1

‘Inhuman treatment’

The destruction of Ascoilemore and one family’s experience of clearance

Jessie Ross’s life began to be taken apart at about 2 p.m. on Thursday 31 May 1821. That was when as many as ten or a dozen men took possession of the Ross family home in the Sutherland community of Ascoilemore. Those men were there to evict this young mother, her two small daughters, aged five and three, and her two-month-old baby girl. They were also there to empty the house of everything the Rosses owned.1

Jessie’s baby, whose name was Roberta, had been born less than a year after another baby, a boy who did not live. In just 20 months, then, Jessie Ross had been through two pregnancies, one of which had ended tragically. Unsurprisingly, she was not in good health. This was of no concern to the men invading Jessie’s home. Their remit was to make way for the expansion of a nearby sheep farm by ridding Ascoilemore of its inhabitants. There was no possibility, then, of the evicting party, the term its members used of themselves, letting anything or anyone – certainly not Jessie Ross and her children – get in their way.

The man in charge of proceedings, a sheriff-officer called Donald Bannerman, began by ordering out the two Ross girls, Elizabeth and Katherine. Their mother, however, refused to go with them, in the hope, it seems, that her continued presence would lead to the family’s belongings being handled with at least a little care. ‘She would not leave . . . until the whole furniture was off,’ it was afterwards explained. On Jessie Ross also refusing to help move the wooden cradle in which her baby was sleeping, one of the party, William Stevenson by name, picked it up – roughly and angrily it was said – with a view to carrying both cradle and baby outside.

Perhaps, as would be alleged, Stevenson was drunk – he and his colleagues having got through ten bottles of whisky the previous night and another three that morning. Or perhaps he was just clumsy. At all events, Stevenson somehow ran the cradle up against the Ross home’s door or doorframe. Two-month-old Roberta, though not tumbled out, was shaken awake and began to cry in alarm. She was still in distress when her cradle was set down in such shelter as an exterior dyke or wall provided from a chill wind out of the north-east.

Although Ascoilemore’s other residents had been evicted the day before, there were still people in the vicinity, some of whom now came to the Rosses’ assistance. Among them was a woman called Mary Murray. Like Jessie Ross, she was a nursing mother and, doing something that would be thought unacceptable today – but which, judging by the matter-of-fact way it was spoken about, must have been standard practice then – Mary quietened Roberta’s cries, a bystander said, by ‘giving the child a suck’ at her own breast.

The older Ross children were not so easily comforted. Not long after the evicting party got to work, Elizabeth, the five-year-old, was struck in the face by a piece of planking thrown from inside the house, the culprit again being Stevenson. She too began to cry and, though her crying was said to have stopped after ‘quarter of an hour’, neither Elizabeth nor Katherine, her sister, could have been anything other than traumatised by what was happening to them. Both were reported to have ‘looked cold’ and to have been ‘trembling’ or shivering, their misery compounded by the fact that they had, or were incubating, whooping cough.

Nowadays rare, thanks to a vaccine developed in the 1950s, whooping cough was once a common childhood illness. Its symptoms – usually including a fever and the drawn-out cough from which the infection got its name – were always unpleasant, sometimes severe and occasionally fatal. What happened to the three-year-old Katherine Ross some three weeks after the events of 31 May, then, might have happened anyway. But when Katherine died, it is understandable that her father, Gordon Ross, unavoidably elsewhere when his wife and children were evicted, should have insisted that his daughter’s death resulted from what he called the ‘inhuman treatment’ she had experienced the day the Ross family’s home was taken from them.2

Sutherland, in the north-western corner of the Scottish Highlands, is twenty-first-century Britain’s empty quarter. England’s average population density is 413 people per square kilometre. Scotland’s is 68. But each square kilometre in Sutherland, a county of roughly the same size as Norfolk or Northumberland, contains on average just two people; and since most Sutherland residents live in coastal areas, much of the district’s extensive interior is practically uninhabited.

This was not always so. Sutherland’s inland straths or valleys, such as Strathnaver, the Strath of Kildonan and Strathbrora, were occupied for a long time, as their plentiful archaeology makes plain, by substantial populations. That changed in the early nineteenth century when, in those three straths, scores of long-established communities, one of them Ascoilemore in the middle part of Strathbrora, were snuffed out in a welter of evictions like the one experienced by Jessie Ross.

Clearances, the term applied in the Highlands to the process of depopulating formerly populated localities, were not confined to Sutherland. The Sutherland clearances, however, were unmatched in scale and ambition. For that reason, they generated, both at the time and subsequently, a great deal of controversy. At the centre of this controversy from the outset were the husband and wife who ordered the obliteration of Sutherland’s interior settlements. Although their having done so would forever be held against them in some quarters, this did not affect the couple’s standing, during their lifetimes anyway, with people who mattered politically. By these people, the man and woman in question were held in high regard – such high regard that, in due course, they were made Duke and Duchess of Sutherland. But this did not happen until 1833. During the clearances, the future duke and duchess were Marquis and Marchioness of Stafford.

The marquis, whose name was George Granville Leveson-Gower, owed his title – one that, even prior to his becoming a duke, put him near the top of the British aristocracy’s pecking order – to his owning substantial estates in Staffordshire. Revenues from those estates and from others elsewhere in England, together with earnings accruing from extensive stakes in coalmines, canals and other enterprises, made Lord Stafford one of early nineteenth-century Britain’s wealthiest individuals. Stafford’s riches enabled him to become a renowned art collector – his forays into the art market adding lustre to the marquis’s several stately homes and to his splendid London residence, Cleveland House. But in spite of his expenditure on paintings of the highest quality, and in spite too of the enormous sums it took to sustain other aspects of his own and his family’s opulent lifestyle, Lord Stafford had more than enough cash left over to finance the transformation of the Highland landholdings that came his way as a result of his marrying someone whose aristocratic credentials were as impeccable as his own. This was Elizabeth Gordon, Countess of Sutherland.*

Orphaned when a child, the countess had inherited from her father, the eighteenth Earl of Sutherland, both her title (a countess being the female equivalent of an earl) and the territories her Gordon forebears had amassed in earlier centuries. Those territories, though they included the Assynt district on the county’s Atlantic coast, consisted mainly of Sutherland’s eastern or North Sea coastal plain and the area to its west and north-west, an area that included Strathbrora, the Strath of Kildonan and Strathnaver. Later acquisitions were to make the Sutherland Estate, as the countess’s possessions were known, the largest landed property in Victorian Britain. The estate and county of Sutherland would then overlap almost completely. But when events of the Ascoilemore sort were occurring, the Sutherland Estate continued to be centred on the county’s eastern half. It is on that area (in particular its interior straths) that this book concentrates.

The clearances that took place there were calculated and considered. But while the thinking behind them was refined over a lengthy period, their key purpose was clear from the first. What Lord and Lady Stafford aimed to bring about was a dramatic expansion of the Sutherland Estate’s revenue-producing capacity. The couple’s means of doing this involved far-reaching changes in the way their Highland property was organised. First, small-scale agriculturalists of the kind who had long occupied much of the Sutherland Estate’s more productive arable land – the bulk of it adjacent to the North Sea – were removed, and the greater part of this land incorporated into large, commercially run farms similar to those already standard on the Marquis of Stafford’s English possessions. Second, the interior straths, where people relied more on cattle-rearing than on crop production, were emptied of their inhabitants – whose land was then turned over to sheep farmers. Both the coastal and inland farms thus created were tenanted. But their tenants – a lot of them freshly arrived outsiders – were no simple sons of the soil. Instead they were highly enterprising men of substance, men possessing the stock management and other skills required of any farmer aspiring to operate effectively in the market economy taking shape in conjunction with Britain’s industrial revolution. Go-getting and fiercely competitive, the sheep farmers who established themselves in Sutherland during the clearance era were soon cashing in impressively on growing demand for wool – demand generated by the clothing and other needs of emerging manufacturing centres in Lowland Scotland and England. But whether producing wool in the interior or grain and other crops on the eastern coastal fringe, the Sutherland Estate’s post-clearance farmers were expected to – and did – generate profits big enough to enable them to pay higher (often much higher) rents than the estate’s owners ever got, even in aggregate, from the people the new class of large-scale agriculturalists displaced.

Homes in the communities destroyed in the course of the clearances might be clustered together or more scattered. Either way, they were surrounded by blocks of arable land laid out in long, narrow strips known as rigs. Oats, barley and potatoes (the latter an eighteenth-century introduction to Sutherland) were grown on those rigs, with every farming family in the typical baile or township (the Gaelic and English terms applied to such settlements) having the use of agreed numbers of them. Rigs were generally distributed in such a way as to ensure that better and worse tracts of arable were shared out equitably; and especially in inland townships families could also draw on a common resource in the shape of large tracts of hill grazing where cattle could be pastured. During the eighteenth century, more and more of those cattle were sold into southern markets. In Sutherland as elsewhere in the Highlands, that made it possible (because of there being more money in circulation) for estate managers to begin to levy higher rents. But there were limits to this, the pre-clearance landholding structure having originated in a period when high rents were not the priority they afterwards became.

During this period, which lasted for several centuries, the Highlands were often outside the effective jurisdiction of the two countries to which the region successively belonged, those countries being first Scotland and next the British state brought into existence by the Anglo-Scottish union of 1707. In those circumstances, the power and prestige of clan chiefs, the quasi-tribal magnates who held sway in the region, necessarily depended (as had been the case since the Middle Ages) on the number of fighting men their territories could sustain. This was as true of Earls of Sutherland, Elizabeth Gordon’s ancestors, as it was of the rest of the Highland nobility. Technically, Sutherland’s earls had been granted their earldom by medieval Scotland’s monarchy. But they held on to this earldom by conducting themselves, generation after generation, as clan chiefs. This meant that more emphasis was placed on keeping people on the land than on maximising cash returns from it. It also meant that the estate Elizabeth Gordon inherited in 1766, when she was barely one year old, was organised in much the same way at it had been in clanship’s heyday.

