Mull and the Clearances, page 2
There were four critical periods:
1. About 1800, when the old communal system of run-rig agriculture merged into individual crofting. The introduction of sheep was now beginning to be felt.
2. The catastrophe of the potato disease in 1846/7, which led to the harsh and well-documented evictions, poverty and emigration.
3. Migration and emigration.
4. The Napier Commission of 1883 and onwards, the outcome of press and private pressures that forced the government into taking belated action.
2
Crofting
Under the old run-rig system, strips of land were cultivated on a system of rotation, changing every three years to prevent the continual use of the best land by one person. The real source of cash income was black cattle, the Highland Kyloe, much in demand for its quality in the south. They depended entirely on communal hill grazings, where the numbers of livestock were carefully managed by the community in order to provide fair grazings for all. This was based on the equation – ‘One horse = four cattle or stirks = thirty sheep’. That is where that peculiar expression originated: ‘Grazing entitlement is one leg of a horse’, i.e. one quarter of the relevant equation figure.
There were three classes of tenants loosely defined by the rents they paid. There was first of all the tacksman, who paid a rent or ‘Tack’ to the landowner in excess of £50 per year. (The figures are approximate.) He was something of a privileged person, perhaps a friend or relative of the laird, who was allowed to sub-let surplus land to crofters and cottars and retain the rents, also to demand their services when required. Next were the crofters, paying rents not exceeding £20 per annum. They were granted legal rights of tenure for a fixed period, with renewal subject to the consent of the landowner. Finally, the cottars, who were greatly in the majority, in fact they formed 95% of the total tenancy and paid 74% of the total rents. Their rents varied from £10 downwards. They had no legal rights of tenure at all, occupying their holdings by use and wont as their forefathers had done during the days of the Clan System, which has been described as ‘The most benevolent form of Feudalism in Europe.’ Under the Clan System, now gone for ever, the lands were not the property of the chiefs, but of the whole clan, of which he was father-figure for the whole conduct of the clan, which in turn supported him in every way. Both crofters and cottars are often loosely referred to as ‘crofters’ for simplicity in the later text.
The cot-houses of the time were primitive and insanitary, according to our standards, and child mortality was high. They are called ‘black houses’, but it is held by some that this somewhat derogatory term should be ‘thatched houses’ through the close similarity of the pronunciation of the two Gaelic words for black and thatched: Tigh Dubh and Tigh Tugath. They were stoutly built with double drystone walls, the space between filled with dried peat to exclude draughts. A peat fire burned in the centre of the room, giving off smoke and soot which escaped through an opening in the roof. That is why old furnishings were low-set, to keep below the smoke level. The house was shared by the livestock behind a flimsy partition, with a sloping floor for obvious reasons! It was not until the beginning of the nineteenth century that a proper chimney and fireplace were built into one of the gables of the later houses.
Early visitors who ventured into the Highlands and Islands wrote scathingly about the living conditions of the people, ignoring the clean air and healthy exacting work outside. Such critics could better have turned their attention to the disease-ridden, overcrowded, insanitary slums of the mainland cities, from which originated the epidemics that spread nationwide.
By the end of the eighteenth century a new race of landowners had become established, wealthy men who took over lands confiscated when the chiefs fled abroad or had been deprived of all their powers and influence. They knew and cared nothing about the traditional ways of the people. More reprehensible were many of the new generation of resident clan chiefs now that their old ties with the clan were gone. They simply became lairds and owners of the lands of their clansfolk.
The cottars became easy prey to be sacrificed for the introduction of sheep and the new ‘Improvements.’ It is true that the old system of crofting was uneconomic. Large open areas formed by the amalgamation of crofts were easier to run, more productive, and yielded higher rents. An unwanted population had to go.
Although crofting conditions became uncertain after 1770, they remained at least tolerable into the early nineteenth century, although always subjected to increasing rents. The menace of sheep was steadily getting worse. It was found that the Highlands and Islands provided excellent grazings for the Cheviot and hardy black-faced sheep, which were larger and heavier than the small indigenous sheep that had been kept mostly for its wool. Sheep were so much more profitable than cattle, so landowners turned to this new source of income. A typical sheep farm carried at least 2,000 sheep. However, the sheep boom ended in the early 1870s, when mutton and wool began to flood into the country from developing Australia and New Zealand. By this time, too, the grazing habits of sheep had ruined the grazings, souring the land, which was now avoided by cattle. Sheep runs reverted to heather, bracken and scrub, and towards the end of the century were useless for anything other than increasingly fashionable sporting estates.
Slow at first to cash in on the profitable sheep, landlords hardened their hearts and began to take every chance to dispossess the peasantry, perhaps moving them to new holdings where the land was poor and difficult to cultivate – but with no reduction in rents. The first direct evictions took place in the lands of Macdonnell of Glengarry in 1785, when 500 tenants were summarily removed, leaving their homeland by the emigrant ship Macdonald at Fort William. Local evictions started in Ross-shire and elsewhere in the 1790s, but the final clearance of the people began in the 1820s.
