The Dam Builders

Life in the Highlands had never been easy – the thin soil and the harsh winters saw to that – but surely something could be done. The Highlanders were an enterprising, intelligent people; they had proved their abilities time and again in every corner of the Empire, but somehow on their home ground they remained acquiescent and, the occasional land raid apart, not nearly as troublesome to politicians as their urban relatives.

‘What is then at issue is not so much restoration of a prosperity which never really existed as the application of modern methods and modern knowledge to the old agricultural economy of the Highlands,’ wrote Hugh Quigley.² Looking north from his suburban home in Esher, Quigley spoke for many who loved the Highlands but recognised that ‘resurrection’ (his term) was desperately needed. Tourism, forestry, fisheries, improved transport and the development of cottage industries were among the favoured options. The Forestry Commission, established in 1919, had planted thousands of acres with conifers in Argyll and the Great Glen, where Neil Gunn saw them in 1937 and considered their green spires: ‘What he [the Highlander] wants now – where the spirit has been left in him to want anything constructive – is hope for the future, and these new forests along the banks of the Canal and on both sides of Loch Lochy were somehow like a symbol of a new order. The trees were full of sap, of young life, green and eager, larches and other pines, pointed in aspiration, and with an air about them not of privilege but of freedom.’³

The Second World War brought men and women once again from the glens to serve the country, and added another set of names to the memorials in every parish, but it also gave impetus to a sense that something had to be done and to a feeling that from the all-consuming effort of war would emerge a new future.

Industry in the Highlands had always been small and local in scale. Some processing of primary produce – the turning of grain into whisky and wool into tweed, the curing of fish – was established and significant; but the Highlands had no coal, apart from isolated mines at Brora and Machrihanish, and it was accepted that large-scale manufacturing belonged elsewhere, in the lowland cities where the labour force, markets and infrastructure favoured a concentration of effort. In the last decade of the nineteenth century, however, the potential of the region for water power had been realised. The North British Aluminium Company, formed in 1894, looked to the Highlands for a reliable supply of electricity, essential in the relatively new technology of converting raw bauxite to aluminium, and found it at Foyers on the south side of Loch Ness. Up to 19,000 kW of electricity were needed to convert four tons of bauxite to one ton of pure metal. Construction of the first major hydro-electric scheme in Britain began in 1895, and the smelting plant produced its first metal the following year, some 200 tons but already 10 per cent of the world output at that time. By 1900 production at Foyers had risen to over 1,000 tons, as the world demand for aluminium rose.⁴

Scotland’s first hydro-electric plant for public supply had been installed at Greenock in 1885, only four years after the first in Britain opened in Godalming, Surrey.⁵ The Greenock experiment ran for only two years but it had been enough to show the potential of hydro-electricity as a clean source of energy for daily activities. The next place to benefit from hydro-electric power was the village of Fort Augustus; in 1890 the Benedictine monks installed an 18-kilowatt turbine in one of the burns supplying their abbey at the southern end of Loch Ness and distributed the excess energy to their secular neighbours. The hotels and houses of the village were to have the benefit of this local supply until nationalisation of the industry in 1948. In 1896, the Fort William Electric Light Company began to operate two turbines at Blarmachfoldach on the Kiachnish River to supply light to the town. Another local scheme, this time at Ravens Rock in Glen Sgathaich, to the north of Strathpeffer, was built in 1903 with funding from Colonel E. W. Blunt-Mackenzie, husband of the Countess of Cromarty, and brought power to Dingwall and Strathpeffer. This enterprise was later transferred to a larger power station at the Falls of Conon on Loch Luichart. The coming of the new source of light was a wonder of the age. ‘On Monday evening’, reported the North Star in Dingwall, ‘the electric light was turned on in the premises of Baillie Frew, jeweller, by his niece, Miss Christine Frew. The glitter and dazzle of the jewellery, caused by the numerous arc lamps, attracted great attention.’ An ironmonger’s and a bookseller’s shop were also illuminated.⁶ Blair Atholl received its first hydro-electricity supply in a similar way in 1910 when the Duke of Atholl built a 130-kilowatt generator on the Banrie Burn, a tributary of the Tilt, to supply his castle and the adjoining village.⁷ Beyond the ends of the wires strung in these isolated localities, the people still depended on the oil lamp and the kitchen range and, in the countryside, were to do so for around another fifty years. These small beginnings had, however, been literally a glimmer of the future.

The aluminium industry continued to grow. A village grew up at Foyers to house the staff of the plant beside Loch Ness. The British Aluminium Company decided to expand its facilities and initiated an extensive scheme in the Loch Leven area that was to create the industrial village of Kinlochleven, with its smelting plant and the associated hydro-electric works drawing on the abundant water of Rannoch Moor. A dam was built across the Blackwater River to turn it into an eight-mile-long reservoir whose waters were then led down the mountainside to a power station above Kinlochleven. Construction began in 1905 and was complete four years later. As a major undertaking in remote mountain country, with the creation of a new loch and the redirection of existing water courses, it was a forerunner of what was to come.

It also marked the end of a more primitive era: the Blackwater Dam, 3,000 feet long and 90 feet high, in its time the largest in Europe, was the last large construction project built by the hard labour, unassisted by machinery, of itinerant Irish navvies. What that was like was captured in Patrick MacGill’s novel, Children of the Dead End, first published in 1914 and based on the author’s own experience of wielding shovel and drilling hammer in the uninhabited, waterlogged wastes of Rannoch Moor. The Kinlochleven project also attracted a large number of labourers from the Hebrides, so many in fact that foremen or ‘gangers’ had to have a command of Gaelic.

