Highlands in 1849, and with the cry of “Justice to Scotland!” he edited the little Inverness Advertiser in defence of the victims of the Clearances, and against the landed establishment. The great magnates he attacked, principally the second Duke of Sutherland, eventually broke him, and brought him to his knees in abject apology. He was not well-served by life, or by his temperament, and was sometimes foolish in his response to misfortune, but he did not deserve the valediction he was given by Donald MacLeod, the stone-mason of Strathnaver. MacLeod was also a tragic figure whose fight to expose the iniquities of the Clearances brought him grief, poverty and bitter exile. He said Mulock had been bought by the Duke of Sutherland. It was possibly true, but that should not diminish the courage of Mulock’s brief but honest fight against injustice.
There is no memorial to John Hill in Fort William, and the town today is a poor place in which to remember him. I tried hard in many months to find some personal details that would widen my knowledge of him – his birthplace, the life he left when he went to fight for Parliament against the Crown, an English grave-yard where he is buried. But beyond the fact that he had two dependent daughters, whose welfare troubled him during his last years, I found nothing. It was his daily custom at Fort William to stand upon its battlements, looking down the wide stretch of Loch Linnhe between the dark walls of Ardgour and Mamore, waiting for the supply ships that so rarely came in answer to his appeals. The loch is now summer-white with other sails, the pleasure yachts, of an age that would astonish and perhaps sadden him. A wide highway curls from a roundabout across his parade-ground, and the windows of a police-station look over the vanished grave-yard of his forgotten soldiers.
The name is spelt variously –MacOloney, MacIllonie, MacOnie and MacGillonie, from the Gaelic Mac-Ghill-onfaidh, the son of the servant of the storm. People of this name held land on Loch Arkaigside long before the Camerons of Lochiel became their masters.
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This and other quotations from the Visitors’Book and Game Book are taken from Place-names of Glengarry and Glenquoich, a rare and illuminating book by Edward C. Ellice, published fifty years ago.
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Chapter 6
On Tuesday, the ninth day of November, 1948, seven men of Knoydart boldly challenged the property rights of their absentee landlord, Arthur Ronald Nall Nall-Cain – second Baron Brocket of Brocket Hall in Hertfordshire and other estates in England and Ireland, a Knight of Justice of the Order of Saint John and the patron of six livings, past-president of the National Sheep Breeders’ Association, chairman or director of several companies including breweries, one time host to Joachim von Ribbentrop in the Glen of the Dark Pool, and an honoured guest at Adolf Hitler’s birthday celebrations in the year of Munich.
The desperate action of these men was a human response to the realisation that Lord Brocket was determined upon further reduction of the stock and crofters’ holdings on his sporting estate, one of the finest for salmon and deer in the Western Highlands. Its population, already diminished a year before by the reluctant departure of fifteen families, was now little more than fifty men, women and children, most of them dependent upon Brocket for employment and housing. In 1810, fifteen hundred of Alasdair Ranaldson’s tenants had lived on this beautiful peninsula of the Rough Bounds, between the mountain-dark waters of Loch Nevis and Loch Hourn. His lordship was seemingly ignorant of this, for when coming events brought him unwelcome publicity he told reporters that the frequency of rain made it an unsuitable place for too many people. With that considerate thought in mind, perhaps, he had successfully opposed a development plan for the idle acres of his estate, by which there could have been an increase in its population and in the production of foodstuffs essential to a struggling nation. The Knoydart people’s consequent petition to the Secretary of State for Scotland had also been ineffectual, and now they decided to make their misfortune known beyond the Great Glen and the Borders. That Tuesday morning each man marked out sixty acres of the estate for his own use, and as they scythed these chosen plots they planned the seizure of more land for hill-grazing on the higher braes of Choineachain.
Their little raid followed a pattern set by the Land League seventy years before when brave and successful efforts were made to secure some legal protection for crofters, and thereby stem the continuing haemorrhage of eviction and emigration. It was also inspired by the living memory of similar land-raids at
the end of the Great War, on Raasay and the Long Isle, when returned soldiers drew public attention to the misuse and mismanagement of land, the cynical neglect of its native people. According to those who knew the Knoydart raiders, they were “very sound, solid, good Scotsmen, well-seasoned Scotsmen.” Some had expended their young manhood in defence of the country, and all believed they were entitled to a just share of its potential wealth. In the changed political climate of the post-war years they were confident that public opinion would support them, as indeed it did.
