by John Prebble
On 18th Feb. last I found poor ‘Aunty Kate’ under the bush and blankets covering her ‘cabin’ at Inverie… After reaching the spot where I was told it stood I was surprised I could not see it. I went on a little further and then I observed a little mound, like some huge molehill, with some smoke issuing from the end of it. Approaching nearer I was satisfied it was the abode of a human being, for I heard through the openings a hard coughing inside. My friend now came up and we both went to the door of the cabin, and Mr Macdonald (Father Coll: J.P.) asked how Aunty Kate was. At first he got no answer, for the door, which consisted of empty sacks thrown double across a rope, was fast closed down, and two branches were thrown across from the outside, signifying that one of the two inmates was out. Mr Macdonald then went to the other side and having cleared away the snow with his staff, he lifted an old divot and cried ‘A' cheat, coid an coir a tha airbh an duibh?’ (‘Catherine, how are you feeling this day?’) Immediately the poor creature turned round in her bed and putting a little, withered hand out through the hole in the roof, she grasped her friend's hand firmly, telling him at the same time that she felt no better, but worse. I put my eyes to the little opening in the roof… Aunty Kate has a very miserable look, her face is pale, her eyes black, and as she speaks from underneath the blankets at me the place puts me in mind of where I kept my pet rabbits as a boy. The cabin was in two divisions, one for sleeping, the other for cooking. The sleeping division I already noticed, the other is a small place about four and one half feet long, by four feet broad. The height is two feet nine inches. A small partition of staves and pieces of cloth divides the apartments, and the entrance to the sleeping apartment is just about the size of a door in an ordinary dog kennel.
In this Catherine Mackinnon, aged about fifty, lived with a niece. Most of the other families were no better housed. Allan Macdonald (‘his head is swelled, his hearing defective now’) lived with his four children in the space between a collapsed roof and a wall. Donald MacEachan at Airor, his wife, baby, and two small children, were huddled under an old sail. ‘The mother's breasts were dry as corks, and although the poor infant continued pulling at them for nourishment, it could procure none.’ Alan Mackinnon's wife was dying of consumption. Alexander Cameron's wife was advanced in pregnancy, and he was sick with asthma and rheumatism, and both were crouched in the roofless corner of a cottage. And so on. So on. And over all of them was the white, silent snow of a Highland winter.
In addition to the public disgust which Ross aroused by his letters, he also secured the powerful support of Edward Ellice who sent blankets and food to the people. As a member of Parliament and a substantial land-owner, Ellice was listened to with more attention than was the angry Glasgow advocate. He wrote to Sir John MacNeill, Chairman of the Board of Supervision, and freely gave a copy of his letter to Ross for publication. He said that parochial relief had been poorly given, if at all to some of the people. There was no medical man in the parish, or nearer than Skye across the Sound. Although Catherine Mackinnon was on the Poors' Roll as an infirm person, she had received no portion of meal sent to the Highlands for such persons, and had in fact been struck from the Roll for no given reason. He accused the local Inspector of the Poor of being party to the destruction of the hovels which the people had built, so that they might not become a demand on Parish Relief. ‘I am not aware of the exact powers of the Board,’ he told MacNeill, ‘but if they can institute an official inquiry there seems to me to be, in this instance, a prima facie case for one. No inquiry, however, can be satisfactory in its results unless conducted by a neutral party, and ample opportunity given to the people of the district to state their alleged grievances.’ He said that, to his mind, Knoydart was ‘only part of a system of trying to starve people who, from age or infirmity, are unfit objects for emigration, into submission to being sent out of the country, or, at all events, out of the parish they properly belong to. Opposed to the common principles of humanity and good government, it appears to me to reflect discredit upon the country where it is permitted to exist.’
In the flutter this aroused, few heard the voice of Alexander Grant who was still pleading that it was neither his fault nor his employer's that people who had been offered a passage on the Sillery were now freezing, starving, and destitute. The Lord Advocate ordered George Young, Sheriff of Inverness-shire, to make a full inquiry, and to discover whether Ewen Campbell in Morar, the Local Inspector of the Poor, should be arrested on charges of neglecting his duty. The right of a proprietor to issue writs of removal against his tenants was not questioned, and nobody suggested an inquiry into the conduct of Alexander Grant, Josephine Macdonell, or the Trustees of the 17th Chief of Glengarry.