The navvies lived in shacks with tarred canvas roofs and slept in bunks, sometimes shared by three men, arranged in tiers around the flimsy walls. Cooking was done in frying pans on a stove in the centre of the muddy floor, and light was provided by naptha-burning lamps. There was almost no law and order among the 3,000 workers beyond what men could exert with their fists, and the only diversions were drinking and gambling. It was less a life than an existence. The highest paid workers, the hammermen, earned sixpence an hour, with rises to sevenpence-ha’penny for overtime and ninepence on Sundays. Drilling the rock was done by teams of five: one man, the holder, sat gripping the steel drill between his knees while his four companions struck it in rotation with sledgehammers until they had driven a hole four or five feet deep. Dynamite was then packed in the hole and the rock blown apart. ‘We spoke of waterworks’, wrote MacGill, ‘but only the contractors knew what the work was intended for. We did not know, and we did not care.’ MacGill also recorded how life in the camp rolled relentlesly and violently on without contact with the native Highlanders: the navvies were ‘outcasts ... despised ... rejected ... forgotten’. A small graveyard with cement tombstones lies on a hillock a little to the west of the dam, the last resting place of some twenty of the navvies. The work camps associated with the later hydro-electric schemes had their share of violence, drinking and gambling but they were a world away from what MacGill and his mates endured.⁸

The First World War brought about a massive rise in the demand for aluminium and the Blackwater Reservoir had to be expanded to cope with the extra electricity requirement. Five hundred British troops and 1,200 German prisoners of war were brought in to build a five-mile aqueduct to lead water from Loch Eilde Mhor into the Blackwater. The British Aluminium Company set in train another development in 1924. Called the Lochaber project, it continued until the end of 1943. The main elements of this scheme were a 900-foot dam to divert water from the upper reaches of the Spey into Loch Laggan which, in turn, fed water through a tunnel to Loch Treig. A fifteen-foot diameter pressure tunnel was driven fifteen miles under the Ben Nevis massif to emerge at the head of a steel pipeline 600 feet above a power station in Fort William. The original plan to build an extra power station at Kinlochleven had to be shelved when Inverness County Council, in whose territory lay the Spey and the Laggan, refused to allow its resources to be piped across the county boundary to Kinlochleven in Argyllshire.

There were several schemes in the 1920s and 1930s to generate power for public use. The Clyde Valley Company’s power stations on the Falls of Clyde opened in 1926. The chief technical engineer on this scheme was Edward MacColl who was later to bring his expertise to the Hydro Board. A larger scheme in Galloway was built between 1931 and 1936. In the Highlands, the main effort was made by the Grampian Electricity Supply Company (acquired by the Scottish Power Company Ltd in 1927) and involved tapping Lochs Ericht, Rannoch and Tummel, with extra feed from Lochs Seilich and Garry, to generate electricity to serve a wide area of the central, southern Highlands and the Central Belt. The power stations opened in 1930 and 1933. The hydro-electric schemes of the interwar years established the pattern that was to be followed after 1945. They all employed large numbers of men – for example, 3,000 at the height of the Lochaber project – who lived in work camps and used technology to allow them to build and drill in the harsh landscape. Compressed air drills were deployed on boring out the pressure tunnel under Ben Nevis, and the workers had electrical power from a temporary generating station on the River Spean.

The Grampian scheme showed how Highland water could be harnessed for the public good and the Cooper Committee, sitting during the early years of the Second World War, looked with approval on its achievement. Not everybody was happy about the ambitions of the Grampian company and when, in 1929, they first put forward plans to develop the waters of the river system that discharged through the Beauly River into the Beauly Firth they met with considerable opposition. This plan would have involved the lochs of Affric, Mullardoch and Monar but it was rejected by the House of Lords, after strong arguments from A. M. MacEwan, the Provost of Inverness, and the Mining Association. Their combined opposition was based on the destruction of the beauty of this area of the Highlands and the fact that there were not enough consumers to benefit from the power to be generated.

Inverness had considered in 1921 accepting an extension of the power output from Loch Luichart to supply the town but the costs, estimated to be in the region of £230,000, made them cautious.⁹ At that time there was not considered to be enough of a demand for electricity to justify the expenditure. A few years later the Town Council plumped for a turbine and generator installed in the Caledonian Canal on the southern outskirts of the town and, in 1926, this municipal initiative came on stream so successfully that in its first ten months it made a net profit of £7,000¹⁰ and enabled the steam-powered generating plant in the town centre to be closed down at certain periods.

Throughout the interwar years private companies supplied electricity to several areas. For example, the Ross-shire Electric Supply Company, the firm founded in 1903 by Colonel Blunt-Mackenzie, had a transmission line running north up the Moray Firth seaboard from its generating station at Loch Luichart in Strathconon through Dingwall and the Easter Ross towns as far as Dornoch in Sutherland, where there was a switch-on ceremony in March 1933. John Murray, the Provost of the small Royal burgh, presided at the ceremony to which, in view of the short notice, a large crowd had been summoned by the town crier and his bell. The Provost’s wife pressed the button to switch on six lamps: these shone with a ‘cheery, mellow light while ... the street lamps shone forth in all their brilliance’.¹¹ A steam power station had been established in Perth in 1901 and was taken over by the Grampian company in 1933. Other small firms ran local generating plants in such towns as Crieff and Dunblane. In the south-west Highlands, there were private or municipal supplies in Campbeltown, Ardrishaig, Dunoon, Oban, Tobermory and a few other centres. A small plant had been installed at Gorten to supply Acharacle and Salen on the Ardnamurchan peninsula by K. M. Clark, the landowner, in 1928; this system remained in private hands until the mid-1950s when, in a sadly deteriorating condition, it was taken over by the Hydro Board.

Each proposed hydro-electric scheme had to receive parliamentary approval and it was during the lengthy process of consideration at Westminster that opponents could deliver the fatal thrust to kill a scheme dead. There were strong interests against hydro-electric power. The coal industry, Highland landowners and sportsmen made an unlikely but effective alliance against hydro-electricity. Some MPs and local authorities also voiced their objections, often basing their opposition on the perception of the schemes as simply another way in which Highland resources were to be exploited by lowlanders. If a private firm received the go-ahead for such a scheme, stated the Inverness Courier, the town would be deprived of ‘valuable rights which are legally and morally hers’ and referred to the support for the schemes from Fort William Town Council and the Lochaber Labour Party as ‘base treachery’.¹² Some MPs argued for the schemes, acknowledging the growing importance of tourism and the need to conserve the landscape but also recognising that the Highlanders needed some industry to provide employment. In April 1938, when the Caledonian Power scheme, the latest proposal to develop the water power resources in Glen Affric, failed to survive the Second Reading in the House of Commons, the Inverness Courier printed a triumphant editorial: ‘The opponents of [the Bill] have been falsely represented as being opposed to the development of water power and the introduction of industry in every shape and form. Nothing could be further from the truth. What we ... maintain is that there shall be no further development of the water power resources of the Highlands until a Committee is set up by the Government to enquire into [how] ... these water resources should be developed for the benefit of the Highlands.’¹³

The leader writer was presumably the Courier’s editor, Dr Evan Barron, whom we shall meet again. He could not have foreseen that in just a few years such a Committee would get down to business, thanks to the foresight and drive of one man.