For a brief while during that harsh winter they became widely-known as “The Seven Men of Knoydart”, a sub-editor’s catch-line but more than an indication of numbers and place. In euphony and rhyme it recalled The Seven Men of Moidart, the band of aging Jacobites who landed with the Young Pretender in 1745 to challenge an entrenched Hanoverian establishment. Whatever the men of the Rough Bounds thought of this irrelevant comparison, it did excite the imagination of good people throughout Scotland. And also, less emotionally, the interest of Fleet Street where my renowned Scottish editor, having listened silently to my proposals for a deeper examination of the land-raid and its historical background, then said it was of no great interest to English readers, but could I explain why I thought he would send me to cover it.
The process of law is rarely influenced by the public’s view of social justice until that is embodied by statute. Lord Brocket quickly secured interim interdicts against the raiders, on Wednesday while they were still breaking the earth at Kilchoan. Encouraged by the response of the Scottish Press whom they had invited to watch and photograph their raid, and by many letters and telegrams of sympathy, the seven men agreed to recognise the interdicts and engage lawyers to continue their fight. Long before spring melted the snow on the long black claw of Ladhar Bheinn, that struggle was lost. The Labour Secretary of State, son of a Lowland brassfounder, came to Loch Nevis by ship, examined the white hills and seaweed rocks through his field-glasses, and departed without going ashore. The raiders’case was heard and rejected by a Court of Inquiry, called by a government which the soldiers of my generation had elected three years before, believing it would bring an end to privilege by rank and power by wealth. When The Seven Men of Knoydart sent an appeal to the voyaging Secretary of State, this too was rejected. The sad dispersal of the people continued, from Scottas, Inverie and the green Glen of the Dark Pool. But at least Lord Brocket soon thought it prudent to sell the estate, and children were no longer forbidden to pass along the loch-shore before the windows of Inverie House lest they disturb her ladyship’s view as she sat at the keyboard of her white piano.
Remembering that winter, the high hopes raised by public meetings in Glasgow and the encouragement of distant sympathisers, one of the raiders has sadly admitted that he and his companions had perhaps been wrong to entrust their defence to lawyers and politicians.
We would have been far better to have done what the old boys in the olden days did, stick on the ground until they put you to gaol. We all thought it was a very good idea, that it was going to be legal, but afterwards when we saw the whole thing, and you look back on it, you realise it didn’t pay to be doing it the modern way1
There is a great melancholy in the beauty of Knoydart, and it is easy to think of the failure of this land-raid as its last cry of despair, an echo of its grief during the wide clearance of the estate almost a century before. Longboats from the emigrant ship Sillery were then beached below the mountains at Sandaig, Doune and Airor, and on the shelving shore where a hastening river twists down to the ford at Inverie. The little vessel itself, avoiding the shoals and tides of Loch Nevis, was anchored across the Sound of Sleat in the lee of Skye, its lower decks cleared and scrubbed with vinegar and water, ready to take the last of Glengarry’s unwanted tenants into exile. There were six hundred of them, and some of the older men, like Allan MacDonell in the township of Airor, had once accompanied Alasdair Ranaldson to Edinburgh for the Royal Visit, standing guard at the door of his lodgings in belted plaids and Glengarry bonnets. But now they were all a burden upon the purse and the patience of his inheritors.
Aeneas MacDonell, the sixth Chief of Glengarry, had made no permanent home in Australia, returning to Scotland with his health and spirit broken. When he died, at Inverie in the summer of 1852, he was buried beside his flamboyant father in the gaunt family mausoleum at Kilfinnan. To his credit he had always been reluctant to press the Knoydart people for their rents, amounting to £2,774 10s 8dper annum, but his widow Josephine, like all Glengarry wives, was more realistic and less compassionate. Acting as the principal guardian for her son, the new Chief and a minor, she put the estate on the market in the spring of 1853, and before its sale to a Lowland ironmaster was completed she made arrangements for the disposal of its people with the committee of the Highland Emigration Society, the Board of Supervision of the Poor Law, and the government’s Colonial Land and Emigration Department. She then served writs of eviction upon the Knoydart tenants, and told them what was required of them with a firmness Lord Brocket might have envied, had he known of it.
