History Forum / General / British History / November 2007

Of course we are -- it's irrelevant.

Vide supra pro sapientia.

DSH

Lux et Veritas et Libertas

I see he still hasn't broken his unbeaten record in being wrong about
absolutely everything absolutely every time.
How does he do it. It's truly uncanny.

<discreet applause!>

As this is a Scottish group, and as the Scots are famous for their
remorseless harrying of an enemy, I look forward to several weeks of
harrassing the now-discredited Hines. We have a major advantage
compared to others; we are graduates of the finest educational system
in the world as may be seen by the subjects discussed in SCS without
benefit of guesswork or vague, dubious claims.

You do realise, don't you, that for the most part the British Empire became,
"The Commonwealth of Nations", (sometimes as the British Commonwealth)?
The British Commonwealth, is a voluntary association of 53 independent
sovereign states, most of which are former British colonies (the exceptions
being the United Kingdom itself and Mozambique). Queen Elizabeth II is the
current Head of the Commonwealth, recognised by each state, and as such is
the symbol of the free association of the organisation's members. This
position, however, does not imply political power over Commonwealth member
states.

Antigua and Barbuda
Australia
The Bahamas
Bangladesh
Barbados
Belize
Botswana
Brunei Darussalam
Cameroon
Canada
Cyprus
Dominica
Fiji Islands
The Gambia
Ghana
Grenada
Guyana
India
Jamaica
Kenya
Kiribati
Lesotho
Malawi
Malaysia
Maldives
Malta
Mauritius
Mozambique
Namibia
Nauru
New Zealand
Nigeria
Pakistan
Papua New Guinea
St Kitts and Nevis
St Lucia
St Vincent and the Grenadines
Samoa
Seychelles
Sierra Leone
Singapore
Solomon Islands
South Africa
Sri Lanka
Swaziland
Tonga
Trinidad and Tobago
Tuvalu
Uganda
United Kingdom
United Republic of Tanzania
Vanuatu
Zambia
***** Gibraltar is an Associate member.

Music to the Highland ear... Leaving children alive only meant one
thing; weakness; leading to revenge massacres when the survivors grew
up and returned to pay off old scores. There is far too much made of
Highland massacres; they were a salutary reminder to others not to
mess with one's clan, not mention access to hitherto unavailable
rations.

Plus there were some damned fine bagpipe rants created during those
times to drown out the screaming - even our ancestors had some
emotions, one likes to believe, They didn't always murder their
prisoners, although I will admit it was a problem during WWI as dead
men can't tell one's superiors who and how many are facing one's own
side.

I suspect the above may be overly sophisticated for the American
eye... On the other hand, the failure to sign the Geneva Convention
does leave them rather open to shootings, hangings and beheadings.

I've always been amused by the story of Aonghas Òg.

Domhnall Gorm Mòr (the chief of the MacDonalds) married a sister of
Ruairi Mòr (the chief of the MacLeods). She was very ugly, and had
only one eye.

After a year and a day Domhnall Gorm sent her home on a
one-eyed horse, with a one-eyed groom, and a one­eyed dog. She was
known as "a' Chailleach Cham" ('The One-eyed Crone:). Not terribly
subtle, and not suprisingly, war broke out between the MacDonalds and
the MacLeods. At this time Aonghus Òg (Young Angus) was the Captain of
the men of Sleat, the MacDonald clansmen.

At the Battle of Coire na Creiche, Aonghus Òg fought so well that he
got too far ahead of his men and the MacLeods closed round him and
took him prisoner. He was taken to Dunvegan and sentenced to be hanged
by MacLeod.

But MacLeod was reluctant to put such a valiant warrior to death and
thought he might persuade him to become one of his own men. Aonghus Òg
was put on the scaffold, the noose round his neck and then
propositioned by MacLeod, who promised him his life if he would marry
his sister and switch sides to fight for the MacLeods.

Aonghas Òg asked if he might see the sister first. The sister was
brought out and her charms displayed. Aonghus Òg then turned to the
hangman and said: "Suas a seo mi!" ('String me up!').

I've always felt this to be a superb example of the ultimate insult!