Tom Johnston was both a socialist and an unrepentantly patriotic Scot. On the ship taking him and other British journalists to Russia for a tour of the Soviet state in 1934, he wore a Kilmarnock bonnet to declare, as he put it, his ‘national status’ (although he resisted appeals to do the Highland Fling). Born in Kirkintilloch in 1881, Johnston joined a cousin’s printing and journalism business in Glasgow and launched the socialist weekly Forward in 1906. At the same time he cut his political teeth in local government, implementing innovative projects in adult education and municipal finance. In 1909, he published a scorching attack on the aristocracy in Our Scots Noble Families, a title dripping in irony as Johnston aimed to show how the prominent landowning dynasties had reached their eminent positions through robbery and fraud. The book was to prove to be an embarrassment to him later,¹⁴ but it established him on the political stage and by the end of the First World War he was a leading figure in Labour politics. In 1922 he was elected as the Independent Labour Member of Parliament for West Stirlingshire but he lost the seat within two years when Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour government fell to the Conservatives. A by-election a few weeks later brought Johnston back to the House of Commons; and in Ramsay MacDonald’s second Labour administration between 1929 and 1931, Johnston briefly held Cabinet rank. He was returned to Westminster again in 1935.

On the outbreak of the War in 1939, Johnston was appointed Regional [sic] Commissioner for Civil Defence in Scotland. Then, in February 1941, Winston Churchill summoned him to Downing Street. The Prime Minister had already tried to persuade the craggy Johnston to accept a London post but now he had another plan. Johnston compared an interview with Churchill to being like a rabbit before a boa constrictor. When the Scot said he wanted to get out of politics to write history, Churchill gave a disdainful snort and said Johnston should join him and ‘help ... make history’. The Prime Minister then laid his cards on the table: he wanted Johnston to be Secretary of State for Scotland. If Johnston felt himself to be like a rabbit, he remained a canny rabbit and agreed to take the post on certain conditions. The most important of these was that he could try out a Council of State comprising all five surviving former Secretaries of State and that whenever they agreed on a Scottish issue Johnston could look to Churchill for backing.

‘I’ll look sympathetically upon anything about which Scotland is unanimous,’ Johnston records the Prime Minister as saying. ‘What next?’

Johnston said he wanted no payment for the job as long as the War lasted. ‘Right!’ agreed Churchill. ‘Nobody can prevent you taking nothing.’

Johnston said later that he was ‘bundled out, a little bewildered’, and miserable at the thought of the commuting he would have to endure between London and his beloved homeland; but he was also pleased that he had been given a unique opportunity ‘to inaugurate some large-scale reforms ... which ... might mean Scotia Resurgent’. As he strode down Whitehall he was already listing the projects he was itching to start, and they included ‘a jolly good try at a public corporation on a non-profit basis to harness Highland water power for electricity’.¹⁵

No one can be sure of the reasons for Churchill’s choice of Johnston as Secretary of State. It is tempting to speculate that it may have stemmed from the Prime Minister’s memory of the First World War and the Red Clydesiders but there is no evidence for this. Although he had never shared all the extreme left-wing views of some of the Red Clydesiders, Johnston had been a leading radical voice in that troubled time but had become more moderate since election to Westminster. Churchill may have been attracted by this poacher-turned-gamekeeper side to Johnston’s career but he would also have known that Johnston was a highly respected man north of the border and was well equipped to keep the home fires loyally burning.¹⁶

Johnston’s Council of State was officially named the Scottish Advisory Council of ex-Secretaries. The other members were Lord Alness, Sir Archibald Sinclair, Sir John Colville (later Lord Clydesmuir), Walter Elliot and Ernest Brown, and, by Johnston’s account, they got on well, despite representing widely varying points on the political spectrum, and proposed projects and reforms in quick succession that laid the basis for postwar reconstruction in Scotland in a broad sweep of public life.

In 1938 Johnston had voted against the Caledonian Power scheme, sharing the opinion of many Highlanders that a private firm should not be allowed to take over a national resource. A Grampian company scheme for Glen Affric was again voted down in the House of Commons in September 1941; at the same time Johnston announced that the government had its own plans in train.¹⁷ Johnston’s view of hydro-electricity, in keeping with his socialist principles, was that public resources should be handled by publicly owned corporations. He had been impressed by the work of the Tennessee Valley Authority in the United States. The TVA, a government agency with the flexibility of a private corporation, was one of the most innovative ideas to emerge from the desk of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in his New Deal aimed to raise the American economy from the depths of the Depression. In the early 1930s, the valley of the Tennessee River was suffering severely from soil erosion and falling fertility, impoverishing thousands of farmers along its banks. As part of an integrated approach to the restoration of the area, the TVA built hydro-electric dams to provide power and control flooding, and integrated power generation into the rural landscape. It was an attractive model for what could be done in the Highlands.

The Cooper Committee was appointed in October 1941 to consider anew the potential for hydro-electricity generation in the Highlands. This body’s official name was the Committee on Hydro-Electric Development in Scotland but it quickly became known by the name of its chairman, Baron Cooper of Culross. Thomas Mackay Cooper, son of an Edinburgh burgh engineer and a Caithness mother, had risen high in public service since graduating in law from Edinburgh University: he had been awarded the OBE in 1920 for his work in the War Trade Department, won the West Edinburgh parliamentary seat as a Tory in 1935, became a judge in June 1941 and was now Lord Justice General of Scotland. He was a firm supporter of Scots law and in one of his legal judgments had questioned the sovereignty of Westminster in relation to the Treaty of Union; this patriotic streak, as well as his intellect and his capacity for hard work, probably appealed to Tom Johnston.¹⁸

The other members of the Cooper Committee were the Viscount, William Douglas Weir, whose family background encompassed an engineering firm in Glasgow and who had served on the committee that devised Britain’s national grid in the 1920s; Neil Beaton, the chairman of the Scottish Cooperative Wholesale Society and the son of a Sutherland shepherd; James Williamson, the chief civil engineer with the consultants to the construction of the Galloway hydro-electric scheme in the 1930s; and John A. Cameron of the Land Court.