As the minds of the guardians are perfectly made up on the subject it will be better for the people to acquiesce quietly in these arrangements for their removal. If they emigrate without trouble or annoyance they will be allowed to remain where they are until the committee are ready to take them; but I must tell you that those who may imagine they will be allowed to remain after this are indulging in a vain hope, as the most stringent measures will be taken to effect their removal. They will best consult their own interest by being ready to move when the committee are ready to take them. Sir John MacNeill2 has promised they shall ALL be removed in one ship to Australia.
The evictions were carried out in August, under the direction of the Glengarry factor. Although no longer young, he was tireless in his duty, organising parties of men to destroy the cottages with axes, crow-bars, hammers and levers. Women who refused to leave their homes were dragged from them to the beach, and at least one was beaten with sticks as she clung screaming to her door-post. Families who fled into the high glens above the loch were hunted and brought back. There was no mercy, no delay, said that indefatigable journalist and advocate, Donald Ross. When the last boat had left for the Sillery
… as far as the eye could see the face of the strath had its black spots where the houses of the crofters were either levelled or burnt, the blackened rafters lying scattered on the grass, the couple-trees cut through the middle and thrown far away, the walls broken down, the thatch and cabers mixed together, but the voice of man was gone.
Thirty-eight of the people still remained, however, avoiding the evictors or rejected as worthless material for the colonies. There were two or three families with middle-aged parents, but most were widows or spinsters. Twenty-four of them were more than seventy years of age, three were in their ninth decade, five over ninety, and one was a centenarian. All were paupers in receipt of the Poor Law allowance. For the most fortunate, that is to say the most infirm, this was eighteenpence a week, but the majority received a shilling, and some less than sevenpence. The allowance was paid quarterly by the Inspector of the Poor Law, but that winter following the evictions he did not visit Knoydart. The old people kept themselves alive as best they could in the ruins of their cottages, in ditches and the wind-break of rocks along the shore. Many were without warm clothing and shoes, and some used their stockings to patch their blankets. They had no meat, and they lived on diseased potatoes which they boiled with dulse, gathered from the cold sea at low tide. They were all that remained of a people whom a Clan Donald bard had once described as “the young saplings of Knoydart … strong and proud.”
When he heard of their condition, Donald Ross went to Inverie by a small boat and in the company of the people’s selfless priest, Father Coll MacDonald. Appalled by what they found, he wrote an angry pamphlet in protest, and then a report for the Northern Ensign. He called this Aunt Katy’s Cabin, telling his readers that if their interes
t and indignation had been aroused by the recent publication of Mrs Beecher Stowe’s “popular creation of female fancy” they would find his “simple narrative of fact” much more strange3 The strength of his public attacks upon Highland proprietors, and upon the Emigration Society which enabled such men to be rid of their tenants so easily, forced the Lord Advocate to order an investigation into the condition of the paupers in Knoydart. Thus the Sheriff-Substitute, the Sheriff Clerk Depute, the Procurator Fiscal and the senior medical practitioner of Lochaber set out from Fort William on the first day of February. They travelled forty miles by road to the white coast of Arisaig, and eighteen by boat to Loch Nevis where they gratefully accepted the warmth and shelter of Father MacDonald’s little house at Sandaig. The neglected misery of the paupers, as reported by the Sheriff, was now worse than it had been when Ross visited them before Christmas. The local Inspector of the Poor was held to be responsible, but in an addendum to the report the Fiscal doubted whether legal action could or should be taken against the man. “A conviction to some extent might perhaps be obtained,” he told the Lord Advocate, “but it is morely likely that the inspector would be acquitted, while the Parochial Board might be blamed.” The latter was no doubt grateful, for it was irregular in constitution and incompetent in practice. It chose its own representatives from the ratepayers, instead of accepting them by election. Twenty-three of the ailing paupers of Knoydart had not once been visited by its medical officer in the two and a half years since his appointment. The four land-owners of the parish were obliged to be members of the Board, but none of them, or their mandataries, ever attended its meetings.