That took place in 1601 and is an excellent example of the sheer
viciousness of those days. Poor woman. The Battle of Coire na Creiche
is also known as the War of the One-eyed Woman. The name Coire na
Creiche itself tells you all about Highland customs - it's a
depression (Coire, or Corrie in English means a cooking kettle) where
cattle that had been stolen from someone else were kept, presumably
intil the heat died down.

Continuing with the theme of insulting women, in Kilmuir (like Kilmore
on Skye and Kilmorie on Rum; they all refer to Saint Mary), an area
about five miles north of Uig, in Trotternish, a district often called
An Fearann Stapagach; "Land of Cream" because it is so fertile; there
is a Martin family graveyard. The Martins are a famous family in Skye,
esp. an historian called Martin Martin, died 1719.

One Martin, called Angus of the Wind - the storm, rather than
digestive troubles - was a wild man living at the time of Queen
Elizabeth of England, who brought a stone back from Iona to enhance
the graveyard, carrying it on his own back from the shore to the
graveyard; a fair five mile walk.

He was married to a sister of the MacDonald chief (his second
marriage) and his brother-in law married a Maclean whom Angus heartily
despised. Angus had some local fame as an amateur port and she begged
him constantly to compose an ode in her honour. Finally he composed a
quatrain for her.

You promised not to get enraged
You red-eyed, pockmarked ruddy-faced old bag,
*We* paid dearly for your dowry
Woe to him who's got you for life!

He was definitely persona non grata at Dunvegan for a long time...

Oddballs weren't confined to Skye though - this story from Uist by
Martin MacDonald writing in the West Highland Free Press in 2003 gives
a fine example of how tough it was to be an ordinary person in days
gone by...  

With a few honourable exceptions, 19th century Highland landlords were
a pretty squalid bunch, avid for coin and short on humanity. But the
most callous of the lot was Colonel John Gordon of Cluny in
Aberdeenshire, mid-century laird of South Uist and Barra. His name is
still a by-word for brutality in the islands. His daughter-in-law and
successor, Lady Gordon Cathcart, was no sweet blossom either.

But let's not lay all the blame on incomers. The last of their native
Macdonald chiefs hardly served the islanders well. A warning of
changing times hit Uist in 1770 when a local tacksman, Colin Macdonald
of Boisdale, forsook Catholicism and moved to the Protestant church.
Personal belief is surely a matter for the individual's conscience,
but he didn't rest at that. Waving his yellow cane he tried to drive
his reluctant sub-tenants into church before him. Creideamh a' bhata
bhuidhe is how the incident is still known in Uist - "the creed of the
yellow stick".

Fortunately for the Macdonald name another of the clan came to the
rescue. John Macdonald of Glenaladale in Moidart was "a man of many
accomplishments and goodness of heart", according to the Clan Donald
history (written, incidentally, by two Presbyterian ministers). In
1772 he sold Glenaladale and gave the name to land he bought in Prince
Edward Island on which he made room for his Moidart tenantry and 100
of the persecuted Uibhistich (the people of Uist). It was a voluntary
emigration to freedom.

But by the dawn of the 19th century emigration was discouraged by
every possible means in Uist. The landlord needed a labour-force to
cut his seaweed and service his highly-profitable kelp industry. And
the way to do that was to give people tiny crofts that allowed them a
bare subsistence, and forced them to labour on the shores for a wage
that would pay their rents but not allow them to save to cross the
Atlantic.

And the landlord? Another once-chiefly Macdonald turned entrepreneur.
Ranald Macdonald of Clanranald succeeded to the clan lands in South
Uist and Moidart as a minor under trustees in 1794. By the time he
came of age around 1810 the bright lights of London had already
beguiled him. He became MP for an English "rotten borough" and married
Lady Caroline Edgcumb, daughter of the Earl of Mount-Edgcumb. And for
the next couple of decades the cold toil of the Uist crofters and the
vast profits of the kelp industry kept the pair of them in the style
her daddy expected.

(My note: I've always thought that Ranald Macdonald of Clanranald,
known to English society as "Clanranald Macdonald" was, to quote my
grandfather, "one of the biggest sh.ts ever to walk the streets of
London".) Here, to show you what still goes on in the Highlands, are
some pictures of the Macdonald chiefs reinforcing their still not
inconsiderable influence today.  

http://www.scotsheraldry.com/Scotsheraldry/Finlaggan.htm
Note the long eagle's pinion feathers that only a chief may wear.

