by John Prebble
‘In every kind of soil and situation,’ wrote a correspondent to the Inverness Courier, ‘in land newly cultivated and planted for the first time, as on old fields, and with every kind of seed, the disease has been found to exist, nor has the remedy been discovered.’ Crops that were sound and healthy on Friday were black and rotten by the Sabbath. ‘A friend had a few days ago gone to Knoydart, Skye, Lochalsh and Kintail, and he tells me that in all that extensive district he had scarcely seen one field which was not affected. Unless a gracious Providence look upon our poor Highlanders in mercy there is every likelihood that starvation must be their portion.’
By autumn it was known that the whole potato crop of the Highlands had failed.
County and parish authorities met in desperate panic, demanding aid from the Government for the purchase of corn, and asking the proprietors to loosen their purse-strings, which most of them did with unexpected liberality. London promised to send a commissary officer as soon as possible, but meanwhile, seeing that ray of good cheer that is sometimes only visible to politicians, ‘Her Majesty's Government has reason to believe that the crop of oats in the West of Scotland is this year generally abundant and the quality is excellent.’ It took no steps, however, to see that this abundant crop (the adjective was its own) remained in the Highlands and was used for the relief of famine. Throughout the months of hunger ahead, merchants would continue to export grain and other foodstuffs from the Highlands to markets in the south where prices were much more agreeable.
Local authorities did their best in the absence of direct relief from the Government, proposing schemes of road-mending that would give employment to the tens of thousands of unemployed. The Government encouraged them, directing their attention to an Act of the previous year which authorized the advance of public money for drainage purposes. But no one could say where men might buy food with the money earned that way. A meeting of proprietors and others held at Fort William decided that South Uist and Barra would need eight thousand bolls of meal if the people there were to survive the winter. North Uist would need five thousand and the Isle of Harris five thousand. A meeting of the Inverness Farmers' Society (with some twinges of conscience, perhaps) discussed the possibility of substituting the potato economy with other vegetables, such as beans, peas, cabbages, carrots or artichokes. But since no one suggested a way of growing these crops overnight, the meeting was of no help to the situation.
Sir Edward Coffin, the intelligent and conscientious Commissary-General who had been knighted for his work during the Irish Famine, came north on the Government's instructions. He set off on a tour of inspection, and promised that revenue cutters would be put at the disposal of any authority wishing to send grain to the west coast and the Isles. The difficulty, however, was to get the meal. Ross-shire farmers, for example, produced twenty-thousand quarters of wheat every year, exporting half of it to London and selling the rest as flour. They were doing the same this year, and would sell the flour only at prices equal to those that could be received for it in England. Aware that the people might not appreciate the sound economics of this, they asked the Sheriff for an assurance that their wagons would be protected by constables and soldiers if necessary on their way to the ships.
A special reporter of the Inverness Courier who made a quick visit to the Black Isle, Easter Ross and the west coast of Inverness, reported two conclusions: ‘First, that there is great destitution present and in prospect; and secondly that the proprietors on the whole are meeting the crisis well.’ But from his report it is evident that only those people who could be classified within the law as paupers were receiving help. And any family that had at least one member at work did not come under this classification.
From Glenshiel, in October, another correspondent of the Courier reported: ‘On the side of the lake which belongs to Mr Baillie of Glenelg we witnessed cases in which whole families had been living on the gleanings from diseased potato fields for weeks, and whose only hope seemed to be that the herrings which have appeared in Loch Eishort would soon appear also in Loch Kintail.’ James Baillie (more accurately of Bristol) was one of the largest sheep-farmers in the west. His estate, worth £100,000 had trebled its value since 1800. When the famine began he was one of several proprietors who petitioned the Government, unsuccessfully, to advance money at low interest to provide employment for the people. Much of the land he now had under sheep had belonged to the Macdonells of Glengarry.
Elsewhere in Glengarry the Courier's man discovered that ‘the cotters and crofters are in an equally destitute condition. In one instance eleven cotters had been kept from starvation by the kindness of a large sheep-farmer; and in another a farmer had thrown open his potato-field to some poor creatures who were digging for sound ones with all the earnestness that a dervish would search for gold.’
Distress and destitution increased as winter approached. It was no mild season this year, but the old cruel Highland winter of wind, snow and black ice. The population moved aimlessly before starvation and the cold. ‘Fathers in rags carry the rude implements that are to be the bringers of bread,’ reported a journalist, ‘Mothers scantily clad bear children in arms, and children bare-headed and bare-footed are loaded with trifling articles of furniture that may assist in supplying the new hovel or, disposed of, avert hunger for an hour.’
It was to the credit of the proprietors (though perhaps no more than should have been expected of them) that they put their hands into their own pockets for once. The second Duke of Sutherland was said to have spent £78,000 in relief during the year of the famine and those following. James Matheson of Achany, who had bought the vast Lewis estate for £190,000 in 1844, spent £40,000 on meal for the people there. But the money from the landlords alone was not enough, and was too rarely distributed impartially. More was collected from public charity, in the Lowlands, England, Canada, Australia and South Africa.
