It’s possible that the generation before my own had a blind faith in education. Especially the members of that generation who only got the minimum of it, like my mother, my father, my uncles and aunts. I had the chance they never had and I probably didn’t make the most of it. But I’ve a thesis brewing. What if you could combine their way of telling a story with the accurate details which come from research. Isn’t that what good history books are made of?
I’ve noticed, when some people get ill they tackle it by gathering information in a very systematic and determined way. When I realised that part of the delay in moving my mother into a house specially adapted for her was caused by pallets of brittle slates, I began to find out more about the material. The research was never put to test in a court of law. In fact it led me up a ladder. But it seems to have found a story. Here is our starting point.
Papers, 1902–93, of or concerning Dr Lachlan Grant MD
See archive in National Library of Scotland
Dr Lachlan Grant MD (1871–1945) was a Fellow of the Royal Faculty of Physicians and Surgeons, Glasgow. He was Medical Officer for Ballachulish and Kinlochleven, for a time. He was the founder of the Highland Development League in the 1930s.
There’s a wide gate across the wide mouth but it’s padlocked shut. You can get in through a smaller side gate, so folk can walk their dogs. There are warning notices about sticking to the path. Quarries are dangerous places. Even disused quarries. It’s pretty quiet in here now. There’s still a lot of slate. Even though twenty-eight million of them were cut and packed and shifted out. There was serious money to be made from quality building materials. As long as you kept your overheads down. And of course if your workers kept their heads down.
Then there was the iron. Iron’s a quality material as well. Corrugated iron is a bit of a rival material to slate. Victoria’s Albert had a serious interest in the material, hence the tin ballroom at Balmoral.
The grading of slates is a skilled job. Remember how the blueberry Penrhyn, one of the Welsh products, is graded by weight. So these are passed in piles, heavies, mediums, lights, as you go on up the pitch. To the apex of the roof.
The softer, saltier Easdale and the hard black fruits of Ballachulish – you work these Scottish varieties in a different way. So the long ones are down low and they get shorter as you climb towards the apex. And there are cheek nails here and there to keep them from pivoting on the single top nail. You get short heavies here and there near the top. It’s what gives it character. All these fine Church of Scotland houses. The Mission House at Kinloch Resort and the one at Uidhe Bay, Taransay, that’s Ballachulish. The Telford manses at Aignish and on the former Island of Berneray, which is now connected by a causeway to North Uist.
The slate lasts longer than the nails. The sarking – the wooden slats under the felt – will normally fail before stone. This structure makes a bed for Scottish slate. In England, they usually nail slate on battens. The ventilation is better but they rattle more.
The cutters worked in basic shelters. A sheet of corrugated iron was pinned to a few spars of timber to give them the most basic roof, while the blasting went on. (If that’s not irony, what is?) That’s how they broke into the mountain. The dynamite would bring down manageable slabs. Stuff they could work with. It would rain stones after a blast. They’d get used to it, swinging their own cutting knives, when all that was going on. Counting out their own slates.
Seated in the dust, in their moleskin trousers. They would swing the slating knife at the slab where they sensed the seam ran. Then they split and trimmed each individual slate. One man might cut two thousand of them in a day. Enough for half a cottage roof. He needed to keep that pace up, to get a wage. Rain was welcomed. It would dampen the dust.
Of course there were injuries. I wouldn’t say they didn’t blink an eye, when that happened, but injuries were common. Even if they escaped unscathed, the workers were prone to illnesses, caused by these conditions. It wasn’t healthy, working in damp and dust, swinging heavy tools. That’s what they did in Siberia and that’s the sort of programme the refined architect, Herr Speer, organised for the Third Reich.
It was about the turn of a century. 1900. A good time for engineering. That’s the year they completed the lighthouse out on the Flannans. They were doing things that just didn’t seem possible. But there was a cost in illnesses and injuries. Working men were learning to get organised. But very few employers were willing to eat into their profit margin to help the march of social progress. So they just had to organise themselves. Dr Grant was not employed by the quarry owners. They were not far-sighted enough to see that the health of the workers was in their own interests.
The doctor would ask what was causing the coughs, the accidents. So he’d be worrying away at the company, negotiating improvements. They got fed up of him. So some bright spark decided they’d sack him. But how do you sack a man you don’t employ?
We’re speaking about a company that made its own rules. You couldn’t just club together and buy a job-lot of tools. That wasn’t allowed. You’d to supply your own but you’d to buy them from the company.
Dr Lachlan wasn’t happy with any of that. He and the men became a strong team. When the company tried to exclude the doctor employed by their workers, the men all pulled together. It was a very early example of the lock-out. They took the bread out of their own mouths. But they couldn’t hold out alone. And the doctor did his bit, writing for the campaign. The boys from the Clyde, they backed the quarry-workers. One day there was a visit from another man in a suit. His name was Keir Hardy.
They won but that’s not the end of this story. This was not just about one quarry, gaining acceptance of one doctor’s right to be there. Dr Grant broadened out the aims. The Highland Development League, the start of an idea for a Health Service – an entitlement not a favour – he was a leading light there.
I might have taken this research a bit further. As it stands, this is only an approach to a line of investigation. I was getting hungry for the details – the data that hints at the story. But I got wind of another cove doing a book on the same subject. Now I do realise that there is more than one work on the bureaucracy of the Third Reich, for example but the timing wasn’t great either. There was a completion certificate to win and I’d need to organise my own working space. When I signed off watch I’d grab some rest then get up a ladder. I couldn’t get the image of the slate-splitters out of mind.
The past lives of workers, nibbling at slate. The crimps putting the pressure on, gradually, so the slate snapped in the right place. An art to it. Like everything else.
I recently helped place some of their work on a roof in SY in the year 2000. It should last longer than the member of the generation sheltered by it. And it should also outlast those who graded the slates and nailed them in place, for her, even though we used galvanised clouts rather than copper.