By 1766, however, that heyday was past. When a number of clan chiefs lined up behind Prince Charles Edward Stuart’s 1745 attempt to regain the throne his forebears had lost a lifetime previously, and when the Highland army the prince thus obtained came close to overthrowing Britain’s government, London’s badly scared politicians – their troops having at last defeated Charles Edward’s forces at the Battle of Culloden – promptly set about dismantling clanship. They did so in part by encouraging leading families in the Highlands to turn their backs on much of their heritage, including the Gaelic language all of them had once spoken, and to adopt instead the manners, accents and attitudes of the rest of the British ruling class. The 1785 marriage of Elizabeth Gordon and George Granville Leveson-Gower was bound up with this shift in the relationship between the Highlands and the wider society into which the region was now integrated. Elizabeth, although raised in Edinburgh and London (where she met her future husband) and never more than an occasional visitor to Sutherland, clearly felt – even if only sporadically – that her ancestry imposed on her an obligation to be mindful of people whose family predecessors had been bound to her own forebears by ties of clanship. But Sutherland’s population, Elizabeth Gordon came to feel, was not best served by permitting matters in Sutherland to continue as before. Elizabeth’s husband who, following the couple’s marriage had become (in accordance with then legal practice) the Sutherland Estate’s proprietor in her place, backed this view, their shared standpoint helping to explain why Lord Stafford (in a way then unusual) gave his wife a substantial and sometimes decisive say in the policy departures that were to impact calamitously on many Sutherland lives.

The scope for such departures grew in 1803 when Leveson-Gower gained control of his recently deceased father’s fortune and, that same year, inherited a further fortune from a childless uncle. Soon the marquis and the marchioness, able now to spend freely, were embarking on the estate management revolution that culminated in the Sutherland clearances.

Although those clearances led to people quitting Sutherland, the Highlands and Scotland, this was not their intended outcome, it being a key component of Lord and Lady Stafford’s thinking that dispossessed families could readily be accommodated elsewhere on their property. Hence the efforts made to ensure that people ejected from localities like Ascoilemore headed for the new or growing settlements to which estate managers directed them. Those settlements were of two types. One consisted of villages and small towns on Sutherland’s east coast – places like (from north to south) Helmsdale, Brora, Golspie and Dornoch. All such communities gained population at the time of the clearances. So did the further and quite different set of settlements – entirely rural in character – which took shape at the same time. Communities in this category consisted of smallholdings of the kind known in the Highlands as crofts. Such communities, many of them located on land that had not previously been cultivated, were established widely on the inland margins of east coast arable farms as well as on Sutherland’s north coast where Strathnaver – exiting the interior from south to north and not, like the Strath of Kildonan and Strathbrora, from west to east – reaches the sea.

Crofting townships were as novel as the sheep farms that gave rise to them. Families settled in these places, instead of having access to rigs of the traditional type, were each allocated a single plot: their croft. Around those crofts there continued to be common grazings. These, however, were far less generous than had previously been the case. This meant that crofters could keep hardly any cattle. The prospect of their growing worthwhile crops was likewise curtailed both by establishing crofts on poor-quality land and by imposing drastic limits on their size – most crofts laid out in the clearance period being no more than three, four or five acres in extent.

The message was clear. Whatever else Sutherland crofters were to be, they were not to be full-time agriculturalists. But this, the Marquis and Marchioness of Stafford, their advisers and agents said and wrote repeatedly, was a good thing. By concentrating the Sutherland Estate’s population in a small proportion of the available acreage, it was claimed, the remainder of the estate could be given over to an up-to-date and highly productive brand of farming. That, it was contended, was exactly what had happened in the rest of the British countryside during preceding centuries, as peasant cultivation everywhere gave way to more advanced modes of husbandry. And just as the dislodged peasantry of rural Staffordshire had helped fuel industrialisation by providing Midland towns and cities with workforces, so the people crowding into Sutherland’s crofting townships and coastal villages would find – if only because they had no alternative – new means of making a living. They would find those, this argument ran, in the various businesses the Sutherland Estate’s owners and managers were intent on promoting. Among such businesses were fishing, fish-curing, coal mining, brick-making, whisky distilling, brewing, road construction and bridge-building. Incoming farmers, it was pointed out, would require labourers. There would be a need for shopkeepers, shop assistants, domestic servants, bakers, carpenters, coopers, boat-builders, netmakers, stone-masons, tailors and other tradesmen.

From this perspective, then, the Sutherland clearances were simply one aspect of the expansion and diversification of what was, as far as Lord and Lady Stafford were concerned, an under-performing estate economy in manifest need of being dragged into the nineteenth century. What they were about, they maintained, was entirely in tune with the times; it was right, progressive, inevitable; they had history, they believed, on their side. Nor, in their own minds, were the marquis and marchioness motivated wholly, or even largely, by self-interest. Their expenditure on roads, bridges and other infrastructure was likely, they pointed out, to be considerably greater than any short-run return on this investment. Ultimately, of course, the Staffords expected to benefit financially from what they called ‘the Sutherland improvements’. But the case for those improvements, as set out by men hired to make them happen, did not dwell on this. That case concentrated rather on the wider consequences of what was going on in Sutherland. Those consequences were said to be wholly positive. A district that had made little contribution to Britain’s economic growth would henceforth contribute much more; and among those bound to gain as a result, or so ‘improvers’ asserted, were people turned out of places like Ascoilemore. Those folk were not so much losing their homes, it was said, as being provided with a fresh start in places where all sorts of opportunities awaited them.

Rhetoric of this sort, a great deal of which was deployed on Lord and Lady Stafford’s behalf, is similar to propaganda produced by some of the twentieth century’s totalitarian regimes, perhaps because those regimes needed, much like the Staffords, to defend programmes of enforced social and economic change. Such comparisons, to be sure, cannot be pushed too far. When, for instance, Joseph Stalin set about the destruction of peasant farming in the Soviet Union of the 1930s, millions died. Nothing remotely like that occurred in the course of the Sutherland clearances. But the collectivisation of Soviet agriculture and ‘the Sutherland improvements’ have something in common all the same. The Soviet dictator, like the Marquis and Marchioness of Stafford, thought himself engaged in the modernisation of backward and benighted segments of his country. And while the Staffords would not have countenanced violence of the extreme sort unleashed by Stalin, they nevertheless thought themselves entitled to treat family after family in the way Jessie Ross and her children were treated in Ascoilemore in 1821. The marquis and marchioness believed themselves so entitled because – and in this their thinking certainly resembles that of totalitarians – they were convinced that the objectives they had in mind for Sutherland and its people were so self-evidently forward-looking as to make it acceptable to secure those objectives by harsh and oppressive means.

*     *     *

Jessie Ross was born in 1793. Her father, George Sutherland, was one of pre-clearance Sutherland’s more substantial farmers and was thus of sufficient standing to have ensured that his daughter, unlike many of her Sutherland contemporaries, became fluent in English as well as Gaelic. Jessie’s upbringing, then, is likely to have been similar to that of her husband, Gordon, who was born in 1791 and whose father, Hugh Ross, made certain that Gordon got a good schooling. Hugh’s being able to provide for his son in this way is a pointer to his having been reasonably well off, his prosperity deriving from his having managed a several-thousand-acre slice of Strathbrora on behalf of its then lairds or proprietors.3

Those proprietors belonged to a well-established Sutherland family, the Gordons of Carrol. For centuries, they had been staunch allies – fellow clansfolk in effect – of the other Gordons who became Earls of Sutherland and whose antecedents Carrol’s lairds shared. The Gordons of Carrol’s readiness to come to the aid of men they regarded as their chiefs is highlighted in a seventeenth-century account of the open warfare that broke out in 1589 between the then Earl of Sutherland and a rival magnate in neighbouring Caithness. When, in response to an armed incursion into his possessions, the earl was in search of someone reliable enough to take charge of the ‘thrie [sic] hundred chosen men’ he had mobilised with a view to inflicting ‘great terror’ on Caithness, his choice fell on Alexander Gordon whose descendant, John Gordon of Carrol, would – a couple of hundred years later – make Hugh Ross his factor or estate manager.⁴

Factor Hugh’s son Gordon may well have been given his first name by way of honouring the Carrol family. For all this family’s long-standing links with Strathbrora, however, John Gordon was its last member to die a laird, the Carrol Estate being bought soon after by the Marquis and Marchioness of Stafford. This was in 1812, by which point Carrol was owned by John’s son Joseph. Three years before, the marchioness had assured Joseph, 30 when his father died in 1807, of her ‘regard for the old connection subsisting between our families’. She and her husband, Lady Stafford told Joseph, would ‘do everything in our power to render your situation in Sutherland agreeable and comfortable’. By 1812, however, this promise had been forgotten, the Staffords now being less interested in their ‘old connection’ with Carrol than in the fact that Joseph’s urgent need for hard cash had presented them with an opportunity to add to their Sutherland acreage.⁵

Joseph Gordon, who began training as a lawyer in Edinburgh in 1804 and who then launched his own legal practice there, was not a poor man. But he was not a rich one either. Unable to afford the Carrol Estate’s upkeep and equally unable to service its accumulated debts, Joseph, though reluctant to sell his ‘paternal inheritance’, felt that ‘duty to [his] family’ – who might otherwise have found themselves in difficulty – left him with no alternative. ‘The thought of getting it pleases me much,’ one of the marquis and marchioness’s land managers commented on hearing of Carrol’s purchase by his employers. Its acquisition, this man added, meant that Stafford control of Strathbrora and adjacent parts of eastern Sutherland was now ‘complete’.6