On Wednesday, 1 February 1854, Andrew Fraser the Sheriff-Substitute at Fort William left for Knoydart with his Clerk, the Fiscal, and Dr Crichton the senior medical practitioner of the town. The weather was bitter and angry, even for those parts, and it delayed them at Father Coll's house in Sandaig, where Ewen Campbell complained that his papers were in Glenelg. He was sent to fetch them. ‘A distance by sea of upwards 25 miles,’ Fraser reported to the Lord Advocate, ‘The weather broke up the day after (he) crossed over to Glenelg by sea, the 3d, and it may give you some idea of the state of the weather when I mention that his boat did not get back till the 10th; he reached us, however, with the books, crossing the hills of Glenelg and Knoydart, two days sooner.’
Meanwhile Fraser, the Fiscal and the doctor had begun their inquiries, visiting the paupers whom Campbell was accused of neglecting, taking down statements from each, and making careful medical examinations. They travelled ten or fifteen miles every day in the company of Father Coll, who acted as witness, guide and interpreter. Their report, when they made it to the Lord Advocate, was precise and comprehensive. They said that in Knoydart and Glenelg the proprietors' contribution to Poor Relief was is. 2d. for every pound of rental they received, and that this amounted to £396 8s. None of the proprietors – the Glengarry Trustees, James Baillie, Lord Lovat, nor even the conscientious Mr Ellice – had ever attended a meeting of the Parochial Board to discover how this one and twopence in the pound was being spent. From the offhand manner in which Mr Fraser announced this, it does not seem to have been an uncommon thing.
The paupers examined were almost all women. ‘Their houses are of the worst description… the wretched inmates scantily and miserably clad. Their clothes, such as they are, being limited to one suit; they have no change of raiment, and are dirty and uncomfortable-looking in their persons, many are without shoes and stockings…. Their food is scarcely limited to potatoes, they cannot provide themselves with meal or other articles of diet sufficient to keep them alive during half the period…. One miserable family (Alexander MacIsaacs, Doune), consisting of a man cripple and blind of an eye, with a wife suckling an infant a month old, and six other children, whose allowance was 19s. 6d. per quarter, we found preparing their daily meal, consisting of potatoes and dulse gathered off the rocks, boiled and mashed together.’
When called upon for a sworn statement, Ewen Campbell admitted that he had known of the wants of the Knoydart paupers,* that their allowances were inadequate, that their accommodation was deplorable, that he had given them ‘no nutritious diet’, that he had found them no medical attention. But, he said, ‘he was acting under the orders of the Parochial Board who gave him no discretionary powers, limiting his duties to the simple payment of the quarterly money allowances fixed by the Board’. Sheriff Fraser thought it relevant to add that the minute-books of the Board did not show that Ewen Campbell had ever informed it of the conditions in Knoydart, or recommended an increase in the allowances. Two police constables from Fort William, however, had made a report to the Board of Supervision, but the members of the Parochial Board, when examined by Fraser, said that they did not know whether the policemen were telling the truth or not. ‘I know nothing personally,’ said James Stavert, factor to Baillie of Glenelg, ‘regarding the state, past or present, of the Knoydart pau
pers. I never was at Knoydart but once in my life, and I never visited the paupers there.’ Another member of the Parochial Board was the Reverend John Macrae, Protestant minister of the parish. He said ‘I did not visit them, these people are of a different communion from me, and have their own priest to attend them.’
The Lord Advocate sent Andrew Fraser's report to the Solicitor-General who, in July 1854, laid it before Parliament. He said that the condition of the paupers disclosed by the precognitions was very distressing. There must have been some defective administration of the Poor Law, yet there was quite obviously a difficulty in proving a case of neglect against the Inspector. ‘A conviction to some extent might perhaps be obtained, but it is more likely that the inspector would be acquitted while the Parochial Board might be blamed.’ Rather than risk this injustice, he decided that criminal proceedings were not necessary.