During the Napoleonic Wars the kelp industry provided some relief for coastal communities. It began when the calcined ash of the kelp was found to be an effective substitute for the barilla that could no longer be imported from the Continent. Kelp, or soda ash, used in the glass and linen industries (‘alginates’ in modern times) was produced by drying and burning seaware, the best being the Laminaria, the familiar ‘Tangle o’ the Isles’, which is half exposed in great beds along rocky shores at low tide and washed ashore in late autumn. Gathering kelp was a hard life for the crofters, who could earn around £5 for a year’s work by a whole family. The landowners collected as much as £20 per ton during the height of the operations – £10-15,000 per year in the best locations. It is recorded that the incidence of arthritis and rheumatic disorders were never worse than during this period, brought on by the constant soakings and exposure.
I was told by some old men in Mull that to drink an infusion of the leaves of the bog bean that floats on most of the pools in the boglands gave some relief. Crofters were often forbidden to use seaweed as the usual fertiliser for cultivation, so greedy were landlords for maximum profits. The industry came to an end when imports from Europe were restored after the wars. Many landowners had begun to cash in on this new source of income, and helped by improving communications were enjoying a new but expensive social life. This still further intensified the impositions on their tenants to replace the lost income.
Mull produced about 600 tons of kelp ash annually, 8.5% of the total production of the western seaboard.
3
The Potato Disease
and Its Aftermath
Uneasy crofting conditions came to a tragic end in the mid-1840s, when the people were faced with a fresh calamity – the potato disease, which at one stroke destroyed the one crop on which the people depended for survival. This disease, Phytophthora infestans, was a wind-blown fungus that first appeared in America in 1843. It spread to Europe, where it first appeared in Belgium, and from there it reached Ireland in 1845, where its virulence and rapidity quickly brought the population to near starvation. In fact, the government had to provide immediate relief by bringing maize flour from North America. Bad though conditions became soon after in Scotland, they were not to be compared with the tragedy of Ireland, where about two million people died or emigrated between 1845 and 1851, for they had become almost totally dependent on potatoes as a main diet
In 1846 and 1847 the full fury of the disease fell on the mild humid areas of the Highlands. A whole crop could be reduced to an uneatable pulp in one day. The clergy submitted that the blight was an act of God, a punishment for the sins of the people, and should not be interfered with by giving relief. The government allowed itself to be persuaded by this nonsense, although as a sop to its hypocrisy it suggested that it was a matter for the landowners. At that time the clergy were appointed by or with the approval of the landowners, so with this Victorian economic rectitude the government at first ignored its duty to the hard-pressed peasantry. This was left to local Parish Councils and the Kirk Sessions of the churches. No wonder that in 1843 what is known as the Disruption of the Churches took place, where a large number of ministers broke away from the State church and set up the Free Church.
The distant government was in any case tied up with foreign wars, acquisition of colonies, Irish politics and putting down slavery abroad with the help of that same navy that was helping to force the use of opium on the Chinese – far too busy to concern itself with the exploitation of women and children in industry, or the heartless extinction of a race of people at home. The parliament was composed of wealthy landowners, the aristocracy, and industrialists, who naturally acted in their own interests.
Although superstitious, the people were highly religious, and resigned to this Divine punishment. If you are ever at Bonar Bridge, turn west into 12-mile Strath Carron until you come to a dead end at Croick church, centre of the infamous Glen Calvie evictions. Here, scratched on one of the diamond window panes (now preserved under glass), you will read such short messages as ‘Glen Calvie people the wicked generation’ with the date, inscribed during the days when the only refuge the people could find was in the churchyard. Any idea of sheltering inside Croick church would have been considered desecration. The three Statistical Accounts published from the 1790s onwards, describing the conditions in Highland parishes, were compiled nearly always by ministers or landowners, with no mention of the evictions or the hardships of the people. It was not until 1883 that the public was made aware of the past 100 years of oppression and hardship.
Faced now with starvation, and with rents always on the increase, the people were bewildered and leaderless, for so many of the tacksmen and crofters who could afford to do so had left the country. Fishing did help coastal communities, and such game as could be picked up without incurring the wrath of the landowners. A central Relief Board was set up, and quantities of oatmeal, barley and peas began to arrive by ship. Tobermory was one of the distributional centres. The government still considered Relief to be the responsibility of the landowners, but at last began to give grudging support.
Relief rations were distributed in exchange for hard work on public services such as road-making, bridges, drainage and wall building. In the 100 years that followed the passing of the eighteenth-century Enclosures Act, no less than an estimated 10,000 miles of dry-stone walls were built in Scotland. To this day the term ‘Destitution Road’ is applied to some of the roads built during the period, such as the lonely stretch across the moorlands between Braemore and Dundonnel. Walking distance for the workers were sometimes unbelievable, but were not taken into consideration for working time. The old and infirm sometimes had to struggle as best they could to the centres of distribution.
