Calum's Road

by Roger Hutchinson

  It was literally an uphill task of clearance and reclamation, and it took Calum more than half a year. On 15 April 1966 Colonel Basil Reckitt, who had recently bought as a holiday home the old manse at Holoman in central Raasay, entered in his diary, ‘The first quarter-mile of the path from Brochel has been made up to a base for a surface to take cars. Calum MacLeod has been working on it for the last six months, and has done a remarkable job in that time. At the present rate of progress he will finish the rough road as far as Arnish in about five years.’

  Colonel Reckitt’s well-intentioned forecast would prove overly optimistic. Once Calum reached the top of the slope he looked onto a further half-mile of exposed terrain which, before it disappeared over the near horizon into a challenging glen, while comparatively defoliated, was comprised instead of trembling peat bog irregularly punctuated by large outcrops of granite. There would be no straight and comfortable course over biddable earth between Brochel and Arnish.

  Below this natural belvedere, this hilltop that marked the completion of his first fifth of a mile of foundation, the sea stretched eastwards towards the Scottish mainland. Calum MacLeod was a native historian. He had seen and heard of momentous traffic on those waters just forty-five years before.

  One March morning in 1921 a small boat set sail from Acarsaid Thioram on the west coast of Rona. The skiff went more or less due south, into the Inner Sound of Raasay, with Applecross in the distance on its port bow and the empty shielings and cleared townships of North and South Screapadal lowering above its starboard gunwales.

  The men aboard continued southerly down this ghostly coastline, past the broken stone remains of the homes at Hallaig and Leac, until they reached the accessible shore at Eyre. There they beached the boat. They went ashore, and on the old sites at Fearns, which seventy years previously had been the most populous part of Raasay, they erected temporary dwellings. Making plans for more permanent homes, they began to stake out the good, soft land. The adults among them were ex-servicemen who had returned in 1919 from the First World War. After having spent much of their lives looking hopefully back over at Raasay from the shores of Rona, they had had enough.

  The Raasay Raids, as the Raasay Raiders knew full well, were not unique. All across the Hebrides, in Uist, Harris, Skye and Lewis, returned servicemen had by 1920 and 1921 run out of patience. Before the war they had been assured new crofts; during the war the survivors among them had been promised a home fit for heroes; but after the war they came back from Flanders and the North Atlantic Ocean to the familiar, depressing status quo of domestic squalor, disease and restricted land. They had not fought and watched their neighbours die for that.

  The Raasay archipelago was by 1921 owned by the Coat-bridge ironmasters William Baird and Co. Raasay’s considerable and diverse mineralogy – a subject which would, on various levels, come to intrigue Calum MacLeod of Arnish – had long been known to include seams of iron ore. When the last remnants of the Wood family decided to sell up in 1911, Baird & Co. bought the islands. Letting out the Big House, the Home Farm, the sheep farm and the sporting rights, they set about turning the south of Raasay into an iron mine.

  The enterprise quickly failed, and would have failed even more quickly if the First World War had not brought with it both increased demand for iron and free labour in the form of German prisoners-of-war, who had been shipped into the newly built mining village of Inverarish, half of which was hastily converted into a PoW camp. At the end of the war the surviving prisoners were returned home and the price of Raasay ore plummeted from its 1916 value of six shillings a ton to four pence a ton.* The substantial mining works were given in 1920 to the ‘care and maintenance’ of three locally retained men. They would never be reopened.

  William Baird & Co., who had never had any interest in the people of the islands of Raasay, Fladda and Rona, by 1921 had no interest in any aspect of the estate whatsoever. Luckily, others did. The Scottish Land Court, which had been established in 1912 to assist in resolving disputes relating to agricultural tenancies, including matters relating to crofts, had in 1919 visited Rona, slashed the rents there and reported that it was ‘entirely unsuited for a settlement of smallholders’. The Scottish Board of Agriculture, emboldened by a postwar Land Settlement Act which gave it some ability to purchase compulsorily from reluctant owners land for crofting, was in protracted negotiation with both Baird & Co. and the people of Rona about the creation of crofts in Raasay when those small boats set sail in 1921. Letters had already been posted early in 1921 from Rona to the Board of Agriculture in Edinburgh, warning that if the good land in Raasay could not be legitimately given, then it would be informally seized and squatted. In January of that year the board was warned following angry public meetings in Rona and northern Raasay, ‘we will take the law into our own hands and make a general raid in both sheep and Home Farm in Raasay, which is for a number of years now let to [a] sporting English gentleman, who rears calves with the milk we should be getting to feed our little children’.