Probably no one was more astonished than Ewen Campbell.
That summer the Inverness Courier reported briefly: ‘Proceedings have been taken to remove those crofters who were allowed to remain in Knoydart at the time of the evictions last year.’ Soon after they were gone, Mr Baird the ironmaster put his sheep on their hills.
‘As to those ridiculous stories about the Duchess…’
AT the beginning of 1853 more than half a million women in Britain put their names to what The Times, grumbling on behalf of their husbands no doubt, regarded as impertinent interference in another nation's affairs: An Affectionate and Christian Address of Many Thousands of Women in Great Britain and Ireland to Their Sisters, the Women of the United States. The signatures filled twenty-six large folio volumes, and the address was emotional. ‘We appeal to you, then, as sisters, wives, and as mothers to raise your voices to your fellow-citizens, and your prayers to God, for the removal of this affliction and disgrace from the Christian world.’
The affliction was slavery. The whole western world (with the exception of Papal Rome where the book was of course banned) was reading Uncle Tom's Cabin, a sentimental, melodramatic and tendentious account of slavery written by a woman whose personal knowledge of the subject had been gathered during a weekend in Kentucky.* It was no more a true picture of the slave-owning South than slabs of wood were ice in numberless dramatizations of Eliza's flight across the Ohio. But the book may be ranked with the Bible, the Koran, and Das Kapital in its profound effect on human emotions and actions. It made dumpy little Harriet Beecher Stowe one of the most famous women in the world, and in Britain she was for a while a greater literary lion than Dickens or Thackeray (neither of whom thought much of Uncle Tom). When forty ladies of Society gathered at Stafford House in March 1853, under the leadership of the second Duchess of Sutherland, to decide what should be done with those twenty-six folio volumes, they resolved to send the Address to Mrs Stowe. Not only had she inspired the feelings that had prompted it, but she was obviously the one person to present it to her compatriots. At least, that was the opinion of the Duchess, though many Americans were inclined to agree with The Times.
Harriet Elizabeth Georgina Sutherland was a Howard, her ancestry weighted by the coronets of Carlisle, Devonshire, Marlborough, Sunderland and Bedford. Her marriage had been one of the most brilliant achievements of the Countess Elizabeth. She was beautiful, witty, charming and romantic. She was the confidante of and Mistress of the Robes to Victoria for twenty years, and at Court she had the good sense to behave ‘like a head housemaid’, veiling her beauty and muting that wit. But when the Queen was her guest – at Dunrobin where a new wing was built for the occasion, or at Stafford House – she was the sun in a galactic setting. ‘I come from my house to your palace,’ said Victoria, peering at the wealth which the first Duke had hung on the walls. The Duchess Harriet was an amateur architect and landscape gardener, filling notebooks with details of the houses she saw abroad, and when her husband built Cliveden in Buckinghamshire it was modelled on the Villa Albano near Rome. She liked comfort and luxury (as the Duke had hastily reminded himself after his father's funeral), but she could also weep for the suffering and poverty of others. She entertained foreign liberals like Garibaldi, and patronized the harmless oppressed at home. When impoverished silk workers of Spitalfields brought her a roll of cloth, in a colour they had called Magenta in honour of Napoleon III's victory over those tyrannical Austrians, she had it made into a gown, wore it to Court, and imposed the fashion upon the country. At her invitation Shaftesbury held many reform meetings in Stafford House. ‘She was always ready,’ he said after her death, ‘to give her palaces, her presence, and her ardent efforts for the promotion of anything that was generous, compassionate and good.’
And what could be more compassionate and good than the abolition of slavery in the United States. With the Duchesses of Bedford and Argyll, with Ladies Shaftesbury and Palmerston, she organized that mammoth address to the women of America, and when the author of Uncle Tom visited England shortly afterwards she suffocated what real sensibility the woman had under extravagant attention and affection. At Stafford House, on her first visit, Mrs Stowe was received by two great Sutherlanders in kilt and plaid. They led her through treasure-chambers. Liveried servants called her name at every door of every empty room. Her memory, and later her pen, recorded the furniture of white and gold, the walls of green damask, the crystal, the paintings, the newness of costly things, the age of the invaluable. There was nothing like this in Cincinnati, Ohio. In the final room of all there was waiting this still-beautiful, middle-aged creature with creamy shoulders, dark hair and splendid eyes, one of the few women whom Winterhalter could paint without flattery. There too, by his wife's chair, was the Duke, old, white, exceedingly deaf and exquisitely polite.