Although ‘handicapped by war conditions’, the Committee examined every aspect of its remit throughout the first half of 1942. It combed through existing data, records and reports (the Snell Committee at the end of the First World War and the Hilleary Committee in the late 1930s had already considered hydro-electricity development in Britain). It also consulted the Electricity Commission, the Central Electricity Board, local authorities, power companies, industry, fishery boards, estate owners and representatives of a wide range of miscellaneous bodies, including the Royal Scottish Automobile Club and the Saltire Society. At the beginning Lord Cooper was sceptical of the Committee’s ability to come up with much to supersede earlier work but, as the data accumulated, he became an increasingly enthusiastic supporter of hydro-electricity.

On its peregrination around the country, the Committee met Evan Barron, the editor of the Inverness Courier, in his office in the newspaper building on the east bank of the Ness; and Barron impressed on them the need for a quid pro quo if Highland water were to be harnessed.¹⁹ In their final report, the Cooper Committee recognised that the ‘portion of the area popularly designated the Highlands has for long been a depressed area and will remain so unless vigorous and farsighted remedial action is taken in hand without delay’. The Committee looked long and hard at not only the potential for hydro-electric development in the Highlands but also at some of the likely results of such development. To those who objected on what was then called ‘amenity grounds’, the Committee retorted sharply that ‘If it is desired to preserve the natural features of the Highlands unchanged in all time coming for the benefit of those holiday makers who wish to contemplate them in their natural state during the comparatively brief season imposed by the climatic conditions, then the logical outcome ... would be to convert the greater part ... into a national park and to sterilise it in perpetuity, providing a few “reservations” in which the dwindling remnants of the native population could for a time ... reside until they eventually became extinct’.

‘We accordingly recommend’, wrote Lord Cooper and his colleagues, ‘that there should be created a new public service corporation called the North Scotland Hydro-Electric Board’ to be responsible for the generation, transmission and supply of power in all the parts of the Highlands currently outside the ‘limits of existing undertakers’. (In time, with the nationalisation of electricity in 1948, the whole of the Highlands and Islands came under the aegis of the Board.)

As the Cooper Committee had been gathering its evidence, Tom Johnston had asked Evan Barron to come down to St Andrew’s House to talk about how hydro-electricity might be made acceptable in the Highlands. Barron was ill at the time and sent a member of his staff with a written summary of his views. Such was the weight given to Barron’s opinion that his submission was included in the final Bill almost word for word. Although the Courier editor was politically much further to the right than the Secretary of State, the two men respected each other highly and maintained a close friendship.²⁰

Barron repeated his assertion that Highlanders would agree to hydroelectricity development only if they were to benefit directly from this surrender of their resources. Johnston responded by passing to Barron a draft copy of the Cooper Committee’s report with the warning not to publish it: Johnston is reported to have said, ‘If anything appears about the Cooper report before Parliament gets it, Scotland will have another secretary of state next week.’²¹

Barron said nothing publicly until, three days after Johnston had laid the Cooper Report before the House of Commons on 15 December 1942, he was able to welcome it in an editorial.²² In a long leader in the issue of the Courier on 23 January 1943, he broke from his usual comments on the progress of the War to give his opinion of the Hydro-Electric Development (Scotland) Bill under the headline, ‘Hope for the Highlands’. The introduction of the Bill based on the Cooper Committee findings, he wrote, ‘is the most hopeful thing for the Highlands which has happened for many a day’. Although the Cooper Report had included many ‘mis-statements and misconceptions’ it was the final recommendations included in the Bill that mattered and these, in Barron’s opinion, conceded ‘practically all we had fought for for twenty-five years’. The water resources of the Highlands were to be developed in the interests of the native Highlander. Barron dismissed the objections raised in editorials of other newspapers such as The Scotsman, which he saw as being the voice of Big Business, and called on Highlanders to see that the Bill became law more or less as it stood and put their water resources ‘forever beyond the reach of the clutching hands’ of outside companies. Now, said the Courier, the State had the chance to undo the illtreatment meted out to the region for the last 150 years and, reminding the Secretary of State of the service to the nation being rendered by the 51st Division, at that time slogging through the African desert, declared the passing of the Bill was not a favour but the fulfilment of a duty.²³

The Bill recognised the broader role of the Board in what became known as the social clause: this stated that the profit from the sale of surplus electricity to the Central Electricity Board for the national grid would be ploughed back into reducing the costs of distributing power to the more remote, low-populated areas of the Highlands for ‘the economic development and social improvement’ of the region. In May 1943 the Courier was pleased to say that Tom Johnston had ‘earned the gratitude of all who love the Highlands and who believe they have a future as great and as noble as their past’.²⁴ After collecting a few minor amendments on its passage through Parliament, the Hydro-Electric Development (Scotland) Act became law in August. Writing of the opponents of the Act, Johnston returned to the rhetoric of his younger days:

I knew most of the nests from which the corbies would operate; the colliery owners had retired from the struggle, and their shareholders wanted no notice taken of the pit bings and so stopped talking about how the hydro schemes would destroy amenity. A few shameless twelfth of August shooting tourists, who themselves took care to live in the electrified south for eleven months in the year, moaned about the possible disappearance in the Highlands of the picturesque cruisie; and I had one deputation whose spokesman was sure we were engaged in a conspiracy to clear Glen Affric of its crofters and its sheep; in response to enquiries, he had not been up at Glen Affric himself, and he really was surprised to learn that there were neither crofters nor sheep in the Glen for these many years past.²⁵

In September the names of the first members of the Board were made public. The Earl of Airlie was appointed chairman, with Edward MacColl as deputy chairman and chief executive. After his success on the Falls of Clyde scheme, MacColl, whose forebears came from Melfert in Argyllshire, had been appointed engineer for the Central Scotland District of the Central Electricity Board and had overseen the construction of the first regional grid in Britain. He brought a vast experience of the technical aspects of electricity generation and distribution to the Board, and added to this formidable expertise a flair for innovation. The other three members were Neil Beaton, who had already served on the Cooper Committee; Hugh Mackenzie, the Provost of Inverness; and Walter Whigham, a director of the Bank of England and the representative of the Central Electricity Board. (Whigham was soon to resign through ill health and his place was filled by Sir Duncan Watson, a Scottish engineer.)

