by John Prebble
He saw seven children, all under the age of eleven, lying in a shed on ‘a collection of rubbish, fern, meadow-hay, straw, pieces of old blanket and rags of clothing’. Rain and snow fell upon them. They were so thin, and so light he said, that he could have carried them all in his arms for a quarter of a mile without feeling their weight. ‘It would be insulting the feelings and commonsense of right-thinking persons to ask them if this is a fair and legal treatment of the poor. The injustice is so palpable, the inhumanity so great, that one can scarcely find language sufficiently strong to condemn it!’ The Parish Relief for the families was rarely more than two shillings a month.
Eighteen people were still living on the shore at Boreraig when spring came, or on the muir about Suishnish. The others had gone, to Portree or Glasgow, or had died in the open like Flora Robertson. By the first warm days of summer the townships were at last empty, and in time Lord Macdonald's Trustees found a tenant for the land. The market for wool and mutton was uneasy that year, owing to the war in the Crimea. Fleeces that would have fetched 21s. 6d. a stone in 1853 were being sold for less than 15s. but the newly published Wool Market Circular in Inverness said that prices for ewes and wedders were still high, and this promised an early return of stability.
One of the last to leave Boreraig had been an old man of eighty-six. ‘I have paid sixty-six rents to the Macdonalds,’ he told Donald Ross, ‘and I am not one farthing in arrears. To be cast out of my house and my home to make room for his sheep is what I never expected. It is breaking my heart.’
‘Oh do not, I beseech you, lose sight of the poor’
WHEN Alistair Ranaldson Macdonell, 15th Chief of Glengarry, made that over-confident leap from a sinking steamer in Loch Linnhe he left his title, his example, and his debts to his son, Aeneas. The young man accepted the rank with pride, the example with caution, and the debts with horror. He did his best to be a romantic like his father, but he had neither the conviction nor the health to support the strain. The debts were more easily honoured, and when he reached his majority he evicted his people and sold some of his lands to pay them. Lord Abinger, the jurist (and father to General Scarlett of Balaclava) bought the mortgage on Inverlochy for £75,150. Edward Ellice, son of a founder of the Reform Club, became the laird of Glenquoich and, fortunately for the Highlands, a fierce critic of Poor Relief administration. When the estate of Glengarry itself was auctioned at the Old Signet Hall, Edinburgh, it was bought for £91,000 by William Ward, an Englishman and 11th Baron of the name. Ward resurrected the spirit of Alistair Ranaldson by wearing kilt and plaid, and by holding Highland gatherings for his friends. He also introduced the flavour of English squirearchy, organizing ploughing matches among those few tenants who remained between his sheep-walks.
All that was left to the 16th Chief was the far land of Knoydart, a knuckle of mountains on the west coast between Loch Nevis and Loch Hourn. When sales of his property were completed he emigrated to New South Wales. He left in October 1840, in comfort and in style. He took with him his wife Josephine and family, his servants, his piper, clothing, bedding, bolts of tartan, furniture, a comprehensive selection of agricultural tools, and a number of prefabricated timber houses. His departure, said the Inverness Courier, could not be considered without emotion and regret, and it was a comfort to know that the piper was going too. ‘These Celtic strains will sound strange in the new world of the wanderers, so far removed from their native Loch Oich, the Rock of the Raven, and other magnificent scenery of the Glengarry mountains.’ Word was heard of the Chief now and then, that he had arrived in New South Wales with all his gear and goods, that he had been guest of honour at a St Andrew's Day fete in Port Phillip, that he had ‘announced his intention to proceed alone, with his family, to the great South Land.’ Two years later a Scots traveller met him in an out-back inn. The chief was so well strapped with pistols that ‘his countryman mistook him for a bushranger. An explanation followed and they spent the night together, discussing Lochaber no more! Glengarry had just bought 100 cows for £10 each.’
And then he was back in Scotland, prematurely aged and dying. The great South Land had not been all that he had hoped. In 1852 his widow buried him beside Alistair Ranaldson at Kilfinnan, and prepared to pay the debts which his heir (a minor, as seemed to be the way with these Glengarrys) had inherited. With her son's trustees and his factor she planned the clearing and the sale of Knoydart.
