THE NEW SETTLEMENT AT GERINISH
Fr Donald Walker, the parish priest of Ardkenneth, makes a simple but significant entry in the parish baptismal register: ‘on the the 23rd August 1908 was born and on 6thSeptember was baptised Angus Morrison, Gerenish, the son of John Morrison and Mary McIntyre, residing in the new settlement Gerenish’. Angus’s elder sister, Mary Bella, had been born on the 1st June in the previous year but the place of residence of the Morrisons at that time is given as Ardnamonie. Somewhere between the two dates the Morrison family had made their new home in the new settlement of Gerinish where they are still to be found today. Sadly, Angus had a short life for in the margin, next to these details, another hand writes RIP 10th March 1941. He had not passed his thirty third birthday when he died.
Fr Walker refers to the ‘new settlement’ at Gerinish. It was ‘new’ in one sense but, in another sense, it was the re-possession of a very much older settlement albeit this time as a crofting community.
In July 1828 six farms are put up for let on South Uist Estates, all in close proximity to one another. Three of these are Gerinish, Gearraidhfliuch and Drimore. The people had been cleared from these areas during the previous year and they had been changed from ‘tacks’ to become tenanted farms. This was part of the action plan put into effect by the Trustees of MacDonald of Clanranald to try to make the Estate ‘pay’, after the dramatic decline in the return which they got from kelp.
No longer did a fairly large population live on these ‘tacks’ in relative prosperity and tranquility under the ‘protection’ of tacksmen of Clanranald: MacDonald of Gerinish and MacDonald of Gearraidhfliuch. The few that were left were farmworkers and grasskeepers. The church and priest’s house at Gearraidhfliuch was abandoned with the death of Mgr Ruaridh (Fr Roderick MacDonald) in 1828 and Fr James MacGregor came, paid the arrears on four crofts at Ardkenneth, and established the farm. He was an agricultural improver, building dry stone walls as field boundaries and dividers, and draining the ground. In his obituary in the Catholic Directory, it says that MacGregor loved the sound of dynamite and when he died there was more stone underground in rubble drains at Ardkenneth than there was above ground in dry stone walls! MacGregor’s move to become a farmer ensured the independence of the Church and ensured that the costs of the mission and of the upkeep of the priest were not too much of a burden on the people.
But the Estate policy of having a limited number of tacks made into tenanted farms using ‘modern’ agricultural methods did not work. Despite the work that was done on Estate drainage and other improvements, Clanranald Estates were put up for sale and the Long Island Estate, stretching from Benbecula to Barra Head, was eventually bought in 1838 by Colonel John Gordon of Cluny. His purchase was a speculative venture – he expected to make money. To begin with, he employed people on drainage and road building schemes as well as in the kelp industry but the failure of the potato crop in 1846 exposed the fragility of the economy and the overdependence of the people on the potato as their staple diet.
The expectation and legal requirement was that the owner had resposibility for feeding his starving people. This Gordon of Cluny refused to do. Relief programmes, such as they were, were organised by the Free Church which distributed food to the starving of South Uist. The local distribution was organised by the Dean of the Isles, Fr John Chisholm of Bornish.
From 1849 to 1851 2,500 to 3,000 people were forcibly evicted from South Uist and Benbecula alone. The majority of these were forced to emigrate while a number were forced to the inhospitable and unproductive areas of the Estate – Eriskay and the area around Loch Carnan, for instance. Large swathes of South Uist were turned into farms with the vast majority of the people either forced to live in increasingly congested areas or forced to emigrate.
From the perspective of the Estate owners and their factors, and even often their ground officers, the indigenous population was considered to be feckless, lazy; the undeserving poor, who breed too much and cannot feed their children. They are dirty and disease ridden. They are permanently in debt. In contrast, they saw themselves as civilised and enlightened. The model which John Gordon of Cluny, and, even more so, his daughter-in-law, Lady Gordon Cathcart, saw as being the way to progress things was the planned fishing villages and tenanted farms of the north east of Scotland with their industrious fishermen and equally industrious farm workers. She tried to make Castlebay a new Buckie and Loch Skipport a township of fishermen crofters.
The Land Reform Movement, began by Daniel O’Connell in Ireland, spread throughout the Highalnds and Islands in the latter part of the 19th century resulting in the establishment of the Napier Commission. The Commission took evidence in Iochdar in 1883. Fr Donald McColl, the parish priest of Ardkenneth, speaking on behalf of the crofters of the area, said ‘ that during the great clearanaces for sheepwalks in 1849 and 1851 many families of the evicted population were sent to Loch Carnan, forming then our hill grazing ground, and our lands rented to them. There are now fifty six families in Loch Carnan, Rhugashnish, and Ardmore: some pay rent, some are cottars. There are over 20 cottars in the district’. There was resentment from the crofters of Iochdar not just towards these new tenants but, above all, towards the cottars. These were people who had no land but who often had the odd cow or two and who helped themselves to the fodder and grazing belonging to the crofters. They paid no rent. The crofters of Iochdar also complained that they had lost their traditional hill grazing but had received no compensation – their rent remained the same.