The Earl of Airlie seems at first glance to have been an unlikely choice for the figurehead of a new public corporation. He was the twelfth member of his family to hold the Airlie title, had been educated at Eton, had won the Military Cross in The Black Watch during the First World War, owned around 40,000 acres, was Lord Lieutenant of Angus, a member of Angus County Council and a staff officer at Scottish Command HQ. The good-natured Airlie had, however, been Tom Johnston’s second-in-command when he had been in charge of civil defence, and the two men obviously felt that they could work well together.

Two sub-committees of the Board were set up – the Amenity Committee under the chairmanship of Colonel the Hon Ian Campbell and including Lady MacGregor of MacGregor, the only woman in the upper echelons of the Board; and the Fisheries Committee with Colonel Sir D. W. Cameron of Lochiel in the chair. The registered office was established in Edinburgh, and the Lord Lyon King of Arms granted the Board its own coat of arms in 1944.The shield bore a winged thunderbolt emitting forked flashes of lightning suspended above a cruisie-lamp, the ancient form of domestic illumination. These symbols, encapsulating the Board’s aspirations, were supported by two rampant stags on either side of a fir tree and a rock from which water gushed. The motto was in Gaelic: Neart nan Gleann, the power of the glens.

Inverness Town Council organised a conference in August 1943 where representatives from all the Highland and Islands local authorities could discuss the implications of the new Act.²⁷ Fearing that once again Highland resources might be exploited for the benefit of others, the so-called Scottish Local Authorities Hydro-Electric General Committee that emerged from the conference resolved to ‘watch the interests of the area’.²⁸ For example, John Murray, the Provost of Dornoch, while calling for a bold policy to take advantage of the new source of energy and expressing confidence that industry would follow power, was concerned that the remote places wouldn’t be forgotten.²⁹

In March 1944, the Board published its development programme and listed no less than 102 projects, ranging in size from small local ones to giant schemes covering whole series of glens. At one end of the spectrum lay the streams draining into Loch nan Gillean, near Plockton, calculated to be capable of generating four million units (kilowatt-hours per year), the streams on Islay and Jura (five million units), two streams on the north side of Loch Nevis (five million units), and streams in Arisaig (six million units). The biggest schemes pinpointed the Affric-Beauly river system (440 million units), the Orrin-Conon and the Garry-Moriston systems (each 350 million units), and the Tummel-Garry system (300 million units).³⁰ It seemed as if every corner of the Highlands and Islands were included, from the burns on Shetland to those draining the Mull of Kintyre. The impressively ambitious programme recorded a total potential output of 6,274 million units of electricity per year, considerably more than the 4,000 million units per year estimated by the Cooper Committee. Edward MacColl pointed out in an address to the Institution of Engineers and Shipbuilders in Scotland that the programme did not include ‘a substantial amount of power still available in the form of high-head run-off schemes’ with little or no storage capacity in the form of lochs. He also conceded that not all the schemes in the list of 102 were economic ‘when compared with other means of producing power’, although in the future when coal became scarce or dear they might become viable.

The prospects were, however, exciting enough. ‘Just before the War finished, the Ministry of Information made a film to show how good it would be to have power in the Highlands,’ said Archie Chisholm, who was a schoolboy in Strathglass at the time. ‘I remember seeing the team coming to make part of the film. They had my grand-uncle, Jim Simpson, with a pair of Clydesdales and a horse plough ploughing up on a very barren bit of ground. This was supposed to show worthless ground that was to be recovered. We were all supposed to get power for nothing. The idea was that the people coming home from the War would get better things. Of course we had no power then; unless you lived on an estate where there was a wee water turbine or a generator, it was the Tilley lamp, double-wick lamps and candles.’

The Scottish branch of the Association of Scientific Workers, a body firmly in favour of centrally planned, publicly owned advancement, hailed the Board’s development programme by issuing a brochure Highland Power, which made direct reference to the Tennessee Valley Authority (‘one of the greatest sociological experiments of history’) and stated that the proposed developments offered ‘a golden opportunity to test a new approach to British social and economic problems’. Other bodies more concerned with what might result when a great concrete dam was thrown across a glen also soon made their voices heard. In the summer of 1944, the Association for the Preservation of Rural Scotland protested that areas of outstanding natural beauty, such as Glen Affric, Glen Garry and Loch Maree, should be safeguarded.³¹

The schemes in the counties of Perth, Dunbarton, Argyll and Inverness were already being surveyed and planned in the spring of 1944³² and the Board published the details of its first construction projects on 3 July. There were three – Loch Morar, Lochalsh and Loch Sloy, costing a total of £4.6 million and aimed at generating an estimated 136,000 units of electricity. Two were mainly of local significance: the Morar scheme proposed a dam and power station on the Morar river to provide power to the Mallaig and Morar area; and the Lochalsh scheme comprised a dam on the Allt Gleann Udalain and a power station near Nostie Bridge to meet local power needs. The third scheme, the one at Loch Sloy, was by far the largest of the three, a major enterprise involving the construction of a power station on the shore of Loch Lomond, four miles north of Tarbet, to be fed from a dam at Loch Sloy in the hills overlooking the outfall.

