Ron MacLeod

Born: May 22, 1924;

Died: 15 January, 2015.

An appreciation

John Ronald (Ron) MacLeod, who has died in British Columbia aged 90, was the retired director general of Pacific and Freshwater Fisheries and an Officer of the Order of Canada. After his retirement, he volunteered for a number of years with the Centre for Continuing Studies in Science at Simon Fraser University (SFU) and, in 1995, the university established an environmental science endowment fund in his name.

He was also a historian of the piobaireachd and a promoter of Scottish culture in Western Canada. Along with the Honourable John Fraser and Ronald Sutherland, he was a community founder of the Centre for Scottish Studies at SFU which allowed me the privilege of knowing him in the first place.

In 2004 Ronald Sutherland and I spent two days at Ron's house in White Rock, British Columbia, interviewing him as a part of an SFU-sponsored oral history project called Scottish Voices from the West. At the end of the interview he presented us with a copy of a history of the MacLeods of Raasay which he had researched and written.

Ron's father Murdo MacLeod came from Kyle Rona at the north end of Raasay and his mother Julia MacLeod from Fladda, a small island joined to Raasay at low tide. When Murdo left Raasay, he went to Glasgow and then joined his brother Ewen in Victoria, British Columbia. Finally, he settled with Julia in Tofino, a small community on the west coast of Vancouver Island which had no road access at the time. Ron was born in the city of Victoria on the east side of Vancouver Island, but only because Tofino did not have a hospital of its own.

Three families of Raasay MacLeods settled in Tofino. They were Gaelic speakers and Ron remembered gatherings at the house where the ceiling echoed to the sound of an ancient language he could not understand. Many of the MacLeod neighbours were First Nations peoples and "my father had a soft spot for the local Indians. He remarked that he and Uncle Ewen thought that the situation in which the Government of Canada had put the Indians reflected their own segregated and poverty-stricken existence in Scotland. Brother Ian and I were well conditioned to show respect for the Indians, unlike some children in Tofino."

Ron recalled his father saying to him "I came to Canada so you could be a Canadian" and on a visit to Raasay some years later he "sat on a big rock mound beside the black house at Kyle Rona where [my father] was born and said to myself 'Father, thank you for moving to Canada'."

Though hugely successful in the new country, Ron MacLeod never forgot his roots. Rereading his family history now it seems clear that it was inspired, at least in part, by the need to contextualize what happened to the MacLeods of Raasay.

Ron saw the history of Raasay as blighted by a long series of rapacious landlords, though he also noted the occasional exception. His paternal great grandfather Donald testified before the Napier Commission in 1883. He informed it that in 1841 there were five families of 29 people at Kyle Rona but that the number of families increased between 1851 and 1861 as a result of clearances in the south end of Raasay. It was this movement of people from "the fertile south to the barren north" that ensured the MacLeods' eventual departure for Canada.

Ron's active concern for Raasay extended right up to 2013 when he opposed a government decision to sell off hunting and fishing rights on the island to a commercial company. He wrote to the Scottish Government expressing the view that "it was the vicious and uncaring policies of past landlords that did untold harm and left behind a damaged island ... Along comes your policy and it is back to the future." The decision was subsequently overturned.

Ron MacLeod's connection to Raasay might explain his lifelong concern with injustice and his desire to oppose it. He was fond of the poetry of Sorley MacLean and, like MacLean, had the sadness of the cleared Highlands in him. But he was also a man of great good humour. When I asked him a couple of years ago how he was doing he wrote, "I hope we will meet again although I am not optimistic about that. I am about two steps from turning 89 and I don't buy green bananas anymore."

As it turns out, we won't be meeting again, but I won't forget him either. Nor will the MacLeod's of Raasay be forgotten. Ron's work ensures that.

Ron MacLeod is survived by Lorraine, his beloved wife of 57 years.

HARRY MCGRATH