  And they did. A series of exploratory, inquisitive and quite conspicuous visits by men from Rona to the old Home Farm and to the southlands at Eyre and Fearns which began as early as March 1920 – which Baird’s factor, who was still resident, considered to be a ‘bluff’, and which in the case of the Home Farm, upon which they had no recent claim, it possibly was – culminated in more permanent removals in the following year. Once the men had set up camp at Fearns they cautiously brought down their wives and families. In the subsequent words of their lawyer they ‘took possession of the lands from which their forefathers had been cleared, they removed [the sheep farm’s] stock very carefully and avoided any unnecessary loss. They offered fair rent for the lands.’

  Even at this time of widespread Hebridean land skirmishes, the Raasay Raids attracted a great deal of national and local attention and sympathy. What happened in the months and years following the spring of 1921 was of special interest to an intelligent schoolboy in the north of Raasay – a schoolboy who could, throughout that summer, have watched from the coast a few hundred yards from his family croft the skiffs containing agricultural implements, household goods and their owners tacking back and forth, like maritime pantechnicons, between Rona and Eyre.

  And what happened was that the raiders were themselves raided. As their numbers grew in March and April, William Baird & Co. and their tenant of Raasay House and Home Farm and current sheep-farmer, Captain Rawnsley of Lincolnshire, resorted to the law. Interdicts were issued against five of the men, ordering them off Baird’s land in Raasay. They were never likely to heed them. On 12 July the sheriff-substitute at Portree in Skye found the five guilty in absentia of breach of interdict and issued warrants for their arrest. When, six weeks later, those men had neither given themselves up nor evacuated the south end of Raasay a detachment of police landed on the island. The policemen would have been visible from Fearns for a long time before they disembarked. Upon arriving there they discovered that the raiders had ‘erected several rude houses for the occupation of themselves and their children, and the numbers of the invaders [had] been considerably augmented within the last week or two’. The five indicted men, however, were nowhere to be found. They were, the officers and the press were told, ‘in hiding’ in ‘the hills and caves of the island’.

  This would have been daunting news for the authorities. Raasay is not a large island, but its topography is as wild and inscrutable as any of the Hebrides. Five men who knew that landscape, and who had the support of virtually every other inhabitant, could have remained at large indefinitely in this place without a permanent police or military presence. But they were not interested in becoming outlaws. They wished, merely, to be crofters. ‘The men repudiate any suggestion’, reported a correspondent to the Scotsman, ‘as to their being regardless of law and order, but they contend that the course they have taken was the only one open to them in the circumstances . . . They express regret that the Board of Agriculture has delayed so long to enforce its
powers . . . If the Board were to assure them that they would get land peaceably and legally, the men say they are willing to do everything possible to conform with the order of the Court and to show their respect for law and order. They say, however, that they could not remain any longer in Rona . . .’

  Following widespread publicity and interventions,* on Monday 19 September the five Raasay fugitives gave themselves up to a second visiting detachment of police officers. They were taken to Portree amid ‘some pathetic scenes, their wives, children and friends following them as far as they could’. Upon their arrival in Skye ‘a considerable crowd, obviously in sympathy with the arrested men, followed them all the way to the [Portree] prison gates’.

  Two days later, at nine in the evening of 22 September, the five men’s case was adjourned until 6 October and they were released pending trial. ‘Although the hour was late,’ reported the Scotsman’s diligent correspondent, ‘a number of their friends, who had been awaiting anxiously the result of the Court, received them with cheers, and the men were carried shoulder high to the Caledonian Hotel, Portree, where they stayed overnight.’ Early next morning the five were piped down to Portree harbour, where they boarded the steamer back to Raasay. It discharged them after an hour’s sailing at the iron-works’ pier, which had been built and then abandoned by William Baird & Co., and an hour after that they would have been back in Fearns, where ‘the community now number[ed] about 40’.