As 1944 wore on, opposition to the Board’s proposals grew louder and more public. Letters began to appear in newspapers. R. Gilmour probably spoke for many when he wrote from the Lochboisdale Hotel on South Uist to say that the Board’s intentions should be made ‘crystal clear’ to the people and that industrial factories were not desirable in the Highlands and Islands.³³ At a public meeting in Pitlochry, a motion was passed to express ‘grave concern’ about the proposals to create dams on the Tummel and the Garry and drown parts of the river valley.³⁴ A committee was formed to oppose the Tummel-Garry scheme; the charge that the large landowners in Perthshire lay behind the opposition was rebutted.³⁵ A few spoke up in support of the development, pointing out that a new loch might enhance rather than destroy the scenery, and someone using the sobriquet ‘Beauty Lover, Perth’ wrote ‘We want Scotland to be a place where we can get a job after the War’.³⁶ The Hydro-Electric Board Amenity Committee met the Pitlochry Amenities Preservation Committee in Fisher’s Hotel in the town to hear the local objections in detail, while other gatherings of the objectors took place in bars and hotels around the county.³⁷ The owners of the salmon fisheries appealed in vain to Perth Town Council for financial support in their campaign.³⁸ Perth County Council received a report on the likely effects of the scheme: Loch Tummel was predicted to rise seventeen feet and submerge 770 acres, some buildings would go under, and the new loch behind the proposed dam at Pitlochry would drown 165 acres.³⁹

The members of the Board took to the road on the public relations offensive. Edward MacColl protested that confidential Board information was being used by anti-hydro agitators.⁴⁰ In Pitlochry, Board member Neil Beaton declared that work on the schemes would employ 10,000–12,000 Scots in the construction phase, that the dams and power station would provide up to £30,000 per year to the Perthshire rates bill, that a permanent staff of fifty would work in Pitlochry, and that hydro-electric schemes had brought about a rise in tourism in the Tennessee Valley, Switzerland and other countries. Beaton also gave voice to a matter hanging in every mind in late 1944: ‘...What was the position of Scotland before the War? A large section of the people were unemployed ... Many of these were fighting and unfortunately dying that Scotland might continue to live in freedom. Were these brave men and women to come back to the old conditions ...?’⁴¹ Lord Galloway, the chairman of the Association for the Preservation of Rural Scotland, countered that the prewar hydro projects of the Grampian Electricity Company at Rannoch and Tummel Bridge had employed mainly Irish labour, that the rates bill would not counteract lost tourist revenue, and that the permanent jobs resulting from the Pitlochry works would not compensate the families whose land would be flooded.⁴²

The Local Authorities Committee was also raising doubts about the schemes. Some of these focused on who should control local water resources. Dunbarton County Council opposed the Loch Sloy scheme, the first Board project, because it might need Loch Sloy for domestic water.⁴³ Inverness County Council lamented the lack of information available from the Board on its plans for their area: a dispute between Inverness Town Council and the Board over who should have control over Loch Duntelchaig, whether the waters of this relatively small loch a few miles south of the town should be part of a hydro-electric scheme or reserved for domestic use, was to run for many months before it was settled in favour of the Council just before Christmas 1945.⁴⁴

In April 1945, the Board published its first Annual Report covering the period between its inception and December 1944, a modest eight-page document in a brown cover, priced 6d. It summarised the progress so far: the approval of the Development Scheme by the Electricity Commissioners and its confirmation by the Secretary of State; the collation of existing rainfall records – they were found to be inadequate; the establishing of automatic river flow recorders on the Tummel and the Conon, with observers taking manual readings on four more; the collection of geological data in relation to the siting of dams, power stations, tunnels and aqueducts; and the publication of the first constructional and distribution schemes. Surveys were proceeding on more distribution schemes as quickly as the wartime staff shortages would allow.

Under the heading ‘Future Policy’ the Report stated that all the schemes for the supply of ordinary consumers in the Board’s district appeared to be uneconomic. ‘In the aggregate, when they are carried out, the annual loss will be very large and it will have to be covered by profits earned in other directions.’ This meant selling electricity to the areas of high demand in the south. ‘Projects of the same exporting type as the Loch Sloy Scheme are required and are being prepared, which will harness the undeveloped resources of the Highlands and help to pay for the many uneconomic distribution schemes there, and to finance a “Grid” in the North of Scotland District.’ The intention to develop economic schemes before working on uneconomic ones for Highland use aroused the ire of some Board-watchers. It was against the terms of the Act’s social clause, in the opinion of the Inverness Courier,⁴⁵ which clearly stated the Highlands had first claim on power from the glens. Lord Airlie said power had to be made available to redevelop postwar Lowland industry but arguments that economic schemes had to have priority in order to subsidise the others cut little ice beyond the Highland Line and words such as ‘betrayal’ began to appear in the editorials of Highland newspapers.

In its first sixteen months, the Board’s total expenditure amounted to almost £137,000. This was met by temporary loans from Scottish banks. All during its life, the Board never received a penny in subsidy from public funds, as Tom Johnston and many others always stressed, although under the terms of the 1943 Act the Treasury guaranteed the Board’s borrowings.

Objections to the Sloy scheme, from local authorities and from individuals, forced the holding of a public inquiry which got down to work in Edinburgh between Christmas and Hogmanay in 1944, with John Cameron KC as chairman. To Cameron’s regret, the business took as long as six days (some later inquiries were to take considerably longer) but the outcome was a victory for the Board. In recommending that the scheme go ahead, Cameron did, however, remind the Board that it should be better prepared to argue its case in future. Dunbarton County Council’s objection that it might need Sloy for its own purposes was dismissed, along with other fears over the appearance of pipelines, the power station and spoil disposal.⁴⁶ As Secretary of State, Tom Johnston happily gave the scheme the green light and, after resting before Parliament for the statutory forty days, it became finally clear to proceed on 28 March 1945.