It couldn't last, of course. After the Napoleonic Wars kelp prices
tumbled as a cheaper Spanish product flooded the market. So how to
sustain the London lifestyle? Why, the same answer as other Highland
lairds were discovering, of course - clear vast tracts of the best
land for profitable sheep farms. And if the now-redundant labour-force
couldn't escape overseas just dump them in the already-overcrowded
plots by the shore. Clanranald's factor prepared such a plan for South
Uist and the early stages were being carried out when impending
bankruptcy forced the sale of the estate in 1837.

Enter the devil in the person of the Aberdeenshire-based Colonel
Gordon.
He showed no remorse in forcing the scheme to its limits. When potato
blight hit the West Highlands in the late 1840s, he refused to
co-operate in a government-sponsored scheme to provide people with an
emergency meal supply. A government official, Captain Pole, warned
that if he took no action "scenes would occur in South Uist, Barra and
Benbecula which would be disgraceful to his name, and injurious to the
reputation of Great Britain."

Prophetic words. In the three years till 1851 he evicted around 2,000
families from Uist and Barra. Men who tried to resist, or escape to
the hills, were harried by bailiffs, policemen and dogs. In front of
hysterical wives and screaming children they were bound hand and foot,
and tossed into the holds of emigrant ships at Lochboisdale pier. Two
teenage sisters were still hiding in the hills when the ships sailed
with their parents and brothers and sisters. Families were separated
like human chattels at a slave market.

Their arrival in Canada caused a scandal. The 'Quebec Times' in 1851
reported bands of starving islanders, few of whom spoke English,
scattered along the banks of the St Lawrence river. An appalled
quarantine officer wrote that he had never seen "a body of emigrants
so destitute of clothing and bedding; many children of nine and ten
years old had not a rag to cover them". Gordon had made absolutely no
provision for the people he so callously threw out.

At home, the people of South Uist were cowed and broken. Fear stalked
the island. Thirty years later the Land League activist John Murdoch
reported the crofters were terrified to attend his meetings in case of
punitive measures by the estate.

By that time Lady Gordon Cathcart was the landlord. In her 54 years of
tenure until her death in 1935 she is reputed to have visited the
island at least once. The 1886 Crofters Act had given the crofters
security of tenure, of course, but it did nothing for the hundreds of
poverty-stricken landless cottars who survived on the crofters'
charity. Nor did her ladyship, exercising her power through her
resident factor, Mr Paterson.

There was a brief blink of hope in 1891 when South Uist voters elected
a Land League supporter, the famous Fr Allan Macdonald, Eriskay, to
the newly-created Inverness County Council. But he had to resign
through illness, and despite assurances from the Skye Land League
contingent on the council that they had a candidate ready to stand for
the vacancy, the landlord majority on the council refused to hold an
election. They simply co-opted Paterson to fill the gap. The estate
stranglehold was as tight as ever.

When Paterson retired in 1901 a small and select group (the banker, a
couple of schoolmasters and merchants, and a few estate lackeys) met
in Lochboisdale Hotel to wine him and dine him and fawn in gratitude.
A few days later half the populace of the island followed pipers to
the top of a hillside to the south of Lochboisdale, and danced with
great glee round a massive bonfire to celebrate his going. Speeches
were made to the effect that Lady Gordon Cathcart would see justice
done to her loyal tenantry now that his malign influence had gone.

Not a hope. So the crofters and cottars began to raid the sheep farms
that were once their grandparents'. But even when the Congested
Districts Board, a government development agency, said they would help
crofters with stock and housing if she let crofts at a fair rent the
lady would not be moved - though she did offer to sell the farms to
the CDB at exorbitant prices their budget could not match. It was 1924
before a final outbreak of post-World War I land raiding brought them
under crofting tenure.

For the past half-century the Uibhistich have enjoyed the
fairly-benign ownership of a syndicate whose basic interests are sport
and fishing. No one will ever again be hog-tied on Lochboisdale pier
and thrown into an emigrant ship. Equally, no one pretends that the
challenge of community ownership is a panacea for all ills in all
circumstances. But it can prevent the stifling inertia of
unsympathetic landlordship, which is still quite possible. A community
that has suffered so grimly, but survived so resiliently, should
consider it well.