  The cases of Malcolm MacKay, John MacKay, Donald MacLeod, John MacSwan and Donald MacLeod were duly heard by Sheriff Valentine in Portree two weeks later. Before passing sentence the sheriff said that ‘in some respects the position is difficult’, but that he had no alternative but to uphold the letter of the law. Sheriff Valentine found in favour of the pursuers, William Baird and Captain Rawnsley, and sentenced each of the five men to a fine of £15, approximately £450 in real terms today. If after twenty-one days the fine was unpaid, they would have to serve forty-two days’ imprisonment.

  They did not, it goes without saying, have that kind of money – John MacSwan’s annual rental in Rona, for instance, had been no more than £3. But, even if their supporters could have raised the £75, there was never any question of the Raasay Raiders paying it. Their cause had become a moral crusade. And so, on the afternoon of Wednesday, 9 November 1921, the five men were taken under police escort to Inverness Jail. They were met at the town’s railway station ‘by ex-servicemen, who loudly cheered them as they entered the conveyance to take them to prison’.

  A week later the Government attempted to seek a compromised solution, suggesting to the imprisoned men’s lawyer, Donald Shaw, that they relinquish their squatted holdings at Fearns in return for a promise of new land elsewhere. The five men refused. ‘It is impossible’, they wrote from Inverness Jail on 17 November, ‘for us to give any undertaking because we have no place to go to and as you know our families are in Raasay, our cattle is there, our peats and potatoes is there and we cannot bear to see our children exposed to the four winds of Heaven.’

  They were released, all five of them, on the morning of Tuesday, 20 December. They were feêted from the gates of the jail to Inverness Railway Station, where they boarded the train to Kyle of Lochalsh. They received another ‘rousing reception’ at Kyle that afternoon. They caught the steamer to Raasay and disembarked at around 6.00 p.m. They were met there by ‘a large crowd of sympathisers, who had been patiently waiting at the pier for the arrival of the boat. They gave the men a warm welcome. In honour of the raiders, bonfires were lighted in Raasay and Skye, and threw their lurid glare all night across the stormy waters that separate the islands from the mainland.’

  As a ten-year-old schoolboy in Arnish, Calum undoubtedly saw those bonfires before being packed off to bed. And Calum MacLeod certainly followed the rest of this story. The five men returned that December, not to Rona, but, naturally, to their families and friends in Fearns. They were still in breach of interdict and therefore still liable to be rearrested and reimprisoned. But the landowners and the Board of Agriculture had had enough bad publicity. Two months later, early in February 1922, William Baird & Co. offered, through their representative Donald Shaw, to rehouse the five men and their families, pending their permanent resettlement on crofting land, rent-free in the deserted company mining cottages at Inverarish. The men accepted, and on 10 February horses and carts belonging to Bairds transported their household goods from Fearns down past the empty mineworks to the village – and former PoW camp – of Inverarish.

  A year later, in February 1923, Bairds sold all of Raasay, Rona and Fladda but the mineral rights and mining works to the Scottish Rural Workers Approved Society, whose trustees promptly sublet the land to the Board of Agriculture. The selling price was £16,150 – a purchasing power of around £600,000 in today’s money – just over half the sum that George Rainy had spent just seventy-seven years earlier, and almost exactly a quarter of the £65,000 that Edward Wood had paid for the islands less than fifty years before, in 1876. Security of crofting tenure and the prospect of compulsory land resettlement had made Highland crofting estates dubious investments.

  The Board of Agriculture promptly created new holdings at Fearns, Eyre, Suisnish, Inverarish, Brochel, Glame and Oscaig. The island of Rona quickly emptied. The census of 1921, the year of the raids, showed 98 people living there. Ten years later there were only 16. And in 1951 the first census after the Second World War showed Rona once again to be empty of everybody but its lighthouse keepers.

  The effect of the Raasay Raids on the family and neighbours of Calum MacLeod was both symbolic and practical. On the first level they represented at least three essential lessons: that bureaucracy and distant officialdom, however well-intentioned, were unreliable sources of assistance; that, in contrast, direct action worked; and that direct action – taking matters into one’s own hands, whatever the short-term cost – was at times more than simply feasible: it could be the only way to progress. None of these lessons would be new to a 1920s crofting family in the north of Raasay. But rarely had they been so vividly illustrated.

  Practically, the success of the raids in transplanting people from Rona back to Raasay splintered and scattered the community in which Calum MacLeod was growing up. Nobody begrudged their neighbours’ escape from poverty and disease in Rona, but from 1921, as Raasay’s demographic pendulum took a giant lurch towards reviving the south and isolating the north, Calum’s homelands were a quieter and a lonelier place. Arnish, Torran, Fladda and Kyle Rona steadily returned to their pre-clearance populations of the 1820s and 1830s. Those had been and still were sustainable levels of inhabitance. Each township could allow only a small handful of families to edge above the poverty level by farming the available land and sea. But since the 1850s and 1860s – within many surviving lifetimes – the north of Raasay, Fladda and Rona had been, insofar as its native people were concerned, the whole of Raasay. Now, in the 1920s, with the evacuation of Rona the trend swung back in favour of the south. And that pendulum, as few people had reason to guess at the time, would continue to creep in one direction only. It never swung back.

  But as he noticed the sudden social vacuum immediately to his north, the young Calum MacLeod would not have had much time or self-pity spare to regret it. There was a life to lead at Arnish, a schooling to get and a living to earn.

  Even without the hundred or more people in Rona, this small region was and would remain for several decades a busy and a viable community. Calum’s grandfather Malcolm and grandmother Kate moved south to a former estate house at Clachan in 1927 – ‘they just got a house, they were too old to do croft work’ – but Kate’s brother John’s family moved into their Arnish cottage, and Calum’s father, Donald, came back from sea in 1930 to work as a crofter-fisherman. More than a hundred people still lived in northern Raasay, Fladda and (occasionally) Eilean Tighe.

  Beyond the woodlands, arable plots and green pasture of Arnish, Torran and Fladda it was a bare and unpromising few square miles o
f earth. Round hills rolled from coast to coast, covered with heather and black peat bog and broken by blisters of bedrock. The small hills were dotted with lochans and serrated by shallow crevasses, apparently offering little to the settled pastoralist. But to the handful of families who remained there, it was almost enough. Those hills offered rough grazings for cattle and for sheep, and their peat bogs gave fuel. Small plots of sheltered land could be reclaimed, fertilised and cut into corrugated channels deep enough for a few vegetables to take root. And around them, all around them, there was always the sea, with its lobsters and its shoals of fish, its broad inviting avenues to distant wage-paying fisheries, to the merchant navy and to the manufactories of the south and east.

  The community had learned not only how to survive in this place, but also how to live relatively full and healthy lives. John Cumming was born in 1915 at Doire Dubh, ‘a rather gloomy hamlet on the east side of Kyle Rona’. Even there, on the farthest outcrop of inhabited Raasay, the Cummings had neighbours for a short time during John Cumming’s boyhood – ‘a family of Gillieses’. The father of that Gillies family, who had been christened Alastair but was nicknamed ‘Suilag’, ‘was building a new house, a very imposing building, but like the Tower of Babel it was never finished, as the family moved to the south of the island’.

  Alastair Gillies’s wife, Peggy, John Cumming recalled in 1996, was a healer. ‘Peggy Beaton was from Skye; she had a good knowledge of herbal healing. I’m sure she was a descendant of the Bethuens or Beatons, the famous physicians to the Lords of the Isles.* Peggy was also an unofficial midwife, and was called out a few times during an emergency, or sometimes owing to the late arrival of the District Nurse. There were no cars in those days [nor, John Cumming might have added, any road to drive them along] and the Nurse had to walk from Glame, which was a long way from Kyle Rona. There was one occasion when they had to go for Peggy during a heavy fall of snow, and the man of the house had to carry Peggy on his back through the snow for about a mile, but she saved the baby. That baby is now a woman over seventy years of age and living still on the island.’