The strong feelings of opposition seem to have been assuaged somewhat by publication of the Board’s distribution schemes for Highland areas. The Gairloch-Aultbea distribution scheme, made public in December 1945, promised lines running from the power station on the River Kerry to bring electricity to some 1,500 people in an area of 180 square miles around Loch Maree and Loch Ewe.⁴⁷ Consumers within a reasonable distance of the power lines would be given free connection. The charges for electricity were likely to be 5d per unit for lighting, three farthings for cooking and heating and a halfpenny for other uses. The distribution scheme for Skye, published in February 1946, aimed to serve over 10,000 people in an area of 690 square miles, from a power station on the Bearreraig river and from a submarine cable across the Kyle of Lochalsh.⁴⁸

On 11 June 1945, Margaret Johnston, the Secretary of State’s wife, inaugurated the Loch Sloy scheme by cutting the ceremonial first sod on the site of the temporary diesel power station by Loch Lomond. In keeping with the scale of the enterprise, the ‘sod’ was a strip of turf twelve feet wide and 100 feet long, and the ‘spade’ was an eighteen-ton bulldozer rejoicing under the name of ‘Red Lichtie’.

The crucial factor in the viability of a hydro-electric scheme is the amount of water available and the vertical distance, the ‘head’, through which it can be induced to fall to reach the power turbines. The hills to the west of Loch Lomond had plenty of water in the 1940s. Around Loch Sloy, rain fell on average on 230 days in every year, to a measured annual depth of some 120 inches. The loch had been surveyed in 1937 and the results of this earlier investigation were revived and modified by the Board engineers in 1944. Before the work began, Loch Sloy was a modest mile or so long, a shallow body of brown, peaty water nestling 780 feet above sea level between the bare rocky slopes of Ben Vane and Ben Vorlich. Very few people lived in the surrounding hills. At the east end of the loch, a burn gushed out through a gorge suitable for a dam and coursed down to swell the Uglas Burn on its steep descent to Inveruglas Bay and the waters of Loch Lomond some 600 feet below. To swell the size of the primary reservoir, a series of tunnels and aqueducts were constructed to divert water from other burns in the surrounding moorland. Loch Sloy, originally enjoying a catchment area of six and a half squares miles, finished up draining some twenty-seven square miles spread over the hills where the three counties of Dunbarton, Argyll and Perth met. The loch rose 155 feet in height and doubled in length, making its surface at its maximum over 900 feet above the turbines it was designed to feed.

Preliminary work took up most of the first two years of the scheme. An access road was driven up the steep valley of the Uglas to the slopes of Ben Vorlich, where part of it around the east side earned the nickname of ‘the Burma road’. The camp and workshops had to be built, a bridge had to be put up to carry the West Highland railway line over the pipeline to the power station, a 3,600 kW diesel generator had to be installed to provide power for the construction. Portland cement was available only in bags, which took considerable handling. Sand had to be towed in barges up Loch Lomond from Balloch twenty-two miles away; and of course the sand had to be unloaded into five-ton lorries for the journey up the access road to the batching plant beside the dam. A conveyor-belt system was erected to carry crushed stone from a quarry on Ben Vane across 1.75 miles of rugged moor to the same batching plant. In the batching plant, the sand, cement and stone were mixed in careful quantities to produce the concrete that was then swung in ten-ton skips on an electrically driven overhead cableway to the site for pouring on the dam. All of this became standard procedure on future schemes.

The Tummel-Garry scheme was vital to the Board’s programme. Designed for a capacity of 150,000 kW, the scheme was to provide energy principally to the Central Electricity Board but also to the Grampian Company and the city of Aberdeen, all sources of revenue that would enable the Board to proceed with smaller, loss-making schemes. The public inquiry opened in the august surroundings of Parliament House, Edinburgh, on 25 April 1945, with John Cameron KC once again in the chair. On this occasion he had Sir Robert Bryce Walker and Major G. H. M. Broun-Lindsay to assist him. A procession of advocates represented the twenty-five formal objectors whose complaints were almost all on amenity grounds and subjected Board witnesses to searching and at times hostile questioning. The same level of antagonism had also been found ‘on the ground’. In Pitlochry only one hotel had been willing to offer accommodation to Board engineers when they were completing surveys. Lord Airlie was seen as a traitor to his class and his son was blackballed by the Perthshire Hunt.

Airlie lamented the parochial attitude of the objectors.⁵² He was severely shaken by the tone of the cross-examination he had to undergo at the hands of some of the lawyers. Edward MacColl was unfortunately too ill at the time to attend the Inquiry. Other Board representatives were subjected to hostile questioning. Tom Lawrie, the secretary of the Board, was asked if visitors to Pitlochry would be coming ‘to view your dam or to damn your view’. Lawrie said they would come anyway and reminded the Inquiry that the Tennessee Valley Authority schemes attracted two million tourists a year.⁵³ An advocate speaking on behalf of Atholl Properties Ltd regretted that the scenic beauty of Pitlochry would be converted into cash to provide electricity for Orkney.⁵⁴ Another, acting for the National Trust for Scotland, added two cutting lines to a well-known Jacobite song:

Cam ye by Atholl lad wi the philabeg,

Doon by the Tummel and banks o’ the Garry,

Saw ye the lads wi their bonnets and white cockades

Leaving their land to follow Prince Cherlie.

Saw ye the lads wi their cusecs and kilowatts

leaving the rivers defaced by Lord Airlie.⁵⁵

The Board stuck grimly to its guns and argued constantly that their plans for the Tummel-Garry were being carried out in the national public interest. The Inquiry dragged to a close just as VE Day was being celebrated and finally it was victory for the Board as well. Approval of the scheme finally came through towards the end of August when the Secretary of State released the order for the work to start.⁵⁶ Rumblings of opposition continued: Perth and Kinross County Council confirmed their resentment of it by twenty-eight votes to eleven in October 1945 and a motion was brought before Parliament a month later to annul the Secretary of State’s order. The latter was defeated, signalling it was now too late for the objectors to win the day.

The Board had bought the Fonab estate, where the dam was to be, and German prisoners of war had been drafted in to widen the roads and do some of the preliminary construction work.⁵⁷ All the activity seemed to jerk Pitlochry into ambition: it applied successfully for burgh status shortly afterwards⁵⁸ and gained a new twelve-acre recreation ground in 1948 at the Board’s expense to replace the one about to go under water, just as work was beginning beside the Tummel beyond Clunie Bridge. In 1949, an article in The Scots Magazine noted that the ‘more enterprising’ of the village’s hotel-keepers were drawing attention to their proximity to the hydro-electric scheme.⁵⁹

The psychological bruising he had received during the Public Inquiry proved too much for Lord Airlie. He probably realised that he did not have the power to protect the Board from its enemies and see its development programme to fruition, and he resigned after Tom Johnston agreed to become the chairman. The change of command took place on 1 April 1946. Johnston was to remain as unpaid chairman of the Board until 1959, years during which the organisation he had brought into being grew to become a major feature of Highland life.

The Countess of Airlie was the guest of honour at the inauguration of the Tummel-Garry scheme on 25 April 1947. Some three hundred people braved the snow and heavy rain to see the ceremony. The Vale of Atholl Pipe Band marched. Tom Johnston regretted the delay in the start of the scheme, pointed out yet again the benefits that would ensue (including £160,000’s worth of rates relief to Highland counties), and promised that the Board would do its best to get rid of the scars on the landscape. The Countess then set in motion a cement mixer to create the first foundation block for the new dam. A time capsule containing the front pages of that day’s newspapers, coins ranging in value from a ha’penny to half a crown, the Airlie coat of arms, a copy of the Hydro-Electric Development Act, and a description of the Tummel-Garry scheme, was prepared for entombment in the concrete. Provost McGlashan recalled how the Council and the Board had not been seeing eye to eye two years before and how he could hardly have imagined he would be speaking this day in the enemy camp. But that was the way in British public life, he said; opponents shook hands after a severe fight and became better friends than before. ‘We as a County Council have now established a most friendly relationship with the Board,’ he concluded.⁶⁰ The Perthshire Advertiser had already noted in a leader that the Scottish Tourist Board did not fear damage to amenity, adding wryly that this was possibly because its president was none other than Tom Johnston, before going on to state a belief that ‘even in their unbecoming infant shape’ the dam and the power station ‘will be an asset of tourism’.⁶¹

Hatchets buried in Perthshire, the Board moved on. Details of further construction schemes emerged apace from 16 Rothesay Terrace in the succeeding twenty years. In February 1945, along with the Tummel-Garry scheme, the Fannich scheme, the first of the developments set to take place in the centre of Ross-shire (costing £6.45 million) was announced; and in September 1946 the Affric-Cannich scheme (£4.8 million), so contentious before the War when it had been the subject of a private initiative, was laid before the public. In this new incarnation, Loch Affric itself was to be left untouched and the main reservoir for the scheme was to be made at Loch Mullardoch in Glen Cannich to the north. From Mullardoch a tunnel would lead the water down to Loch Benevean at the east end of Glen Affric. Benevean would be dammed but its level would rise only about twenty-five feet and it would not change much in appearance. The Benevean water would then be fed through a tunnel to a power station at Fasnakyle on the floor of Strath Glass. Although several properties would be drowned in the enlarged Loch Mullardoch, only one house in Glen Affric would be submerged, and generally the scheme met with wide approval. The Inverness Courier noted that two thousand men would be employed on the construction and that the County Council coffers would receive some £10,000 in rates instead of the paltry £300 the glens were affording at present.⁶²

In May 1946 Shinwell told the Cabinet his decision and, in the following January, the Bill for the nationalisation of the electricity generating industry established that the North of Scotland Hydro-Electric Board would be given responsibility for the whole of the north of Scotland, an area of 21,638 square miles with a population of 1,165,608 people and including the cities of Dundee and Aberdeen.⁶⁵ The Grampian Electricity Supply Company and all the smaller private and municipal generating operations would be swallowed by the Board, whose borrowing facilities were to be increased from £30 million to £100 million.

The debate over nationalisation was given extra point by the severity of the winter in 1947. Crippling frosts settled over the Highlands and ice floes with seals aboard were observed in the Beauly Firth. Electricity supplies from the coal-burning stations were disrupted, and troops were deployed in February to move coal from the pitheads. When the temperature in Perth dropped to 12°F, parts of the Tay froze and workmen had to resort to picks to break frozen snow from the pavements, the Perthshire Advertiser carried a leader on the vital importance of the hydro-electric schemes.⁶⁶ Schools were closed, travel was disrupted, the harbour at Perth froze into immobility, and fifty sheep died when a south-bound train was trapped by a blizzard at Dalwhinnie.

In the midst of this austerity and finger-pinching cold, the prospect of cheap, abundant electricity from their own lochs and rivers sent a wave of anticipation across the Highlands and Islands. The excitement was encouraged of course by the Board, who mounted exhibitions about the new source of energy and whose switch-on ceremonies were already becoming a familiar event in village life.

On Tuesday 6 May 1947, Lady Mackenzie, the wife of Sir Hugh, threw the switch at Kyleakin that provided a small part of Skye with its first public electricity supply. ‘Slowly but surely’, cheered the Inverness Courier, ‘electricity is being brought to remote glens and to the islands of the West, and that cannot fail to arrest depopulation and to make a positive contribution to the development of the Highlands.’⁶⁷ Sir Hugh said that his wife had asked him to appeal to ‘the ladies of Skye’ to make the best use of electricity. He also informed his audience that £2,000’s worth of electric cookers had been sold in Mallaig. Five houses in Kyleakin received electricity at once and more than twenty others were wired and eagerly waiting to be connected. Poles were being erected along the coast to bring current to Broadford. An exhibition of appliances was mounted for three days and a Miss Scott, described as the Board’s cookery demonstrator, showed the housewifes of Kyleakin how to use an electric cooker to grill steak and liver, and bake cheese scones, date slice and drop scones. The submarine cable from Kyle of Lochalsh was designed to bring power to 85 per cent of the Skye people but Edward MacColl happily announced after the opening ceremony that the Electricity Commissioners in London had just approved the Storr Lochs generating scheme. The details were published a month later. A dam was to be built at the north end of Loch Leathan, whence a pipe would convey the water to a power station near the mouth of the Bearreraig River. The project would cost £247,000 and would provide 5.5 million units per year to supply the island’s 10,500 inhabitants.

It was a moment for relaxation and celebration. The Board had survived the difficulties of its early years and could now get on with its aims. The shot heard in Strathglass that Friday could fairly be claimed to be the starting gun for the first major experiment in Highland development for many a long year.