Lord and Lady Stafford, however, had got their way at a price – a price that did not begin and end with the £17,000 it cost them to get the Carrol Estate into their possession. What looked to the marquis and the marchioness like a good piece of business, looked very different when viewed from Joseph Gordon’s standpoint. This was in part a consequence of bitter disputes as to what exactly Joseph had been offered for Carrol. In conversation with him in Edinburgh, Joseph said, Lady Stafford had agreed a figure of 16,000 guineas. But the written offer that then reached him was for £16,000 – that is, £800 less. In response to Joseph’s protests that he had, in effect, been duped, Lord Stafford eventually gave way. Joseph’s account of his dealings with the marchioness, Stafford admitted, was ‘correct’. Hence his decision to give Joseph £17,000. This, the marquis added with bad grace, was ‘a very large sum for such a property and not a shilling more will be paid . . . for it’.⁷

Despite its being eaten into by debt repayments, the money made from Carrol’s sale (around £1 million at today’s prices) helped Joseph get properly set up in Edinburgh. His 1812 windfall accounts too for his having become in 1813 an investor in, and a director of, that city’s recently launched Commercial Bank. But none of this reconciled Joseph Gordon to his loss of Carrol. Because he lost status when he ceased to be a laird, Joseph (even had he not also been subjected to what he saw as double-dealing) would have been less than human had he not regarded the Carrol Estate’s buyers – newly in command of what had been his family’s territories – with some resentment. In fact, or so the evidence indicates, Joseph Gordon, from 1812 onwards, loathed the Marquis and Marchioness of Stafford. He certainly went out of his way to cause them a great deal of trouble.⁸

Throughout the clearance period, Joseph Gordon’s legal services were made available to some of the most outspoken critics and opponents of evictions; and by 1821, when Ascoilemore was cleared, Joseph – by means (as will be seen) of grants from a fund at his disposal – was assisting dispossessed families, some of Ascoilemore’s former residents among them, to emigrate to Nova Scotia. Because eagerness to be off to North America was not at all in accord with Stafford insistence that everyone affected by ‘improvement’ was benefiting from it, Joseph Gordon’s championing of emigration intensified the Stafford camp’s already profound mistrust of him. ‘Joseph Gordon was always a great enemy of ours,’ the marchioness wrote on hearing of his plan to help meet prospective emigrants’ costs. Her Edinburgh lawyers were in agreement. Carrol’s ex-laird was ‘strongly biased against’ everything Lord and Lady Stafford were trying to accomplish, one of them commented. Equally forthright condemnation came from James Loch, the Staffords’ land management supremo. Hired in 1812 to oversee the marquis’s English estates, Loch, though continuing to be based in the south, was in overall charge from 1816 of developments in Sutherland – developments Gordon was intent, or so James Loch believed, on sabotaging. ‘Joseph Gordon and all his family are most determined and open enemies to the interests of your Lordship,’ Loch informed the Marquis of Stafford.9

As James Loch was well aware, Joseph Gordon maintained an extensive network of friends and informants in the Highlands. Among members of this network was Joseph’s maternal uncle, Donald MacLeod of Geanies. Like his nephew, MacLeod was a Commercial Bank director. He was also a well-established laird in Ross-shire – Sutherland’s neighbouring county to the south – where he had long been that county’s sheriff. Joseph Gordon’s close links with Donald MacLeod – after whom Joseph named his eldest son – were indicative, as was Joseph’s involvement in Edinburgh business circles, of his ready access to individuals of influence. His having such access worried James Loch. So did the extent of Joseph’s dealings with some of the many people in Sutherland who thought about opposing, or who actually did oppose, the Marquis and Marchioness of Stafford’s plans for them. Loch responded to all such dealings by categorising as a troublemaker anyone known to have participated in them. When, during the month that ended with Ascoilemore’s clearance, Joseph Gordon (then in the north) met a number of the township’s residents, this accordingly inclined Loch to the view that the people in question were ‘a turbulent set’. Among the most turbulent, or so Loch and his management team were soon to conclude, was Gordon Ross, a man prepared, Loch learned in July 1821, to state publicly that his daughter’s death was attributable to the way she, her sisters and their mother were treated when turned out of their Ascoilemore home.¹⁰

Today the Highlands are usually entered from the south by way of the A9 trunk road that links Perth, on the northern edge of the Scottish Lowlands, with Inverness, the Highland capital and the region’s only city. The distance between Perth and Inverness is 115 miles. At Inverness, however, anyone travelling from Perth to Strathnaver, say, is barely halfway, while no part of Sutherland is much less than an hour distant. A good deal of that hour is taken up, again on the A9, traversing Easter Ross, the lower-lying, and most intensively farmed, half of Ross-shire. For much of the twentieth century, the A9 got to Sutherland from Easter Ross by following the shores of the Dornoch Firth, the North Sea inlet that is eastern Sutherland’s southern boundary. Since the bridging of the firth in 1991, however, the A9 has taken a more direct route that gives speedier access to Dornoch, Sutherland’s county town and as such the place housing, at the time of the clearances, both Sutherland’s sheriff court and (handily nearby) the county’s jail.

From Dornoch, by way of a further stretch of the A9, it takes 20 minutes to reach Golspie, greatly altered in the early nineteenth century by the construction of new buildings including, on the town’s northern outskirts, a substantial and still extant inn. Not far beyond the inn is Dunrobin Castle. Much of present-day Dunrobin is Victorian in origin and appearance. But the earlier Dunrobin, though not so ornate, was just as impressive. In 1812, when the clearances were getting under way, ‘the ancient seat of the Earls of Sutherland’, as the castle was even then described, consisted of ‘a well constructed square building’ with ‘a small court[yard] in the centre’. Some decades previously, Dunrobin had become dilapidated. But the Marquis and Marchioness of Stafford spent heavily on the castle’s refurbishment, with a view to its providing them with an acceptable, if always temporary, home when (after journeys that then took days instead of hours) they came north to inspect projects they had initiated.11

Many of those projects centred on Brora where a coalmine, for which high hopes were entertained, was meant to underpin a series of other industries. During the nineteenth century’s second decade, when those industries were being got up and running, the marchioness was a regular visitor here, the trip from Dunrobin to Brora being reasonably short even when tackled by horse-drawn carriage.

In Brora as in Golspie, the A9 doubles as the town’s main street. From this street, at a point just beyond the town centre, a further – narrower – street links the A9 with a single-track road that threads its way westwards or north-westwards into Strathbrora. About five miles up the strath, and occupying its floor for another five miles or more, is Loch Brora which, in the 1790s, the Church of Scotland minister serving this part of Sutherland thought a most attractive ‘stretch of water’. The loch was surrounded, the minister went on, by ‘lofty mountains at the feet of which are some beautiful villages’. The hills in Loch Brora’s vicinity remain as lofty as ever and the loch itself is equally unchanged. But the settlements mentioned by Strathbrora’s late eighteenth-century clergyman are nowhere to be seen. They were among the dozens of small communities, collectively containing well over 1,000 people, that disappeared from this single valley in the course of the clearances.12

One of these townships was Carrol, the place, about halfway up Loch Brora and on the loch’s southern shore, which provided Joseph Gordon’s family with their territorial designation. Sheltered from the prevailing westerly wind by a steep hillside, Carrol contained reasonably good arable land. That perhaps is why Joseph’s forebears settled here in the Middle Ages. Long before Joseph Gordon sold the Carrol Estate to the Marquis and Marchioness of Stafford, however, his family had transferred their base of operations to another part of the property. Their new home was on Loch Brora’s northern shore and near the loch’s western end. The spot was called Kilcalmkill. This is an anglicised version of a Gaelic original, Cill Chaluim Chille, signifying that the settlement once contained a place of worship dedicated to St Columba, the Irish-born monk believed to have brought Christianity to much of the Highlands. This Kilcalmkill church or chapel was one of seven such foundations in Strathbrora – another indication that the valley was thickly populated for a lengthy period. But by the end of the eighteenth century the Kilcalmkill name had been abandoned in favour of a new one, Gordonbush. Adding ‘bush’ to a surname in this fashion was one way that colonists in North America staked a claim to a particular locality. Whether or not they followed colonial precedent, the Gordons of Carrol, by renaming Kilcalmkill as they did, were certainly intent on advertising their connection – one they must have expected to endure – with the spot where they built a home described as ‘handsome’.¹³

The Marchioness of Stafford, on one of her excursions from Dunrobin, travelled up Strathbrora towards the end of September 1820. The strath’s road, then new, was one piece of Sutherland Estate infrastructure that had been completed (unlike some others) on schedule, and Lady Stafford was pleased by it. Writing to her husband (who had not come north) to tell him about her ‘beautiful drive by the lake’, meaning Loch Brora, the marchioness nevertheless confessed to feeling ‘rather melancholy’ on seeing, ‘from the opposite side of the lake’, the ‘old town[ship]’ of Carrol, cleared earlier that year and therefore, as Lady Stafford put it, ‘empty’. Today little is left of Carrol homes their occupants were forced to abandon, and such remnants as survive are not visible from Loch Brora’s northern shore. In the autumn of 1820, however, the settlement’s houses – which the last of Carrol’s pre-clearance residents left the previous June – would still have been standing. Already, admittedly, they would have been roofless. But this, when Lady Stafford gazed into Carrol from less than half a mile away, may well have served to accentuate their dreariness and her ‘melancholy’. The marchioness’s regrets, to be sure, were for her vanished youth as much as for Carrol’s evicted families. ‘You remember we walked [there]’, she commented of Carrol in her letter to Lord Stafford – evoking a time when both she and her husband, who by 1820 was in poor health, had been unbothered by age and infirmity. But there is, all the same, something telling about Elizabeth Leveson-Gower’s reaction to her glimpsing just a little of the destruction resulting from policies she had helped formulate and carry out. In her letter touching on it, Carrol’s clearance takes on the character of a chance occurrence in which the Marchioness of Stafford played no part.14

Some of Carrol’s displaced tenants were allocated freshly laid-out crofts, lots or allotments (the three terms were used interchangeably) in a locality, just south of Brora, known as the Doll. In contrast to Carrol’s rigs, which had been cultivated for generations, those new holdings – their boundaries consisting initially of nothing other than the scratchy markings made by dragging a plough across open moorland – were located mostly on land that had never been farmed. This meant that Carrol’s newly settled crofters were expected to contribute to the Sutherland Estate’s ‘improvement’ by somehow getting crops to grow in places where no crops had ever before been sown or planted. This was not an enticing prospect. Unsurprisingly, then, some of the people meant to move to the Doll from Carrol, and from other Strathbrora townships cleared in 1819 and 1820, refused to go there, managing instead to acquire farms in Caithness or to emigrate to North America. But both Caithness tenancies and Atlantic passages were expensive. Many Strathbrora families consequently had no option but to take up crofting in the Doll. There they were told that anyone falling down on the job of land reclamation – which was supposed to proceed in tandem with the house construction crofters also had to undertake – would be evicted for a second time. Reclamation duly got under way, with results still to be seen all around the Doll in the shape of boundary walls made from stones and boulders dug and levered out of each croft’s little fields. But this took time, and to begin with progress was so slow as to suggest that some Doll crofters engaged in deliberate obstructionism. Hence the exasperated tone of a letter sent to James Loch in February 1820 by Francis Suther who, as the Staffords’ most senior manager in Sutherland, was responsible for ensuring that matters at the Doll turned out as intended. ‘The Doll allotments are now all fixed,’ Suther reported to Loch. ‘I have threatened to turn out [meaning evict] all such as do not begin to improve and get on busily in bringing in the waste [meaning formerly uncultivated] pieces of their lots.’15

The Marchioness of Stafford was told nothing of this when, a day or two after her Strathbrora expedition, she was shown around the Doll. She found the settlement a ‘pretty’ place, the marchioness reported, and was pleased to see its newly installed crofting families ‘working at their little harvests’. If, after sighting a newly derelict Carrol, Lady Stafford had felt some momentary qualms as to the long-run wisdom of what she, Lord Stafford and their agents were about, her inspection of the Doll helped set her mind at rest. What the marchioness saw and heard when taken to Gordonbush helped further.¹⁶

Following the Staffords’ purchase of the Carrol Estate in 1812, Gordonbush’s earlier name, Kilcalmkill, had been revived. However, it was not now applied to Gordonbush (which retained that name) but to a farm which took shape in 1813 and which stretched from Strathbrora to the Strath of Kildonan, some 15 miles, as the crow flies, further north. This Kilcalmkill farm carried a stock of around 10,000 sheep. Those sheep belonged to the farm’s tenant, Gabriel Reed, whom James Loch, not given to flattery, considered ‘one of the most intelligent stock farmers’ of his day. Underpinning this judgement was Reed’s mastery of the complex business of getting large-scale sheep farming under way in Sutherland. Raised in Northumberland, where the Reeds were a well-entrenched family, Gabriel had come to the Highlands in the mid-1790s. Then his centre of operations was the Bighouse Estate on Sutherland’s north coast – where Reed installed one of the first of the cheviot flocks (cheviots being a breed originating in the English-Scottish border country) that were to proliferate in Sutherland during the clearance era. Another of the properties which (like Carrol) would eventually fall into Stafford hands, Bighouse, when Gabriel Reed got there, belonged to a Sutherland gentry family, one of whose members became in time Gabriel’s wife. But despite his having thus put down roots at Bighouse, not far from Sutherland’s boundary with Caithness, Gabriel agreed in 1813 to take on the tenancy of Kilcalmkill, one of the farm’s attractions, over and above its cheviot-rearing potential, being the accommodation the Reed family obtained there. Reckoned to be ‘a good modern house’ of a kind then rare in Sutherland, this accommodation was no common farmhouse but the mansion-like and plantation-surrounded home that had belonged, until 1812, to Joseph Gordon.17

‘The beauty of it is indescribable,’ the Marchioness of Stafford wrote of Gordonbush following her 1820 visit. ‘The Reeds’, she added, ‘are very good sort of people [and] were delighted to see us.’ Their home, the marchioness went on, was ‘like an English gentleman’s place’. While there, she had been delighted to be assured by Gabriel Reed that, thanks to her and the marquis’s ‘improvements’, Sutherland ‘would soon be the richest county in England’ – England standing, in Lady Stafford’s mind, for Britain. Perhaps Gabriel Reed believed this. More probably, however, his purpose was to butter up, and show some gratitude to, the Staffords. Having already profited greatly from the land-use changes the marquis and the marchioness were implementing, Reed in 1820 was looking forward to further gains – because of its having been agreed that an additional piece of Strathbrora would shortly be incorporated into his Kilcalmkill farm. The area in question included one of the few Strathbrora townships to have survived previous clearances. This was Ascoilemore, which, in the autumn of 1820 when the Marchioness of Stafford’s Strathbrora expedition took her past the place, was home to Gordon Ross, his two small daughters and his (at this point) three months pregnant wife Jessie.¹⁸

A mile or so west of Gordonbush is the head of Loch Brora. Further on is a large expanse of flat, potentially cultivable, land intersected by the River Brora – all sweeping curves and deep, dark salmon pools. Here, not far upriver from the loch, the Brora is joined by a smaller but faster flowing watercourse emerging out of the hills to the north. This burn is called in Gaelic Allt a’ Mhuilin. That means Mill Stream; and though there is no mill in this vicinity today, and has not been for two centuries, Allt a’ Mhuilin’s name testifies to one having once stood hereabouts. Where there was a mill, moreover, there must have been a settlement. In fact, there were two. One, east of Allt a’ Mhuilin, was called Ascoilebeg. The other, beyond the mill burn to the west and a little way up a hillside, was Ascoilemore.

Ascoilemore, before its 1821 clearance, contained several houses. Because nearly 20 decades have passed since those houses ceased to be inhabited, their surviving traces consist of little more than rectangular undulations in the turf. There being no detailed map or plan of Ascoilemore as it was prior to 1821, it is impossible to say which of the township’s vestigial ruins marks the spot that was once home to Gordon and Jessie Ross. What can be located, however, is what was said subsequently to be the site of Gordon’s place of work. This site is not in Ascoilemore but about half a mile away in Ascoilebeg, and the building that stood there, as can be seen from its remnant footings or foundations, was a substantial one. This goes some way to substantiating its later identification (made well within living memory of the events of 1821) as the school maintained, if not in this precise spot then certainly in this vicinity, by the Society in Scotland for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge (SSPCK). Established in Edinburgh in the early 1700s with a view to civilising Highlanders, then seen widely in the south as barbaric, the SSPCK, by the start of the nineteenth century, had evolved into a charitable body concentrating on the provision of elementary education. The organisation’s relationship with the Marquis and Marchioness of Stafford was a chequered one, the marchioness, on one occasion, rejecting as ‘totally inadmissible’ an SSPCK request that the Sutherland Estate help it financially by not levying rents on its Sutherland schools. But the society, despite those difficulties, remained committed to the county, its Strathbrora school catering, at any given point, for between 40 and 60 pupils.19

Gordon Ross may have been one of this school’s students and, while still a teenager, may have served as assistant to its then schoolmaster. By 1813, at all events, he had taken that schoolmaster’s place. The post carried an annual salary of £15. This is put in perspective by the fact that James Loch’s earnings, when Loch was first employed by the Marquis of Stafford, were 70 times greater. But his £15 a year was nevertheless sufficient to enable Gordon to marry Jessie Sutherland and to set up home with her in Ascoilemore. By the standards of their place and time, indeed, the Rosses – until the clearances deprived them of home, income and prospects – enjoyed a good standard of living. Thus the couple employed a maid who helped Jessie manage a home that, unlike most houses in early nineteenth-century Sutherland, ran to two (or at least one and a half) storeys, its ground floor rooms being supplemented by a floored garret or loft. This home appears, in addition, to have been well furnished – no fewer than three cartloads of furniture being taken from it on the day of the family’s eviction.²⁰

Ascoilemore, when Jessie and Gordon Ross’s children were starting to arrive, had four farming tenants: John Baillie, Robert MacKay, Adam MacDonald and Donald MacKay. Those men were jointly in control of the township’s hill pasture, its fields or rigs where grain was grown and the drying kiln where this grain was dried prior to its being milled by John MacKay whose mill was on the Ascoilebeg side of Allt a’ Mhuilin but whose home was in Ascoilemore. Although other people appear to have lived there, the miller and his family, the Rosses and the township’s farming tenants, along with their wives and children, accounted for the largest part of Ascoilemore’s population. This population was probably similar to that of Ascoilebeg which had a comparable number of tenants; and since there must have been a lot of toing and froing between Ascoilebeg and Ascoilemore, it is likely that all inhabitants of ‘the two Ascoiles’, as the townships are sometimes called in surviving documentation, were well known to each other. This being so, it makes sense to imagine Gordon Ross, Jessie Ross and their daughters as belonging to a close-knit community numbering (between the two Ascoiles) perhaps 70 or 80 in total. This community, in turn, would have had all sorts of links with those other pre-clearance townships (of which there were several) close enough to have supplied Gordon Ross’s school with pupils.21

Exactly how Gordon and Jessie Ross were regarded by their neighbours cannot now be established. But it is suggestive, first, that the leading men of Ascoilemore – the two MacKays, MacDonald and Baillie – were well enough disposed towards the Ross family to have put their names in April 1818 to a written record of their having agreed to Gordon being granted ‘grass for a cow’, this animal’s function being to supply Gordon and Jessie (whose second daughter, Katherine, was born the following month) with the milk, butter and other dairy produce needed by a growing family. It is suggestive, second, that ‘the schoolmaster’, as Gordon Ross is designated in that 1818 document, should also have been provided with what he afterwards called a ‘garden’ and ‘potato land’. It is suggestive, finally, that it was to Gordon Ross that the occupants of Ascoilemore and one or two neighbouring communities turned for assistance when in 1819 they were notified that, although they had escaped that spring’s clearance of much of Strathbrora, their townships too had been earmarked for destruction. A number of people duly met more than once with Gordon Ross in his school, where it was decided that, on their and on his own behalf, he should write for help to that Stafford bête noire, Joseph Gordon.²²