The funds obtained in this way were administered by two Destitution Boards, one in Glasgow and another in Edinburgh, and until they provided themselves with paid staffs and an intelligent system of distributing relief they operated in the usual inefficient and wasteful manner of such bodies. Edward Coffin helped them by establishing food depots at Oban and Portree. The potato-crop failure of 1846 was followed by another in 1847 of a lesser degree, and the effects of both lasted for five years. Though the Destitution Boards prevented the Highlands from becoming another Ireland, they were able to do little more than anaesthetize the pain of those years, and when they had exhausted the £151,532 they collected in money or kind, the people may have passed through the worst they were called upon to suffer but they still endured poverty and hunger.
When the Glasgow Board wound itself up it admitted that it had been of no real assistance to the people. The Edinburgh Board's attempt to introduce new industries for the homeless and the starving – the knitting of hosiery, for example – had brought little improvement at the time and nothing of permanence. As late as 1849 in Wester Ross there were over three thousand people on relief, and in Skye there were five thousand.
When the Boards were established, in January 1847, the Inverness Courier said: ‘There never was a time when there need be less fear of famine. In the shipping ports of the south the granaries are choked full.’ Had the Government considered it part of its purpose to set fixed prices on this grain, and to direct its distribution to where there was the greatest need, the funds collected by the Destitution Boards might have been sufficient to meet the demand. As it was, charity became a honey-pot for the speculators.
Relief was given in return for work, a labour test upon one of the family. ‘A whole day's hard labour,’ said the Courier, ‘is not exacted for a pound of meal. The rule practically acted upon is to give the maximum allowance of 1½ lb. of meal for eight hours fair labour; the relief officer having it in his power to give only one pound when the working-time is idled away.’ The day's work also entitled a man to an extra half a pound of meal for every child under the age of employmen
t. ‘While the wife, by spinning, or in certain cases by mere attention to personal and household cleanliness, can earn her three-quarters of a pound or a pound per day, Sunday included.’ Ministers of the parish determined the fitness or merit of those asking for relief, and in return for their meal the men worked on the roads, on drains, on the improvement of the landlord's property.
The Reverend Norman Macleod, now Chaplain in Ordinary to Queen Victoria, was active in stimulating the charity of the Lowlands and England. To obtain material for his many public addresses, he wrote to ministers and factors all over the Highlands asking one question: ‘What is now doing for the poor?’ He received some terrifying answers.
From Bracadale Manse in December 1846, Mr Norman Mackinnon wrote: ‘My only fear is that relief will come too late. They are now in actual want of everything in the shape of food; some of them days past told me that they had not eaten anything for two days but a salt herring which they said “kept them in good heart”…. I have attended already death-beds that may be said to have died of starvation. This day a great number of them came to my house, who said they had not a bite and the meal store was run out; a Government store-ship having come into the loch on her way to Portree, they thought I could get them to land some of it, but this could not be done. Oh, send us someing immediately, whatever may be done again. If you can send but a few pounds at present, let it come, for many are dying, I may say, of starvation.’
John Lamont, minister of Swordale, said that he did not know what to do for people who came to him daily, asking for food. ‘A woman with a suckling child at her breast had not tasted anything for some time, until going some distance she got some food in another house, and nearly fainted upon tasting it. Misery and want are plainly depicted in the very faces of the people, and unless something is done, and done soon, the consequences must be of the most deplorable kind you can imagine.’ He admitted that the proprietors were helping to relieve the distress in his parish, ‘but they cannot, with any justice to their own interests*, do anything like what will be required.’
From Lochmaddy, Norman Macleod was told that deaths from starvation were inevitable. On Iona the Reverend Alexander MacGregor said that all his people were now dependent upon charity for whatever they could get to eat. William Robertson, who had a sheep-farm at Kinlochmoidart, discovered that there was more to his lease than wool and mutton. ‘I believe that one-fourth of the population of my estate would have died of famine ere now, had I not supplied them with food. This I have hitherto done at vast expense, inconvenience and sacrifice. Were it not an imperative sense of duty, I would not remain in the Highlands and see so much that pains me.’
On the island of Mull a factor called David Ross had been doing his best to form relief committes, raise money, and purchase wool ‘to employ the females’. Daily, men and women came to him for bread, and one woman told him that she and her husband had lived on three-halfpennyworth of barley for two days. In the bitter weather of January 1847, Ross was told by one cotter that he had sold his last blanket to buy meal for his eight children. ‘Another family's case stood thus: The husband had just one morsel of bread in the morning and went out to trench at Dunnipie. The wife, a boy and a girl, had not a single morsel. The girl, toward evening, got a little broth in the School of Industry, and the mother and the boy had nothing but a little cold gruel from one of the neighbours in the dusk.’
Archibald Clerk, at his manse of Kilmallie, told Macleod that more than half of his parish in Lochaber, three thousand people, were in need of ‘urgent aid’. And from Barra, the Royal Chaplain heard that women, young and old, had died from hunger. ‘Unless aid is immediately given there must be deaths. The prospects for the future are dismal in the extreme.’