Knoydart had been the most westerly of Macdonell lands. Its conical hills rise abruptly from the sea and from lakes of black glass. Columns of summer sunlight support the clouds above it, and its beauty is an eternity of melancholy. Marshal Wade broke no way into Knoydart, and Cumberland's burning infantry touched its shores only. In 1852 the road that reached it from the east was frequently impassable, abandoning incautious travellers in a blue wilderness. This road ran through Edward Ellice's estate for thirty miles, and here there were no townships, nothing but Cheviot wool. ‘Had I been walking through the wild territories of the Hudson's Bay Company,’ said Donald Ross, who went that way to Loch Hourn, ‘I could scarcely see greater signs of desolation.’
Most of the people of Knoydart had gone to Canada during the long century of Macdonell emigration. Those who remained lived in townships on the coast. In 1847 there had been over six hundred of them, but the poverty which followed the Great Famine had scattered most of these. The land which the remainder worked was good, and had they received encouragement and help, thought Donald Ross, they could have grazed more sheep and cattle, raised vegetables and corn, and thus paid their rents with money to spare, though such modest husbandry would not have settled the debts of the 17th Chief. They were Catholics for the most part, and were cared for by a selfless priest, Coll Macdonald, known to them as Maighstir Colla. In an open boat, winter and summer, he took the Sacrament from township to township along the coast. By 1853 there were only seventy families in his parish, but all the people, Protestant or Roman, loved him. Half a century later the children of Glengarry in Australia and Canada were still calling their sons Coll in his memory.
Since they lived on the coastal fringe of Knoydart, and worked none of the inland valleys needed for a sheep-walk, the people were no real obstacle to the Great Cheviot. But no incoming tenant in the Highlands now wanted the financial responsibility of a near-pauper population. If the thought of their eviction troubled the conscience of Josephine Macdonell, her factor, an old man called Alexander Grant, eased it for her. The people were in arrears, the people were making ill-use of the land, the people wished to emigrate…. And, of course, Mr James Baird wished to buy the estate. He was a Lowlander, a great admirer of Robert Burns, who had bought the estate of Cambusdoon in Ayr because that was the poet's shire. When he had built himself a fine house there, on the banks of the Doon, he invited Miss Isabella Begg, a niece of Burns, to break a launching bottle of whisky over its door. Mr Baird's money came from iron and coal, and he was a generous benefactor of the Church of Scotland.
The arrears of rent in Knoydart were £2,300, or so Alexander Grant claimed, and Mrs Macdonell had apparently forgotten that this was due to the fact that after the Famine her husband had written to Grant from Australia, directing that no rent should be taken until better times, for he looked upon the people ‘less as tenantry than as children and followers’. When a reader of the Inverness Courier questioned the ethics of ignoring the wishes of a dead man, Alexander Grant replied that Mrs Macdonell ‘acting for her son, considered it a duty to remove a nonpaying body of tenants.’ The people of Knoydart, with uneasy memories of what Glengarry widows had done to their clan in the past, petitioned Grant at Martinmas in 1852, soon after the death of Aeneas, offering to pay what rent and arrears they could in return for a promise that they would remain on their holdings. They tried again in 1853, but by then Mrs Macdonell was making arrangements with the Highland Emigration Society and the Board of Supervision for their speedy dispatch to Australia. Having received Sir John MacNeill's approval, and a promise from the Soc
iety that a transport would be sent, she instructed Grant to prepare and execute the writs of removal. ‘Just as if,’ said Donald Ross bitterly, ‘they had been a parcel of broken-down useless slaves she was desirous of getting rid of.’