Because Gordon Ross’s father was one of the Carrol Estate’s key employees, Gordon must have been known personally to Joseph, even though the latter was already a teenager when the future SSPCK teacher was born. As their correspondence cannot be traced, there is no knowing how the two men addressed each other. What can be known, however, is the outcome of their 1819 exchange of letters. There was no prospect, Joseph Gordon told Gordon Ross, of Ascoilemore residents mounting a successful legal challenge to their imminent eviction because, as stated in a subsequent summary of what Joseph had to say, they had ‘no ground on which they could resist’.23

Since landlords could eject any landholder who did not have a lease, and since the leases Ascoilemore’s tenants possessed (leases that spared them eviction in 1819) were due to expire in late 1820, this news cannot have come as much of a surprise to Gordon Ross. Others in Ascoilemore were to make further efforts to hang on there, and, to this end, were reportedly consulting ‘a twopenny lawyer’ from Tain in Easter Ross just weeks before their eventual dispossession. For his part, however, Gordon Ross now concluded that he had no hope of retaining either his Ascoilemore home or his job. As Strathbrora’s last inhabitants were shortly ‘to be removed’ from the strath, he informed his SSPCK employers, there would soon be ‘no occasion’ for a school there. But as Gordon well appreciated, this did not mean that Sutherland more generally was ceasing to need schools and schoolmasters. The depopulation of the county’s interior valleys had resulted (as mentioned earlier) in newly evicted families flocking into its coastal localities. Among those localities was Helmsdale, 12 miles north of Brora, where the Marquis and Marchioness of Stafford were intent on developing both a harbour and a fishing fleet. A school was required there, and Gordon Ross very much wanted to be appointed its teacher.²⁴

Because they controlled all such matters, the Staffords, or more precisely their agents, would have a decisive say in the new school’s staffing arrangements. That is why Gordon Ross now tried to curry favour with the marquis and marchioness’s Golspie-based factor, Francis Suther. This suited Suther. Being well aware of the efforts Ascoilemore’s tenants were making to stave off their eviction, the factor – who thought Ascoilemore folk ‘a bad set’ – took some satisfaction in having been presented, in the person of a newly obsequious Gordon Ross, with a means of discovering exactly what was going on in the township. This is evident from Francis Suther’s correspondence with James Loch. Ascoilemore’s tenants were ‘determined not to accept’ the lots or crofts awaiting them near Brora, Suther told Loch at the start of 1820. At least three of them had consequently ‘taken places [meaning farms] in Caithness’. This piece of intelligence, the factor added, came from a man he described as ‘my informer Ross’ – an informer identified further as ‘schoolmaster in Ascoilemore’.²⁵

Because there was some prospect at this point of Ascoilemore being cleared in the autumn of 1820, its people were ordered by Francis Suther not to sow or plant crops that spring. As if by way of confirming the factor’s opinion of them, most Ascoilemore residents ignored this instruction. One who did not was Gordon Ross. During April and May 1820, the teacher wrote, he ‘turned not an inch of . . . [his] potato land’, something he is sure to have drawn to Suther’s attention when, in May, he made the journey to Rhives, just outside Golspie, where the factor lived and where the Sutherland Estate’s administrative headquarters were located. At Rhives, Gordon spoke about his wish to ‘be placed at Helmsdale’. Much to his delight, this wish – or so the young man understood Francis Suther to have said – was one the factor was prepared to grant.26

But if his dealings with Francis Suther helped Gordon Ross (as he thought) to secure his family’s medium-term prospects, those dealings were not without their more immediate downside for the Rosses. Gordon’s neighbours, people who had begun by treating the SSPCK teacher as a valuable ally in their developing conflict with the Sutherland Estate, now (or so it was reported) ‘withdrew their confidence in him’. However, any consequent unpleasantness (and there is bound to have been some) must have been outweighed, as far as Gordon was concerned, by its having been ‘settled’, as he put it, that he was to become Helmsdale’s schoolmaster.²⁷

So matters continued through the rest of 1820 and into the following year – Ascoilemore’s clearance having been postponed for some months. Then, in mid-May 1821, no more than a couple of weeks before he, his family and everyone else in Ascoilemore were due to quit the place, Gordon Ross learned, greatly to his distress, that what he had thought to be Francis Suther’s promise of a new schoolmastership was no promise at all. Helmsdale’s teaching post, it now appeared, was to go not to Ross but to a man whose claim to it was being promoted by George MacPherson Grant, Sutherland’s MP and a close friend and ally of the Marquis and Marchioness of Stafford, to whom Grant owed his parliamentary seat. Gordon Ross had no such backer. Immediately, however, he wrote again to Joseph Gordon. The latter, because of his involvement in the professional and commercial life of Edinburgh, is bound to have known some of the Edinburgh-based SSPCK’s board of directors – people drawn mostly from the city’s business and legal community. It is possible, therefore, that Gordon Ross asked Joseph Gordon to engage in a little lobbying on his behalf, with the aim of persuading the SSPCK to look kindly on their soon-to-be-redundant Strathbrora teacher in connection with any vacancy that might occur elsewhere in the society’s network. But if he was to be sure that his employers were made properly aware of his circumstances, Gordon Ross decided, he himself would have to go ‘instantly to Edinburgh’. He set out on 24 May. Ascoilemore was to be cleared just six days later.28

Before leaving Sutherland for the south, Gordon Ross did everything he could to ensure the safety of his wife and children. He found a place where they could stay temporarily if evicted in his absence, and he attempted to extend by two or three weeks his family’s occupancy of their Ascoilemore home. Hence the drawing up of a document signed, according to Gordon, by ‘two respectable people’ who put their reputations on the line by undertaking to ensure that, as soon as the schoolmaster’s trip to Edinburgh was at an end, he, Jessie, their two girls and their baby would remove themselves at once from Ascoilemore. This arrangement, Gordon Ross insisted afterwards, was known to, and agreed by, Francis Suther. If so, Suther’s word proved no more reliable in this context than it had done in the case of the promised teaching post in Helmsdale. Gordon learned as much in mid-June when, returning from Edinburgh (where he had failed to get a definite promise of a job) and trudging north through Easter Ross, he chanced to meet a group of people from Strathbrora. Those people were making for the Ross-shire port of Cromarty. There they were to board the Leith-registered Ossian and sail for Nova Scotia. The departing emigrants – their voyage financed in part by Joseph Gordon – included at least two families from Ascoilemore. From them Gordon Ross learned that Jessie, Elizabeth, Katherine and Roberta, contrary to his expectations, had already been evicted. This was distressing. More alarming still was the news that Katherine and Elizabeth, as well as their mother, were ill – the girls perhaps dangerously so.²⁹

Katherine Ross, then not much more than a month past her third birthday, died some three weeks into June 1821. A week or so later, her father began work on a long letter to the Marquis of Stafford. In this letter, an embittered and angry Gordon Ross outlined how he had been lied to (as he saw it) by Lord Stafford’s factor. He then summarised the abuse (as he saw it) his family had experienced.

He had ‘always reckoned’ Francis Suther ‘one of [his] best friends’, Gordon Ross wrote. But his efforts to collaborate with the factor had availed him nothing. The job on which he had set his heart had gone to someone else; the arrangement intended to keep his family secure until he got back from Edinburgh had been disregarded. Told of this arrangement on their arrival in Ascoilemore on Wednesday 30 May, the ‘evicting party’ had held off for just one day. On 31 May – in breach of Suther’s assurances, in spite of his wife being in poor health and in spite of his children having been ‘taken ill with the [w]hooping cough’ – his family, including ‘an infant of two months’, were ejected from their home, Gordon Ross stated, by men ‘who [had] sat up the previous night drinking whisky’. On gaining entry to his house, Gordon continued, one of those men ‘began furiously to throw some lumber out of the garret window and knocked down my eldest child’. The same man, the schoolmaster stated, had come close to injuring his baby girl. ‘The rest of his conduct,’ Gordon Ross went on, ‘I shall forbear to mention for decency’s sake. Sufficient to say that the mother [and] her three children were exposed to the inclemency of the weather while labouring under the greatest distress of sickness.’ The effects of this sickness, Gordon added, had been aggravated by the ill-treatment his wife and daughters had suffered. One of the girls had ‘only survived that inhuman treatment twenty-three days’.30

He had thought it right to draw those matters to Lord Stafford’s attention, Gordon Ross informed the marquis, because he presumed that what had been done to Jessie and her daughters was, as the Strathbrora teacher put it, ‘inconsistent with your Lordship’s sanction and knowledge’. As for himself, Gordon Ross wrote, he had ‘taken advice about the steps’ he might take to obtain ‘redress’. Acting on this advice, he planned to have his grievances ‘laid before a public court’.³¹

The Marquis and Marchioness of Stafford, at this point, were spending some months in Paris. Just over 30 years before, as the French Revolution was beginning, the marquis had gone there when appointed Britain’s ambassador to France. His wife, who went with him, greatly enjoyed her time in the French capital, which, being in a ferment politically, was an exciting if sometimes frightening place. But that was then; and the Paris of 1821, its revolution long since snuffed out and its public life quiescent, was not as the Marchioness of Stafford, now in her late fifties, remembered it. ‘The life of Paris is less gay than that of London,’ she complained; and when, two weeks after its being penned, Gordon Ross’s letter reached the Staffords, Lady Stafford’s mood could only have darkened further. As both the marchioness and the marquis were quick to recognise, the letter’s contents constituted a pressing threat to their position, the Strathbrora schoolmaster’s allegations having the potential to embroil them in a reputational crisis of a sort an earlier experience had given them good cause to fear.³²

Some six years previously, a Sutherland Estate factor had been accused of causing two deaths in the course of evictions he had supervised. The factor in question (of whom more later) was Patrick Sellar, who was duly brought to trial on a charge of culpable homicide – Scotland’s equivalent of the English crime of manslaughter. Although Sellar was found not guilty, the action taken against him had generated a great deal of comment – not just in the Highlands but in Edinburgh and London. Much of this comment blurred any distinction there might have been between allegedly brutal evictions and the wider, ostensibly positive, transformations those evictions were meant to bring about. The Staffords, in consequence, found themselves on the receiving end of a great deal of criticism; their Sutherland ‘improvements’ were set back; there were mutterings – stilled in the Sellar trial’s aftermath but by no means forgotten – to the effect that what was going on in Sutherland should perhaps be looked into formally by the United Kingdom’s parliament.

Now Gordon Ross’s accusations threatened to expose the Marquis and Marchioness of Stafford, together with their senior managers, to renewed attack. There was even a risk, if the Strathbrora schoolmaster’s letter was taken at face value, of their being caught up in a trial as damaging to them as Patrick Sellar’s had been, for if the Ross family’s eviction had indeed been conducted in the way Gordon Ross described, and if injury or death had resulted, then crimes had been committed. Responsibility for those crimes, to be sure, could not be laid directly at Lord Stafford’s door. But as had occurred in the Sellar case, there would be plenty of people prepared to implicate the marquis in what had allegedly occurred. Should Gordon Ross succeed in carrying out his threat of getting matters into court, then – irrespective of whether or not the court came down on Ross’s side – the Marquis of Stafford, as the Sutherland Estate’s proprietor, would be said, and said widely, to be ultimately to blame for a vulnerable woman and her sick children having been cold-heartedly and violently turned out of their home by a set of drunks. Should any such interpretation of events gain acceptance, moreover, it would follow – logically if not legally – that Lord Stafford was also responsible for one of the evicted children having afterwards become so ill that she died.

That was bad enough. Making things worse, from a Stafford perspective, was the source of accusations that, if nothing was done to stop this, might find their way into newspapers which, during the Sellar episode and subsequently, had taken a close interest in what was going on in Sutherland. Gordon Ross, as demonstrated by his letter to Lord Stafford, was no obscure and wholly Gaelic-speaking agriculturalist of the sort constituting the majority of clearance victims. He was fluent in English; he was literate; his background, his profession and connections were such as to help his story gain traction; and he had been in contact with Joseph Gordon who, or so experience suggested, was likely to see in Gordon Ross’s litany of complaint an ideal means of once again causing difficulty for the Sutherland Estate and its owners.

Hence the urgency with which Gordon Ross’s letter to the Marquis of Stafford was forwarded from Paris to James Loch, then in London. Hence too the tenor of an accompanying note from the marchioness. If there was anything in what the schoolmaster had to say, she instructed Loch, his allegations were not ‘to be passed over’. But on enquiry, Lady Stafford was sure, Ross’s claims would ‘turn out to be gross misrepresentations’. This was to give James Loch a clear steer as to what was expected of him, and, in consequence, to eliminate such slight possibility as there might have been of Loch looking into what had happened at Ascoilemore with anything approximating to an open mind. Writing at once to Francis Suther, Loch ordered the factor to find ‘the best means of obliging’ Gordon Ross and anyone backing him to ‘acknowledge they have told infamous falsehoods’. ‘It is out of the question to permit such lies to pass without notice,’ Loch went on. Suther, nevertheless, was to ‘proceed very cautiously’. In Ross, James Loch warned, ‘you have a man who will take advantage of any slip that may be made’.33

Francis Suther was Loch’s most valued subordinate. So serious was the crisis arising from Gordon Ross’s claims, however, that Loch was not prepared to entrust Suther with its resolution. On 28 July 1821, within hours of his getting the first of several Ross-related communications from Paris, James Loch wrote to the Marquis of Stafford to tell him that he personally would shortly be en route for Sutherland. Given the time and effort such a journey required in the early nineteenth century, this was no small undertaking. But not much more than a week later, James Loch had installed himself in Dunrobin Castle. There, in mid-August, he presided over a two-day hearing intended to culminate in Gordon Ross being made to retract his accusations.³⁴

In today’s Scotland, allegations analogous to those made by Gordon Ross – allegations that might lead to criminal charges – would be investigated by the police. They would report their findings to a procurator fiscal, and the fiscal, in his capacity as public prosecutor, would decide whether or not to bring a suspected offender, or offenders, to trial. But that is not how things worked in Sutherland in 1821, the county’s law enforcement mechanisms then being, for most practical purposes, indistinguishable from the Sutherland Estate’s administrative machinery. Thus James Loch took it for granted, when writing from London to Francis Suther at the end of July, that Sutherland’s procurator fiscal, James Brander, would be party to the planned discrediting of Gordon Ross. Since Brander had himself supervised lots of the evictions on which Ross-instigated court proceedings might throw a harsh light, there was no chance of his not falling in with Loch’s wishes. These were clear. If Gordon Ross or anyone else stuck by claims Loch was already describing as ‘lies’ and ‘falsehoods’, then Brander was to make all such people aware that he would ‘punish them by prosecuting them’.35

By involving the procurator fiscal in this way, James Loch may well have succeeded – as he meant to – in confusing the people paraded before him in Dunrobin as to what exactly was going on there. Loch’s enquiry had no standing in law. But it cannot have seemed that way to men and women – Loch called them ‘witnesses’ – who were commanded by James Brander to travel (on foot and for considerable distances in many instances) to Golspie in order to have their answers to Loch’s questions recorded in exactly the same manner as if they had been called to testify before a judge.

A key participant in those Dunrobin proceedings was Donald Bannerman, the man ‘employed’, in James Loch’s words, ‘to execute the [Ascoilemore] ejections’. On the face of things, Bannerman’s ‘evidence’, as Loch entitled it, carried particular weight because Bannerman, being a constable as well as a sheriff-officer, seemed doubly immune to Sutherland Estate manipulation. The people who gave sheriff-officers and constables their instructions, formally at any rate, were not the Staffords or their representatives but a variety of public office-holders. Those office-holders’ duty (supposedly) was to uphold the rule of law; their authority derived (supposedly) from Britain’s monarch; they answered (supposedly) to government ministers in Edinburgh and London. In principle, then, Donald Bannerman, in his role as sheriff-officer helped give effect to court orders issued by, or on the authority of, Charles Ross, Sutherland’s sheriff. In his other role as constable, Bannerman’s line managers, so to speak, were Sutherland’s several Justices of the Peace (JPs) – men entrusted by government with the task of appointing and supervising the two dozen or so constables who (as the term constable suggests) were the nearest thing early nineteenth-century Sutherland possessed to a police force.³⁶

But if in theory Donald Bannerman was a public servant, neither he nor his superiors – whether Sutherland’s sheriff or the county’s JPs – were any more likely than Procurator Fiscal Brander to cross the Marquis of Stafford, the Marchioness of Stafford or James Loch. On paper, Sheriff Ross might have owed his post to Alexander Maconochie MP, Scotland’s lord advocate and the government’s main man in Scotland. But Maconochie had assured Loch, prior to Charles Ross’s appointment in 1816, that Ross would only become Sheriff of Sutherland if this was ‘agreeable to Lord and Lady Stafford’ whose ‘approval’ of any such appointment, Maconochie wrote, he ‘thought indispensible’. Nor was Ross himself under any illusion as to what was expected of him. This is clear from a letter the sheriff sent to the Marchioness of Stafford on taking up his position: ‘I assure you . . . [of my] most zealous wish to second [meaning assist] by every means in my power your extensive and benevolent projects for the improvement of Sutherland . . . I have only to add that it will be most satisfactory to me at all times to have a communication of what may be your Ladyship’s views as to anything to be done in the county.’37

Sheriff Ross, then, appreciated precisely where he stood in relation to the Staffords. So did Sutherland’s JPs. Prominent among their number were: Francis Suther, the marquis and marchioness’s factor; Gabriel Reed, the Gordonbush-based sheep farmer who had gained directly from Ascoilemore’s clearance; and Patrick Sellar, no longer a Sutherland Estate employee but a sheep farmer on an even larger scale than Reed. Those men understood what was expected of them by the Staffords. They could be trusted to ensure that Donald Bannerman, one of their longer-serving constables, knew exactly what to say when he appeared before James Loch’s Dunrobin tribunal.

Bannerman, moreover, had his own reasons for currying favour with James Loch. In June 1820, when serving removal notices on families at Gruids, a township on a property adjacent to the Sutherland Estate, he had been assaulted by a number of young women who stripped the sheriff-officer naked prior to parading him through a mocking crowd.* Bannerman, who was in his sixties, must have found this humiliating as well as frightening. But despite the attack on him having been precipitated by a clearance the Staffords had no part in, Bannerman, in dealings with the marquis and the marchioness, capitalised shamelessly on what had happened. He informed Lady Stafford that he had been ‘brutally used’. He reminded the marchioness of his ‘long service’ in the cause of clearing areas like Strathbrora. He asked that she and her husband help him stave off ‘old age and infirmity’ by providing him with some sort of pension.³⁸

Among testimonials produced by Donald Bannerman in connection with this plea was one from Patrick Sellar who was happy to ‘certify’ – on the basis of what he had seen in the course of the clearances – that Bannerman ‘was almost the only [sheriff-officer in Sutherland] . . . who went straight forward [with] any warrant [of eviction] entrusted to him without fear of the dangers which surrounded him’.39

The marchioness, in her response, made known that Donald Bannerman ‘should be attended to’. But it would be ‘time enough,’ she thought, ‘to give him [financial] assistance when he stands in need of it’. Whether or not such aid was in the end forthcoming is not known – Bannerman’s claim on a Stafford-paid pension having conceivably been jeopardised when, during legal proceedings arising from the Gruids fracas, the doctor who had treated the sheriff-officer said his injuries had amounted to no more than ‘a contusion between the shoulders and some scratches upon the body for which he [the doctor] prescribed only one dose of salts’.⁴⁰

That version of events, however, did not become public until a month or more after Bannerman gave James Loch his account of the Ross family’s expulsion from Ascoilemore. This account, as well as being coloured by Donald Bannerman’s customary loyalty to Sheriff Ross and to JPs like Sellar, Reed and Suther, may have been coloured further, then, by his continuing hopes – at that point anyway – of an eventual cash hand-out from the Marchioness of Stafford.