MacColl was asked about emigration. He replied: ‘As regards emigration, we may frankly tell our minds to the members of the Royal Commission that we are in no way inclined to emigrate, while there are plenty of lands in the country for us for the next one hundered years. We desire not to see revived the cruel and forced evictions, as carried out in 1849 and 1851, when many were bound hand and foot, and packed like cattle on the vessel to America’.
The Commission also took evidence on the clearances of 1827, on the Estate’s policy of subdividing crofts, of ‘stealing’ land traditionally tenanted by crofters and adding it to the large farms, on the rights of the Catholic population in education. Evidence was given, too, on the topic of overcrowding in the crofting townships.
While the Crofting Act of 1886 was a great step forward, giving security of tenure,fair rent, the right to dispose of the tenancy, and the right to compensation for improvements, there were still many problems to be addressed, principal amongst which was the problem of overcrowding and the demand for the farms to be broken up into crofts.
Estate owners throughout the country, reacting to the provisions of the Crofting Act and to the increasing political support for the land reformers, made a clever move. They declared massive areas of their Estates to be Deer Forests and, therefore, not suitable for crofting or farming. Another Royal Commission was established in 1892, this time the Royal Commission on Deer Forests in the Highlands and Islands. Its task was to mark out those areas of the Highlands and Islands that were suitable for crofting. The Commission visited South Uist in 1894 and sat in Iochdar in June of that year. Alexander Og MacDonald, 75 years of age, from Ardnamonie, testified that whereas before there had been eight crofts on Ardnamonie, there were now seventeen. These subdivisions had taken place with the approval of the Estate to allow more people to be involved in kelp harvesting and manufacture.
MacDonald was aked, “Would it be a great reliefto the crofters if the cottars were removed from the township and got land somewhere else?” MacDonald answers “Certainly, it would”. “Do you know of any place where they could get that land?” “Many a place in the country and many a tack in the country”, replies MacDonald. The commissioner asks “Where are these lands to be got?” MacDonald responds: “On the large farms, the largestfarms could be given”.
But the Deer Commission of 1892 had no powers to change anything. It had been set up as a political ‘sop’ to those who were agitating for change.
Although the Royal Commission on Deer Forests was largely a waste of time, one of its recommendations was accepted – the setting up in 1897 of the Congested Districts Board. The purpose of the Board was to offer practical help to those living in the Crofting Counties: help to establish fisheries and new piers, and to provide weaving equipment. Crucially, it was given the power to purchase farms from landowners to be broken up into crofts (smallholdings).
Although the Board had an annual budget of £35,000 to do its work, the scale of the need was immense. For the landlords and their political allies in the House of Commons and the House of Lords, all Tories, the presentation of the annual report of the Congested Districts Board was the focus of their wrath and scorn.
The Tories remained in power until the election of the liberal Minority government of 1905 and were then comprehensively beaten in the Liberal landslide of 1906 when the new government of Campbell Bannerman had a majority over all other parties of 358 seats. The MP for Inverness-shire, of which constituency the Uists and Barra were a part until 1917, was John Dewar. A Perthshire landowner, he was the son of the founder of Dewar’s whisky and was elected as MP for the constituency in the election of 1900 on a land reform ticket. He defeated the Tory, MacKintosh of MacKintosh.
In opposition Dewar, along with the other land reform MPs, was a thorn in the side of the government and their supporters and he also constantly drew the attention of the members of the Congested Districts Board to the situation of congestion and poverty in the Uists.
Where was Lady Gordon Cathcart in all this? She had inherited the Long Island Estate in 1878 after the death of her first husband, the youngest son of Colonel John Gordon of Cluny, and she remained owner of the Estate until her death in 1934.
There seems to be little or no correspondence surviving in the letters books of the factors of the Estate between these factors and their mistress. The factors were meticulous in recording everything that they wrote year after year, and yet, there are no instructions or replies to her instructions on any of the contentious subjects of the day. I did find one letter of complaint from the factor, MacKenzie, stating that his predecessor, Paterson, had made off with Lady Cathcart’s correspondence maintaining that these were personal letters. It may just be the case that she instructed after that episode that all correspondence between her and her factors in Uist and Barra was to be destroyed.