At the end of August 1853, the Government transport Sillery came to Isleornsay on Skye, and waited there for the people to be ferried across the Sound of Sleat from Knoydart. The evictions began soon after her arrival, and Mrs Macdonnell came up from Edinburgh to Invergarry, to be near should there be papers to sign or orders to give. Under the direction of Grant, parties of men with axes, crow-bars, and hammers, visited each township, and daily the Sillery's boats rocked across the bronze sea to Inverie, Sandaig, Doune and Airor. Four hundred people were cleared from their homes, and those who refused to go in the boats ran to the hills and hid in caves. Grant ordered the destruction of each house immediately it was evacuated. ‘Not only the houses of those who had left,’ said Ross, ‘but also of those who had refused to go. The inmates were ordered out, the thatch was pulled off, picks were stuck into the walls, the levers removed the foundations, axes cut the couple trees, and then roof, rafters and walls fell with a crash. Clouds of dust rose to the skies, while men, women and children stood at a distance completely dismayed. From house to house, hut to hut, and from barn to barn the factor and his menials proceeded.’ The few huts left standing belonged to paupers on the poor roll of Glenelg parish. Grant warned them that if they gave shelter to the evicted, ‘for one moment by day or night’, they too would have their homes levelled.
One of those evicted from the township of Airor was Allan Macdonell, a widower with four children. Thirty years before he had gone to Edinburgh with Alistair Ranaldson, to support the chiefs dignity before George IV at Holyrood. ‘Commercially speaking,’ said Donald Ross, ‘Allan Macdonell now has no value at all. Had he been a roe, a deer, a sheep, or a bullock, a Highland laird in speculating could estimate his “real worth” to within a few shillings, but Allan is only a man. Then his children – they are of no value, nor taken into account in the calculation of the sportsmen. They cannot be shot at like hares, blackcocks, or grouse, nor yet can they be sent to the south as game to feed the London markets.’ Macdonell said that he did not wish to emigrate, and would not go aboard the Sillery.
A widow called Elizabeth Gillies sat by her fire and refused to move. One of Grant's assistants threw water on the peat, two more pulled at the old woman's arms. She fought with them, screaming, and they struck at her fingers with sticks when she caught at her door-posts. She crawled on her knees to a dyke-wall, and watched as the agents threw out her furniture, ‘broke down the partitions, took down the crook from over the fireplace, destroyed the hen-roosts, and then beat the hens out through the broad vent in the roof of the house.’
Charles Mackinnon, who was seventy and lived alone, was waiting at his door for the factor. Grant asked him when he was going. ‘As soon as I can,’ said Mackinnon. He put on his bonnet and plaid and walked away from the boats, up into the hills. Alexander Macdonell carried his pregnant wife to the shelter of a bush, refusing to put her aboard the Sillery when she was so close to labour. Catherine Mackinnon, sick in bed, asked that she be given God's time to recover, and then she would go to the boats, or anywhere the factor ordered. She was taken out and put in a ditch. These things were repeated again and again until all the cottages in all the townships were emptied and destroyed. ‘No hand was lifted, no stone cast, no angry word spoken,’ said Ross. ‘Able bodied men who, if the matter would rest with mere trial of physical force would have bound the factor and his party and sent them out of the district, stood aside as dumb witnesses… 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.’
The Sillery sailed. The russet Highland autumn was over. There were white frosts on the hills when sixteen families came down from the rocks and the caves and began to put their houses together. They stretched blankets over the walls, and built shelters from the timbers. Grant sent men to destroy these and to burn them, and to tell the people that they were trespassers. Three families were living in the store-house, and this too was burned. ‘The couples and rafters were of old mountain-pine, full of resin, the cabers dry as tinder. The thatch of old moss divot. The straw and heather covering, all dry, all combustible, blazed away magnificently, illuminating the whole district.’ Father Coll visited the families regularly, tacking up the coast in his little boat. He collected money from other districts, bought a tent or two, and took seven old people back to his house at Sandaig on Loch Nevis, building them a shelter in the garden. He must also have been the ‘much-respected clergyman’ who wrote to Donald Ross soon after the Sillery sailed, telling the lawyer what had happened and of his fears for the winter. ‘One of the young women lay for some time beside a bush; she was afterwards brought within the wall of her former house, where she lay for three days so ill that her recovery was very doubtful. The other woman, Mackinnon, is very unwell as yet, it is not unlikely that this cold weather will put an end to her suffering and her life together.’