When he and his evicting party got to Ascoilemore on Wednesday 30 May 1821, Bannerman told Loch’s Dunrobin tribunal, it had been his intention to get every one of its homes – except the one where he and his colleagues were to lodge overnight – vacated that day. In the event, however, he left a second home unemptied. This was the one occupied by Jessie Ross, her two daughters and her baby. They were spared eviction, the sheriff-officer explained, because Jessie (in accordance with the document drawn up by her husband before his departure for Edinburgh) ‘had given an obligation to remove when she should be asked’. To this extent, Donald Bannerman’s take on the Ross family’s expulsion from Ascoilemore coincided with Gordon Ross’s. But there was little further overlap between the Ross and Bannerman versions of what had occurred.⁴¹

On the morning of Thursday 31 May, the sheriff-officer said, he had been informed that the Rosses were after all to be evicted immediately because ‘Mr [Gabriel] Reed [evidently wanting to have Ascoilemore cleared completely] would not allow [them] to remain’. News of Reed’s vetoing of concessions to the Rosses, Bannerman continued, had been brought to him by one of the farmer’s shepherds. This was William Stevenson who, during the two days it took to clear the township, was on hand – on his employer’s orders – to assist Donald Bannerman and his men.⁴²

Also on Thursday morning, Bannerman next stated, he had called on Jessie Ross to tell her that the ‘obligation’ on which Jessie had been relying had now been countermanded by Reed, and that, in consequence, he wanted her, Elizabeth, Katherine and Roberta to quit their home voluntarily by midday. Following this conversation, Donald Bannerman went on, he and the rest of the evicting party set off for rising ground behind Ascoilemore where they were ‘to drive off the cattle’ grazing on the township’s hill pastures. On his return, at ‘about two o’ clock in the afternoon’, the sheriff-officer said, it was apparent that the Rosses had no intention of leaving of their own volition. At once, therefore, he ‘carried [their] ejection into execution’.43

This ejection, the sheriff-officer testified, went without a hitch, and he certainly ‘saw no violence used’. If this was a slippery formulation which allowed for there having been wrongdoing he had not observed, it was Bannerman’s sole concession to that possibility. ‘None of [his party] were drunk,’ he insisted. The weather, which Gordon Ross had described as ‘inclement’ in his letter to Lord Stafford, had actually been ‘very hot and dry’. Elizabeth and Katherine, far from being ill, hurt and upset, ‘were running about’ outside. Why, towards the end of the afternoon, he had even ‘got a drink of milk’ from Jessie Ross who, it was thereby implied, bore neither him nor his colleagues the slightest ill-will.⁴⁴

Four of those colleagues were questioned by James Loch. They were in full agreement with everything that Donald Bannerman had said, and, on hearing this, Loch must surely have thought that, from his perspective, proceedings were going well. There had still to be investigated, however, the conduct of Gabriel Reed’s shepherd, William Stevenson, against whom, even in the highly constrained circumstances of James Loch’s Dunrobin hearings, there were at least the beginnings of a case to be made.⁴⁵

Stevenson’s relationship with the Rosses, it emerged, was not founded on mutual antipathy – rather the reverse. He had been ‘very intimate’ with Jessie and Gordon Ross. He had been, in other words, their friend. This appears to have attracted attention, perhaps because friendships between Strathbrora people and men like William Stevenson are unlikely to have been common. Many such shepherds, after all, had come north (and Stevenson’s non-Highland surname suggests he was in this category) with the sheep farmers who employed them and the sheep they looked after. To begin with anyway, few of those shepherds spoke Gaelic. This precluded much in the way of communication between them and Sutherland’s predominantly Gaelic-speaking population – a population which anyway had little time for men thought to be aiding and abetting the farmers and estate managers responsible for uprooting community after community.46

But William Stevenson, for all that, was on good terms with Gordon and Jessie Ross. He visited their home, conversing with them there, neighbours recalled, in English, which both Jessie and Gordon, thanks to their upbringing and education, spoke effortlessly. Nor is it hard to guess why this Ross–Stevenson bond might have developed. If (as suggested earlier) the Rosses began to be cold-shouldered by other Ascoilemore families when it became known during 1820 that Gordon was in contact with Francis Suther, this could well have led to the schoolmaster and his wife linking up with another outsider. This, in turn, helps explain both William Stevenson’s conduct on the afternoon of Thursday 31 May 1821 and the ferocity with which Gordon Ross, Stevenson’s former but now betrayed friend, reacted to the shepherd’s behaviour.

William Stevenson, that afternoon, had to choose between conflicting loyalties: to his employer, Gabriel Reed, on the one side; to Jessie Ross, who had befriended him, on the other. In the end – and to have done otherwise would have been to lose his livelihood – he did his employer’s bidding. Hence the shepherd’s active participation in the Ross family’s eviction. But hence too – or so one might surmise – his opting to dull his guilt (and some guilt there must surely have been) by having recourse to alcohol. That Stevenson had consumed a lot of whisky, that he was in fact drunk, on the day of their eviction: of this the Rosses were in no doubt. Nor, Donald Bannerman’s assurances of the evicting party’s sobriety notwithstanding, was there any lack of circumstantial evidence to the effect that such was indeed the case.

When, as her eviction got under way, Jessie Ross was asked to take the two-month-old Roberta out of the house, Jessie (as noted earlier) refused point-blank. And when her maid, a girl called Kathleen Fraser, made to pick up the baby’s cradle instead, Jessie told her, Kathleen said, ‘to let it alone’. ‘Stevenson,’ Kathleen went on, ‘got a little angry at this and took up the cradle and, going out, struck the cradle against the door.’ The baby, Kathleen Fraser said, was ‘hurt’ in the course of this episode, her comment indicating that the cradle came up against the doorway with some force. Given the care people take – almost instinctively – when moving babies, William Stevenson’s simultaneously casual and irate handling of Roberta Ross is consistent (to put the matter no higher) with his having been drinking. So is the shepherd’s subsequent conduct, notably his throwing a piece of planking into the face of five-year-old Elizabeth Ross and his drenching of Kathleen Fraser with the contents of a tub of urine he came across in the Ross house’s garret.⁴⁷

Urine was stored in this way because homespun cloth was customarily soaked in it as a means of fixing the locally produced vegetable dyes applied to all such fabrics. The tub found by Stevenson, then, could well have contained a lot of liquid, all of which, it seems, was poured over Kathleen as she stood below the ladder leading to the Ross home’s loft. On Stevenson seeing what he had done, the maid told James Loch, the shepherd ‘laughed’, as at a joke.48

Had Loch been looking to establish misconduct on the part of the Ascoilemore evicting party, then, what he heard from Kathleen Fraser went some way to providing the necessary evidence. But James Loch’s purpose was the opposite of this. The person whose wrongdoing Loch was set on proving in the course of the show trial (as good a description as any) he mounted at Dunrobin in mid-August 1821 was not William Stevenson but Gordon Ross. It was essential, therefore, to demonstrate that the shepherd, together with everyone else involved in the Ross family’s eviction, had been perfectly sober throughout. With this requirement in view, Loch turned to John MacKay, the man in whose Ascoilemore home Donald Bannerman and his evicting party were accommodated on the night of 30–31 May.

MacKay, the Ascoilemore–Ascoilebeg miller and a leading member of his parish’s Church of Scotland congregation, was one of those people whose role in the Sutherland clearances is best described as both critical and obscure: critical because, had estate managers not had the support of individuals like John MacKay, evictions would have been more difficult to carry out; obscure because, while it is clear that such folk got something out of behaving as they did, it is impossible, at this remove, to ascertain what that something was. But if there is no knowing what favours were done for John MacKay in return for the hospitality he extended to the Ascoilemore evicting party, this hospitality was certainly extensive. ‘She cooked their victuals for them,’ Mary MacKay, the miller’s daughter, said of her part in proceedings. ‘They had beef and broth for dinner.’ Afterwards, Mary continued, she had been sent to fetch whisky – the source, doubtless, being one of the illicit stills that (as recounted later) were then rife in Strathbrora and surrounding areas. ‘Ten bottles of whisky were drunk . . . during the first day and night [of the Ascoilemore clearance],’ Mary MacKay said. ‘Two bottles of whisky were drunk before breakfast [on the second day],’ she went on, ‘and one immediately after breakfast.’ Those bottles, it should be made clear, were probably smaller than their modern counterparts. But the whisky they contained would have been at least half as potent again, perhaps twice as potent, as today’s commercial spirit. Since members of Donald Bannerman’s party – ten to twelve strong in total – got through more than a bottle apiece on average, it is hard to believe that they were in no way affected. But such was definitely the case, said Mary and John MacKay, who thus put themselves deep in the Sutherland Estate’s debt. ‘None of the men were drunk,’ Mary MacKay insisted. Her father concurred. William Stevenson in particular, he added, ‘was not the worse of liquor’.49

When John and Mary MacKay’s statements were taken in conjunction with those made by Donald Bannerman and his associates, Gordon Ross’s contention of drunkenness on the part of the Ascoilemore evicting party was shown, as far as James Loch was concerned, to have no foundation. Gordon’s other claims were to be disproved, to Loch’s satisfaction, every bit as comprehensively. In part, this was because of the isolated position in which the ex-schoolmaster found himself.

By August, the families from whom Gordon Ross had first heard about the circumstances surrounding Ascoilemore’s clearance were in Nova Scotia. Had they been interviewed before they sailed, they might – having by that point no reason to fear repercussions from Sutherland Estate managers – have backed Gordon’s account of his family’s eviction. But of the many ‘witnesses’ obliged to appear before James Loch at Dunrobin, none had anything to gain, and all had quite a lot to lose, from endorsing what the estate side had chosen to regard from the outset as evident fabrications. This was most obviously true of people like Donald Bannerman, John MacKay and Mary MacKay who were clearly in the Sutherland Estate camp. But it was true too of folk whom Gordon Ross might have expected to take his part, Sutherland Estate residents being well aware that their homes and livelihoods could all too readily be lost should they be thought by Loch and his aides to have stepped out of line.