The one Harriet instructed the other in the subtleties of British Society, introduced her to the Palmerstons, Russells, Glad-stones, the right-thinking and the well-born. She was an American thrush among ospreys, and when she came again to Britain in 1856 she was welcomed by the Duchess less as a guest than as an old friend. It was no secret that on this visit Mrs Stowe was gathering material for a book, a journal of her European tour, and it was with the suggestion that she might find much to employ her pen in the Highlands that the Sutherlands invited her to spend a few days at Dunrobin. The Duchess of Argyll, who competed with her mother the Duchess Harriet in most things social or philanthropic, sent an invitation from Inveraray. Mrs Stowe was thus given an opportunity of seeing more of Scotland than she had ever seen of Kentucky.
Elsewhere than in the ducal drawing-rooms where she spent most of her time, men took an interest in her visit to the Highlands. Donald Ross wrote to her at Inverary, saying that he had read in the newspapers that she had come ‘to make notes on the clearances and to report the result in your future “Memoirs of a Sojourn to the Highlands of Scotland”’. If indeed she had made such an announcement it would suggest that the Duchess Harriet's invitation had not been without a hook in the bait. Remembering Aunty Kate's Cabin in Knoydart, Ross sent her some of Donald Macleod's pamphlets on Sutherland, in the hope that they would help her to understand that not all Uncle Toms had black skins. He received no reply, no acknowledgement. He wrote to her again at Dunrobin Castle. From what he had heard of her visit, he said, he thought that she was – ‘… ill-prepared to write anything worthy of being read regarding the clearances and the cruelties to which the Highland people are subjected. At Dunrobin Castle you are in a manner tied to the Duchess of Sutherland's apron strings. You are shown all the glory and grandeur of the Ducal residence. You are brought to see extensive gardens, aviaries, pleasure-groves, waterfalls and all that is beautiful and attractive, and you are occasionally treated to a drive along the coast road for some miles, through rich farms and beautiful corn-fields, and to finish all you are asked to be present at an exhibition of stockings, plaids, winceys, and tartans made up by poor females from a distant part of the country. But you have not visited Strathnaver, you have not penetrated into Kildonan, you have not been up Strathbrora, you have not seen the ruins of h
undreds and hundreds of houses of the burnt-out tenants.’
Indeed she had not, but the Duke had given her son Henry a magnificent plaid of the Sutherland tartan. The Duchess gave her a copy of Mr Loch's book, so that she might understand the nature and extent of the Great Improvements. The author she could not meet. He had died a year before at his house in Albemarle Street, and on the day of his death there had been evictions on the Sutherland estates of Tongue and Farr. At Achtoly near Tongue, John Mackay stood outside his cottage with his wife, his children and his furniture while officers of the estate cut the couples, tore down the back wall and felled the roof-tree. The next day the same officers went to the house of Christy Mackay, described by the Northern Ensign as ‘a harmless, inoffensive but sensible girl’. The factor accused her of giving shelter to an evicted family, and of having in her cottage at this moment an aged pauper. The officers dug a hole in the ground and put the old woman in it, and then nailed up the house, leaving Christy Mackay weeping against a dry-stone wall. At Armadale, while his house was destroyed, Angus Sutherland led his family in the singing of the 43rd Psalm….
On the day of James Loch's funeral his son wrote in his journal ‘What eminent and great qualities he had! What a long and useful life! His whole existence is one long lesson. How simple, direct in his aim, sagacious, wise and fine!’ Thirty gentlemen followed the hearse to Brompton Cemetery, led by the Duke of Sutherland ‘very much affected’. While Mrs Stowe was at Dunrobin plans were already in hand to give James Loch a monument in the county. At the top of the steps leading to it was to be placed a commemorative tablet:
