The rebel crofters

I. M. M. MacPhail. His two-volume History of Scotland, published in 1954

and 1956, was for many years a standard work in Scottish schools.

It was before its time in giving some place in our educational system

to the Clearances and other largely submerged aspects of Highland

history. Dr MacPhail's Lewis background and Gaelic commitment ensured

that these chapters in Scottish history were prominent in his

consciousness.

The Crofters' War takes that interest an important stage further. It

concentrates upon a narrow but vital period in Highlands and islands

history, the 1870s and 1880s, when the crofting population finally

rebelled against its fate, established a political movement, secured

legislative change, and frequently faced the might of the British Army.

It was a struggle that attracted interest, sympathy, and hostility in

places far removed from the crofting townships in which these actions

evolved. The echoes of Ireland sounded ominously for the forces of law

and order, who reacted nervously, but always with the threat of armed

force, in defence of the landlord interests.

Dr MacPhail rightly identifies Bernera, Lewis, as the starting point

of the crofters' war in 1874 -- ''the first resistance by crofters to

the domination of their landlords and factors'' in the post-Clearance

period. The issue revolved around the threatened withdrawal of summer

grazings which had been promised to the crofters. When they refused to

accept that it should become part of a deer forest, 58 notices of

eviction were served upon them.

The sheriff's officers were mildly attacked by a group of Bernera men

and when an attempt was made to arrest one of them in Stornoway, public

resistance was so fierce that the Riot Act was read. The man was given

bail while 130 of his fellows marched from Bernera with a view to

liberating him. In the end, they kept their crofts and the grazing.

In the annals of conflict it was scarcely a grand affair. The main

villain, Donald Munro, was chamberlain in Lewis for the opium baron who

owned the island, Sir James Matheson. Charles Innes, the lawyer who

defended the Bernera men, said of Munro: ''Had he been in either

Connaught or Munster, he would long ago have licked the dust he had for

years made the poor people of Lewis to swallow.''

But one of the most significant facts about the crofters' war is that

it never did escalate to the tactics of Connaught or Munster. By these

standards, the battles were relatively genteel, though the sources of

grievance were scarcely any less. The crofters won proportionately less

than their Irish counterparts in legislation, as testified to by the

continued blight of landlordism in the Highlands and islands.

The victory in Bernera heartened others, and intermittent incidents

followed as landlords sought to remove crofters from traditional grazing

land, often to make way for deer forests. The Highland associations in

the cities began to take a more political interest in the lot of their

kin at home. That wonderful newspaper, John Murdoch's The Highlander,

gave expression to the crofters' case.

But it was not until the early 1880s, on Skye, that the movement

gained sufficient impetus to turn it into a politically influential

force. At this time, events in Ireland were dominating the British

political mind. The Irish Land League, with Michael Davitt as president,

had been formed in 1879 and he became a regular and massively popular

visitor to the Highlands and islands -- to the terror of the landlords.

Dr MacPhail relates in authoritative detail the landmark events in the

crofters' resistance -- Kilmuir, the Braes, Glendale. This turmoil in

Skye led to the establishment of the Napier Commission, a turning point

in the whole struggle. Under the chairmanship of Lord Napier, the

commissioners set sail for their epic tour of the crofting areas to take

evidence from the common people.

The verbatim testimonies to the Napier Commission represent by far the

most important historical record of what actually happened in the

Highlands and islands during the nineteenth century. From the lips of

ordinary folk rather than through self-serving accounts by literate

servants of the landlords, came the stories of how eviction, emigration,

and destitution had been visited upon their communities.

Meanwhile, the political movement was gaining strength. The 1885

Franchise Act gave most crofting tenants the vote. They used it in the

election of the same year to return candidates supported by the Highland

Land Law Reform Association in every crofting constituency but

Sutherland, which the Marquis of Stafford narrowly held with -- God

forgive them -- the support of leading ministers.

The movement threw up great men both in the crofting communities and

among those who became its political spokesmen. One of my own favourites

was Donald MacFarlane, a Catholic born in Caithness who had argued the

crofters' cause while Parnellite MP for county Carlow. Overnight, he

switched to being HLLRA candidate in Argyll -- and won, defeating the

Duke of Argyll's henchman Malcolm of Poltalloch.

Political pressure and agitation in the townships led inexorably to

the Crofting Reform Act of 1886, which gave security of tenure to

crofting tenants -- the simple explanation of why there are still

substantial populations in crofting areas today. But the Act did not

redress the historic wrongs by giving back to the people those lands

that had been usurped from them over the previous century.

So, crucial though it was, the Act was only half the cake. Where

overcrowding and land starvation persisted, so did the rioting and use

of troops to quell it. The concept of soldiers marching about Tiree to

subdue crofters little more than 100 years ago is still difficult to

contemplate. One of the most fiercely contested incidents was in the

Pairc area of Lewis, where the Royal Scots arrived from Maryhill

barracks to quell a raid on the deer forest.

Without the crofters' war, the entire crofting area would now be as

denuded of population as are those parts of the Highlands and islands

which were not protected by crofting tenure under the 1886 Act

(paradoxically, because they had already been so comprehensively

cleared). Compare Mull to Lewis -- 3000 people to 22,000 -- and the

difference is that, in Lewis, crofting tenure made it possible for

people to stay. That's what the crofters' war was about.

Dr MacPhail tells all of these stories in precise and unemotional

detail. But he would surely not dissent from a poem of the day, which

described Highland landlords as ''daoine's miosa a tha ri fhaighinn'' --

men as bad as can be found.