She did make one public statement along with her husband, Sir Reginald Cathcart, which was printed by the Scotsman in March 1886, around the time of the passage of the Crofting Act. In it she says that she took over the Estate in 1878 and in that time she has spent more than the rental in experiments for the improvement of the Estate and on the social condition of crofters, including the three leading recommendations of the Crofters’ Commissioners. ‘The result,’ she says, ‘has been that while grants for improving the fishing industry and promoting voluntary emigration have been successful and attended with beneficial result to the crofting population, the experiment of enlarging crofting holdings by land taken from the larger farms has proved a complete failure’. In Benbecula she had extended holdings in 1883 and had offered holdings on Bentagaval, Bruernish, and Garrygall on Barra. The result was only that rent arrears had increased and that the ground was now exhausted. She had wanted to encourage ‘as far as the local circumstances and the habits of the people would permit, the system which has proved on the East Coast of Scotland to be the most successful’. In other words, farms and fishing villages! They have given loans to Barra fishermen for boats and nets who have not only paid the interest but are also paying off the capital. They have built piers at Lochboisdale and Loch Skipport and have underwritten the cost of bringing the telegraph to the islands.
They say that in 1884 they had sent a circular round their islands pointing out all that they had done, but that they couldn’t continue these schemes for the improvement of the condition of the people while law was defied and rents withheld, ‘intimating at the same time that they would continue to give due indulgence to those who, through poverty or misfortune, were unable to pay their rents’. With a clear threatenting tone, they added ‘that proceedings would be adopted against those who were able but refused to pay.’
In their conclusion they say that ‘Land League Associations have been formed throughout the Hebrides, where, until recently, the people were peaceable and law abiding. Forcible possession was taken of land in Benbecula and South Uist in the occupation of other tenants, with threats of violence.’ The areas which they had recently fenced and drained, crofters and cottars have taken possession of. She describes what she calls ‘acts of terrorism’ – paraffin placed on her seat in the parish church discovered just before she attended service there; the cutting of telegraph wires; the placing of dangerous obstacles at night on the public road near Grogarry. They add: ‘And the terrorism prevailing was such that the perpetrators of the crimes could not be discovered by the authorities though well known in the district’. ‘Law is practically in abeyance.’ Crofters withold rent and don’t pay the rates that they are due. The result is that Banks won’t lend money to the Parish Council because there is no prospect of getting it back. Delivering their ‘coup de grace’, they call for government intervention since ‘unless some remedy is applied, there must be a breakdown of the whole parochial administration of the islands, and a failure of the means to support the poor and to provide education’.
Althoug this is the only statement that I have come across from Lady Cathcart herself, her views are reflected in the actions of her factors, her solicitors, and her political supporters. After the passage of the Crofting Act in 1886, she moved to deal with some of the main ‘agitators’, as they were called. Amongst the priests, who were the most articulate presenters of the crofter’s case in South Uist and Barra, John MacDonald, from Eochar, the parish priest in Barra who had done so much for the Barra crofters, was accused of encouraging religious division and was transferred to Ardrishaig; Sandy MacKintosh of Daliburgh was accused of promoting religious animosity and was moved to Fort William; Donald MacColl in Ardkenneth was threatened with eviction and was transferred to Drimnin in 1887; John MacKintosh at Bornish was caught poaching and was also threatened with eviction. None of this could have happened without at least the tacit approval of Lady Cathcart.
Ten years after the passage of the Crofting Act, Thomas Wilson, the solicitor in Lochmaddy, writes to her lawyers, Skene, Edwards, and Garson on behalf of his clients wanting extensions to their holdings. Their reply, which is uncharacteristically incautious, reflects the opinions of their paymaster: “We cannot believe that it was the purpose of Parliament to encourage in the crofting counties a system existing nowhere else in the country, of maintaining able bodied adults, for whom there is plenty remunerative work in the country, idle or partially idle or engaged in itinerant labour. Some of the families of the applicants are large enough to manage farms of £100 a year rent and upwards, and it is not in the interest of the people themselves or of the country that they should be encouraged to spend their lives in a manner which does not add anything to their own resources or the wealth of the country”.
Crofting might be tolerated. It is certainly not to be spread. The crofters are feckless, lazy, breed too much, and contribute nothing to the good of the Estate or of the country.
Although, an ‘absentee’ landlord in that she did not live on the Estate, there is little doubt that Lady Gordon Cathcart kept her finger on the pulse of everything that was going on. Her husband, Sir Reginald Cathcart, visited regularly. On the 21st March 1901 the factor writes to Archie Lamont, the surveyor at Howmore, asking him to make sure that the road to HowmoreChurch is repaired because Sir Reginald is to arrive at Grogarry Lodge on the 29th.