Norman Macleod published all the letters he had received in reply to his question. The picture they gave was supported by the reports of a young journalist called James Bruce, whom the Scotsman sent to the Highlands in February. Bruce, however, was a proprietor's man, or at least the conclusions he drew from the things he saw were pleasing to a landlord's ear. He described the hunger and the poverty and the destitution, but decided that there were too many people in the Highlands anyway. ‘I cannot help looking on the fact of a fruitful population living in a barren country as a proof of indolence and want of proper spirit…. The rising population must, as soon as they are able to labour for themselves, be removed from the vicious influence of the idleness in which their fathers have been brought up and have lived and starved.’ And when, on Mull, a cotter told Bruce how grateful he was to the proprietor for giving him work so that he might earn money for bread, the Scotsman's special correspondent reported this with all the contempt which Lowlanders had long felt for the Highlandman:
It is encouraging to find that such opinions are making their way among poor men who recollect well that their fathers and grandfathers contrived somehow to live while their employment mainly consisted in walking about all day with their hands in their pockets, and at night sitting down and telling traditions about great lords and mighty chiefs, and stories about ghosts and fairies, while their mothers and grandmothers, though living on the poorest fare, would have looked upon themselves and their families as eternally disgraced if it were to get out to the public that they had sold a dozen eggs.
Bruce's reports, later published in book form, prepared Scotland for the great emigrations to come, and made it possible for Lowlanders to approve of the dispersal of the people whom they were later to romanticize and imitate. The Highlanders themselves, always conscious of Mi-run mor nan Gall, the Lowlander's great hatred, expected no more, perhaps. Yet their pride and their dignity, already injured by thirty years of betrayal and eviction were scarcely enough to support them during these years of famine. And Bruce may have been speaking with some truth when he wrote impatiently: ‘They are positively getting proud of so much looking-after, and of so many enquiries being made into their condition.’
If the people in the Western Highlands were passive during the famine, in the East they were frequently violent. The only grain-ships seen on the west coast were those that occasionally unloaded cargoes for the depots at Oban and Portree. but from the Moray and Cromarty Firths in the east ships left weekly for the south with their holds full of wheat, barley and oats. Desperate attempts were made to prevent their departure, and were sometimes successful. In February 1874, three hundred men and women from Evanton in Ross stopped the shipment of five wagonloads of grain. They gathered on the beach at Foulis Point, kindled great fires and waited all night. In the morning they met the wagons near Waterloo and, despite protests and threats from the Sheriff, turned them back. Sixty men of the 7th Regiment were sent to Avoch in the Black Isle in answer to an urgent appeal from Mr George More, a farmer and corn dealer there. According to the Inverness Courier poverty and destitution in Avoch were as bad as anywhere in the Highlands, and the people were enraged by hunger. Helped by local fishermen they unmoored the ship on which More wanted to load his barley, and tried to pull it out into the firth, but the soldiers of the 7th drove them off, and the barley went south.
At Burghead, when the Ceres was loading meal for Leith, a crowd boarded her and took the cargo ashore again. Constables from Elgin, armed with ash-sticks, beat the crowd from the quay, arrested the ring-leaders and lodged them in the Grant Arms. But the mob broke down the doors of the inn and carried away the prisoners. A hundred men of the 76th Regiment came up from Edinburgh by steamer, and guarded the Ceres with their bayonets until she loaded and sailed.
In Macduff young men barricaded the quay and successfully prevented a schooner from taking aboard three cart-loads of meal. At Banff more men and boys laid booms across the harbour-mouth and stopped the sailing of the Boyne for Leith. When it was rumoured that the Duke of Richmond's agents were buying up grain and storing it for the use of the town of Huntly only, a great crowd came out of the hills with sticks and stones, mobbed the few constables there, burnt effigies of the Duke and his agents, turned off the ga
s supply and rioted in the darkness. Soldiers from Aberdeen drove them out. In Port Gordon a meeting of Justices, convened for the purpose of swearing in special constables against imminent riot, was broken up by the people who then laid siege to the house of the local corn-dealer. He was protected by the guns of a coast-guard detachment until the soldiers from Huntly arrived.
Then, for a few weeks, there was quiet. ‘This has been accomplished,’ said the Courier, ‘by assurances being given to the people that meal will be placed in ample quantities within their reach at fair prices.’ There was more optimism than truth in the assurance. The situation in Skye was typical of most districts. There Lord Macdonald, Macleod of Macleod, and other proprietors announced that 30,000 bolls of meal would be needed to support the islanders at subsistence level until October. Then there must be seed-potatoes and grain for next year's planting. Nobody knew where to find the £68,000 that all this would cost. It was hoped that Skye workmen, who had gone to the Lowlands to find employment on the railways, would send £5,000 home to their families, and a grant of £13,000 had been applied for under the Drainage Act, but this was scarcely enough.