Some people were prepared, despite this, to go at least part way in Gordon Ross’s direction. One was Jessie Ross’s former maid, Kathleen Fraser. Following her departure from Ascoilemore, Kathleen had got fish-processing work of some sort in Helmsdale. Her job, like every other job in that part of Sutherland, would have been vulnerable to Sutherland Estate pressure. But this did not stop her saying what she said about William Stevenson. Nor were others wholly lacking in the courage needed to take issue with what had been said by Donald Bannerman and his associates. From them James Loch heard that Katherine and Elizabeth Ross were indeed suffering from whooping cough prior to their eviction; that the two girls were seen to be ‘cold and trembling’ when they found themselves outside their home; that their mother, though ‘going about her work’ prior to her eviction, was unwell; that Roberta Ross’s cradle had indeed been handled roughly by William Stevenson; that the baby’s resulting distress was eased only when, as described earlier, Mary Murray (who left shortly afterwards for Nova Scotia) took it on herself to breastfeed and pacify the child; that Elizabeth was indeed struck in the face by a board thrown by Stevenson; that she was hurt and in tears as a result.50

But none of this influenced James Loch whose eventual findings gave weight only to what accorded with his own predetermined interpretation of the facts. There was much in this category. When at the Rosses’ home, Loch was told, the evicting party ‘conducted themselves in a peaceable manner’; they ‘used no harshness’; they were ‘as careful as they could be of everything’. One man ‘did not see any of the [Ross] children hurt or crying’. Another remarked of Elizabeth and Katherine that they ‘did not appear very ill’ – their whooping cough having developed, this man said, only after their departure from Ascoilemore.⁵¹

Perhaps this was the way things truly were. Perhaps, as James Loch maintained from the start, Gordon Ross was a fantasist, a liar or worse. Perhaps, as asserted by a number of the ‘witnesses’ Loch produced to demolish Ross’s standing and reputation, the former SSPCK schoolmaster was not, as he had seemed to be, a respectable teacher and family man but a habitual poacher – a lawbreaker (for poaching was a crime) who fished the several Brora River pools below Ascoilemore and who sold (this being thought worse than poaching for domestic consumption) the salmon he caught there. Perhaps, as stated further, Gordon Ross, not confining himself to petty criminality like poaching, was also a troublemaker and agitator who had advised his neighbours to ‘oppose’ (violently it was implied) their eviction. Perhaps, as also claimed, he had gone so far as to urge Strathbrora people ‘to go and set fire to the houses of . . . Gordonbush and Morvich during the night’, the homes in question being those occupied by Gabriel Reed and Patrick Sellar. Perhaps the weather which (as mentioned in one of Francis Suther’s regular letters to Loch) had brought ‘an abundance of snow’ to Sutherland as late as 27 May, had turned – just three or four days later and despite the wind still being in the northeast – every bit as ‘hot’ as Donald Bannerman contended.⁵²

But ultimately what was said – whether in support of Gordon Ross or in opposition to him – was neither here nor there. This was because the Ascoilemore schoolmaster, in daring to take on the Sutherland Estate, was assailing the unassailable. The power the Marquis and Marchioness of Stafford exercised in their role as the estate’s proprietors, when combined with the wider influence they wielded as a result of their enormous wealth, meant that the Stafford-dominated part of Sutherland had been deprived of anything independent of its owners. Gordon Ross’s predicament, it followed, was analogous to that confronting dissenters in the perfectly authoritarian world imagined in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. As in that world, there remained in Sutherland no autonomous institution to which Gordon Ross could turn. The Church of Scotland, ostensibly self-administering, was in reality (as will be seen) a Sutherland Estate fiefdom. The county’s justice system (as already shown and as will be shown further) was a Sutherland Estate subsidiary. Nor does the parallel with Nineteen Eighty-Four end there. In Orwell’s fictional dictatorship, where even language has been subverted by the ruling regime, ‘war is peace’ and ‘freedom is slavery’. Similarly, in early nineteenth-century Sutherland – this place the Staffords had made so completely theirs – to depopulate a strath was to ‘improve’ it and truth, as became apparent in the course of Gordon Ross’s Dunrobin ordeal, was whatever James Loch decided truth to be.

Nineteen Eighty-Four ends with its broken rebel, Winston Smith, confessing that everything he had done and thought was wrong. James Loch’s enquiry into Gordon Ross’s accusations ended in much the same way. First Jessie Ross assented to the proposition, or so James Loch reported, that the contents of her husband’s July letter to Lord Stafford had been ‘nonsense’. Next Gordon himself, again according to Loch, was left with little alternative but to do likewise. ‘After two days examination of witnesses respecting Gordon Ross’s complaint to your Lordship,’ James Loch informed the Marquis of Stafford on 17 August, ‘I have the satisfaction of being enabled to state that the whole of his assertions are false from beginning to end.’ It had been proven beyond doubt, Loch continued, ‘that the [Ross] children had not the [w]hooping cough when removed [and] . . . that [on the day of their eviction] the greatest care and kindness was shown the family.’53

To use that phrase in connection with the events of 31 May 1821 was again to have recourse to proto-Orwellian terminology. For even if James Loch was right to disbelieve everything said and written by Gordon Ross, it remained the case that the Sutherland Estate had removed from her Ascoilemore home a woman whose health was (to put the matter no higher) less than perfect, whose two small daughters were (at the minimum) falling ill, and whose absent husband (because of the Stafford-ordered clearance of Strathbrora) had lost his teaching post. But if it is hard to see where ‘care and kindness’ had been extended to the Ross family, it is easy to understand the mix of triumph and relief that pervades Loch’s 17 August letter to Loch Stafford. Less than three weeks after leaving London for Sutherland, James Loch had closed off any possibility of Gordon Ross doing damage to the marquis and the marchioness’s reputation. The former schoolmaster had ‘made ample recantation’, Loch told Lord Stafford. Ross had also apologised to everyone he had maligned. ‘I made him express his sorrow [in particular] to the shepherd [William Stevenson],’ Loch wrote.54

Inclining now to magnanimity, and having scrutinised Gordon Ross’s correspondence (which Ross had been ordered to produce) with Joseph Gordon, James Loch concluded that the schoolmaster had neither incited violence nor engaged in poaching, his taking fish from the River Brora having been sanctioned, it seems, by Francis Suther with whom of course Ross had for a time been on good terms. But when Gordon Ross (aware of the likely impact of his Dunrobin ‘recantation’ on his future prospects) asked for ‘the certificate of indemnification of character’ he felt he would need if he were to resume his career, Loch drew the line. ‘In demanding the way you do a certificate,’ James Loch told Ross, ‘you totally forget the nature of the charge which you made to Lord Stafford, [a charge] . . . which has been proved . . . to be untrue in every particular.’⁵⁵

Gordon’s consequent lack of an immediate way back into teaching must have further aggravated the Rosses’ already desperate plight – the family’s homelessness and Gordon’s joblessness having had the effect of making them dependent on other people’s charity. First to come to their aid were Jean and Alexander MacKay who lived in Ascoilebeg, which, luckily for the Rosses and their fellow refugees from Ascoilemore, escaped clearance a little longer than its neighbouring township. Jean MacKay, it seems, invited Jessie Ross and her children into her home when, on the day of her eviction, Jessie discovered that the emergency accommodation arranged for her before Gordon set off for Edinburgh had been taken by others, the man (another Ascoilebeg resident) with whom the Rosses were to stay having concluded (in the wake of Donald Bannerman’s initial, but later countermanded, assurances) that Jessie and her daughters were, for the time being, to be left in place.⁵⁶

Quite how long the Rosses stayed with the MacKays is unclear, but they were definitely there into August. It was at the MacKay home in Ascoilebeg, then, that the three-year-old Katherine Ross died, the child being buried no doubt in the little cemetery still to be seen on the Ascoilemore side of Allt a’ Mhuilin. It was in the MacKay home, too, that Jessie Ross, ‘through distress, sickness and despair,’ as her husband put it, ‘lost her milk’. Unable now to feed Roberta, Jessie – probably with Jean MacKay’s help – accordingly had to find a wet nurse ‘to give the infant suck’.57

What happened to Roberta, to Elizabeth, her surviving sister, and to the Ross family more generally during the period that followed is mostly irrecoverable. One or two facts can be established, however. In November 1821, the SSPCK’s board of directors, clearly unpersuaded (unlike the Staffords and James Loch) that their former employee had brought his troubles on himself, minuted their decision to forward the sum of £2 (the equivalent of seven weeks’ salary) to Gordon Ross, whom they described as ‘in distress from the death of a child’. In May 1825, exactly four years after Ascoilemore’s clearance, Gordon again features briefly in SSPCK minutes – the organisation’s board recording their receipt of a letter ‘recommending Gordon Ross . . . to the sympathy and support of the society’. This time Gordon, described as ‘now insane’ and evidently grappling with mental breakdown, was granted £6. Some part of that sum is likely to have been spent on the Rosses’ latest child, a little boy born two years previously. Like his brother, the 1820 baby who died in infancy, this boy was called George. Gordon and Jessie’s first son, however, had been christened George Sutherland Ross for Jessie’s father. This second boy was named for someone else entirely. He was christened George Granville Leveson Gower Ross. Just as Winston Smith, George Orwell’s fictional rebel, learned in the end to love his country’s dictator, so that real-life rebel, Gordon Ross, or so it seems from the name he gave his son, learned if not to love, then certainly to show proper deference to, George Granville Leveson-Gower, Marquis of Stafford.⁵⁸

* During the eighteenth century, the Gordon Earls of Sutherland adopted the surname Sutherland. Here, to avoid confusing name changes within the same family, the older name is retained.

* This episode is dealt with in Chapter 14.