In Mull, the first road on which a carriage could be driven was built by this labour between Auchnacraig (at Grass Point, nearest ferry-point to Oban) and the village of Salen. However, work was not confined to public utilities. The lairds were the ones appointed to administer the distribution of food. Some of them directed the labour to carrying out improvements on their own private estates, the work paid for by food from the public supplies. There were even reports later by a few witnesses that lairds had been quietly feeding their livestock with grain from the same source.
More and more people had to leave their holdings to face a life of destitution and pauperism. This was the period when local authorities, driven by the financial burden of Relief, decided it would be cheaper and more effective to erect several poorhouses, such as the Mull Combination Poorhouse at Tobermory, about which I have written elsewhere in detail. Institutions that would care for the homeless were financed by a consortium of parishes, such as in the case of the Tobermory Poorhouse, built in 1862 and financed by three Mull parishes plus those of Moidart, Morven, Ardnamurchan and the islands of Coll and Tiree.
Excellent and well thought-out as this scheme proved to be, it was after all a temporary expedient whose usefulness ended with the nineteenth century, when living conditions were stabilised and independence gained for the old folk when the Old Age Pensioners’ Act was passed in 1909, awarding a pension of 5 shillings (22½p) per week. With hindsight, it was thought that a better idea would have been to have those unfortunate people cared for in their own communities. The best was done in the exacting circumstances of the times.
The impact of the potato disease was a long-awaited excuse for some of the more impatient landowners to carry out immediate evictions of this unwanted peasantry. One excellent solution was by emigration – compulsory and otherwise – which the landlords hastened to exploit.
4
Migration and Emigration
From the earliest times, when crofting became increasingly precarious, there was always a slow drift to the industrial south, where prospects were better. The older people who were traditionally peasant farmers were slow to adapt to the new jobs in the growing heavy industries. Every year at harvest time there was a seasonal return journey made to the farmlands of the south, especially by the younger people. The few pounds they brought home greatly helped the family budget. Cash was always scarce in the Highlands and Islands, and barter a regular medium of exchange. Up to about 1815 there was a national scarcity of coin in Scotland. At the time of the Treaty of Union in 1707 the coinage was so scarce and debased that one of the clauses of the Act promised an immediate review, and a restoration of quantity and quality. This was not implemented until 100 years later. The Scottish Mint in Edinburgh was closed and its functions transferred to the south.
The seasonal migration of harvesters reminds me that up to twenty or so years ago, before mechanical digging took over, I used to see gangs of potato-lifters who came over from Ireland to work in our extensive potato fields. They lived in bothies or farm outhouses, which would have been the same conditions as experienced by our migrant Highlanders. In 1822 there was the tragic loss of the smack Mary of Iona conveying forty-four harvesters from Iona and the Ross of Mull that cast a gloom for years over the whole community. She sank after a collision with a tug in the Clyde; only two men and two women were saved.
Emigration was a different story. It was started on a small scale by tacksmen in the 1770s when landlords were beginning to find that the conditions of the ‘tack’ were over-generous, such as the rights to retain rents from sub-letting. By raising the rents and curtailing entitlements, it was sought to get rid of this class of tenant. Anticipating trouble ahead, and when financially able to do so, they began to leave the country for destinations abroad where there were genuine prospects of an assured future. They left in ships of their own choice and in such comfort as those ships provided. They were followed by wise crofters who could afford to do so, when the going was still good, so to speak Those early emigrants usually became well established in the developing colonies, where their energy and initiative found scope, and their favourable reports encouraged the people at home to follow their example. Sufficient starting capital was the answer, and the many thousands who lacked this were disappointed as the years went on. North America was the favoured destination, with settlements developing, especially around the Great Lakes. There is a ‘Tobermory’, now a large town on a peninsula on the south side of Lake Huron. Australia and New Zealand came next in popularity. Among many Scottish placenames there is another ‘Tobermory’, a settlement in central Queensland of all places! By the end of the nineteenth century there were few corners of the world where Scots folk were not to be found. I’ve even read that Gaelic is still spoken by the descendants of some emigrants in Patagonia!
In Hong Kong, perhaps the greatest company in the Far East, Jardine Matheson & Company, was founded by William Jardine, who came from Dumfries, and James Matheson, from Lairg – I’ve mentioned his good works in Lewis earlier. Wherever possible, they made it a point to engage clerks from Scotland. They had both started as clerks in Calcutta before settling in Hong Kong early in the nineteenth century. Matheson retired to Lewis with a huge fortune from the opium trade, and spent vast sums improving the island and financing emigration.
At home crofters were now defenceless against the actions of impatient lairds. Massive evictions followed the potato catastrophe, and their holdings were turned into sheep farms – or large agricultural units. Finding emigration a convenient way of clearing the land, some landlords were even prepared to subsidise the fares of emigrants. Some of the victims, torn between nostalgia for the old settled days of their forefathers, threatened with pauperism and a futureless life at home, considered that even the unknown conditions overseas could be no worse, perhaps much better, if they were to believe some of the reports sent home by earlier emigrants. They paid their own fares if they could scrape the cash together, selling their livestock and anything that could be turned into money, leaving them penniless in an inhospitable environment. Fares ranged widely from £3.50 for an individual to £35 for a large family.