Ross wrote to Grant, asking him for permission to send tents and blankets to Knoydart. The factor, who was busy explaining to the Inverness Courier why the widow Glengarry had been forced to clear her tenants, referred Ross to her law-agent in Edinburgh. He received no reply from this man at all, ‘although there are four mails every day from Edinburgh to Glasgow’. Meanwhile he received another letter from Coll MacDonald. ‘Today, the 22nd October, is the stormiest day we have seen this year, and yet the servants from Inverie are after making their round, destroying the shelters of the outcasts! All those poor creatures are out there exposed to the raging elements. The officers and servants have broken their huts now six times with the first warrant. If this is legal, you know best. Oh do not, I beseech you, lose sight of the poor who are living without shelter in this dreadful weather!’
Collecting what clothing and tents he could, Ross left for Knoydart. He travelled by road to Loch Hournhead, and there hired a small boat to take him to the township of Airor, thirty-four miles away, where most of the people had collected. The voyage was rough for the first half of the journey. ‘A strong current like a powerful tide rushed up the loch, boiling and raging, and had our bark the power of an ordinary steamer it would have baffled her to make head against such an element. We had to change our course, ply our oars, and soon got into smooth water again, and a gentle breeze soon starting, filling our unreefed sail, we steered along under the shadow of the high hills of Knoydart, rounded several rocky points, and reached the pier at Arar by seven o'clock at night, after a voyage of four hours and a half.’
He found and spoke to all sixteen families, took the names and ages of the parents, the names and ages of the children, and published them all before Christmas in a pamphlet called Scenes at Knoydart. Each wretched individual was given his careful, compassionate attention. ‘Allan is still a fine specimen of a highlander, well-made, good-looking and muscular. He has fallen off very much of late, however, in consequence of exposure to cold and damp.’ There was Angus Kennedy, a boatman, whose ‘wife's complaint is caused by some mismanagement, and by want of proper nourishment and appliances after a premature birth.’ Ross called at each hovel, each hole in the ground, greeting the people with respect and in the Highland manner: ‘Failte na maduin duibh!’ (Hail, good morning to you). Children crawled from holes in the ground to stare at him with large, dark eyes. ‘The boy was complaining very much of colic. He looked pale and very ill, and said he had sore arms. The father pointed to the hole where he and the boy had to lie all night. It was damp and rain from the level roof kept dripping on them.’ One man had built a crude shelter for his family four times, and four times it had been destroyed by Grant's men. ‘On one oc
casion they surprised the inmates boiling a pot of potatoes, they took the roof off the hut at one sweep, then put out the fire and ordered the wretched lodgers out at the door.’ Ross told each story in detail, each family's agony, until they all became one pain that numbs.
‘Had this Emigration Committee not been so very accommodating,’ said Ross with restrained anger, ‘had Sir John MacNeill not been so very ready with his promises of large ships, need I say that Mrs Macdonell would not have been so ready to warn out and evict the peasantry on the Glengarry property? Such conduct deserves exposure.’ He did his best to expose it. He went back to Glasgow, wrote to the Northern Ensign and published his pamphlet. He appealed for food, clothing, meal, and justice. ‘It is most unfair to bargain with “Committees”, and to arrange about large ships fit to carry away the whole population of a Highland district without first consulting the population that is sought to be packed off.’
Throughout the winter he gathered and sent what supplies he could to Father Coll, and in February he made another bitter, snow-driven visit to Knoydart. He became a better newspaperman with every letter he wrote to the Northern Ensign, and this time he told the story of the cold and starving people through the case of one of them only – Catherine Mackinnon, who had asked the factor for God's time to recover before he put her out. Ross headed his letter ‘AUNTY KATE'S CABIN’, taking theme and title from a novel then exciting the country. He presumed that few people had not read ‘Mrs B. Stowe's’ work, and he said that fiction was not ‘so strange as the simple narrative of facts I am about to give’.
