The dispossession of people in the Highlands has always had a high historical profile. In the Lowlands it is low to the point of virtual non-existence. It is ironic, therefore, that landlessness in relation to overall population of each region was considerably greater among the people of the Lowland countryside at the end of clearance than in the western Highlands and Islands. As the next chapter will show, the number of those with some stake in land, however tiny, as crofters and cottars, continued to grow in the north-west region throughout the entire cycle of mass clearance until the evictions mainly came to an end in the years after the potato famine of the later 1840s. The numerical and political significance of the crofters became clear in the 1880s when government set up a Royal Commission to investigate their conditions and then passed legislation in 1886 to protect their interests. Long before that time, however, the vast majority of rural Lowlanders were already bereft of land. Only in one region did the age-old connections survive. In the north-eastern counties of Aberdeen, Banff and Kincardine, as has been seen, landlords divided wastes, moors and hillsides above the line of cultivation into small crofts at no rental until economic returns were achieved. The lives of these crofting families was one of unremitting drudgery and hard toil for meagre returns. Some of them might well have been tenants and cottars who had lost land when dispossession gathered pace. It was said of some parishes in upper Banffshire, for example, that at first the new colonies of crofters were ‘mere specs of cultivated land in the midst of the great waste’. Eventually, however, whole areas came under regular cultivation without, so it was said, ‘costing the proprietor a penny’.1
In Aberdeenshire, by the 1880s, 43 per cent of holdings were at or under 100 acres; in Banff the figure was 49 per cent and in Moray and Nairn 40 per cent. Elsewhere in most of the south, especially across the eastern plain, the big farms reigned supreme. Only 4 per cent of holdings in Berwick, 5 per cent in East Lothian and 12 per cent in Fife and Kinross were less than 100 acres. The old world of subsistence husbandmen, multi-tenants and cottars had passed away into history in these districts to be replaced by enlarged compact farms, where full-time waged servants and labourers lived and worked. Landless tradesmen, formerly living in the fermetouns, with a few rigs of land, were now gathered in rural villages and country towns. Everywhere single blocks of land of varying size had taken the place of the traditional township clusters. These improved holdings were under the authority of one master with his family house, outbuildings for tools and storage, together with living space of different kinds for his workers, all within the same steading.
However, it would be wrong to conclude that these far-reaching changes atomized rural society and left it arid and devoid of human colour. The age-old institutions of kirk and school maintained their social centrality and connection with the past, as did the inns and howffs where the menfolk from different farms would gather for evenings of conviviality. As Robert Burns memorably recorded of one watering hole in Ayrshire in the late eighteenth century:
While we sit boozing at the nappy,
And getting fou and unco happy,
We think na on the lang Scots miles,
The mosses, waters, slaps and styles,
That lie between us and our hame,
Where sits our sulky sullen dame,
Gathering her brows like gathering storm,
Nursing her wrath to keep it warm.
[nappy – strong ale; fou – drunk; unco – very; mosses – marshes; slaps – steps; dame – wife]
Robert Burns, Tam O’Shanter, published 1791.
Also, the larger farm steadings were communities of families, ploughmen, labourers, foremen and single women, working both in the house and in the fields, which replicated something of the life of the fermetouns, though the people who laboured in them were now engaged as hired employees rather than landholding cottars or small independent husbandmen. Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s A Scots Quair (1932–4), his great trilogy of rural life set in the north-east Lowlands before and after the Great War, describes a society where neighbourliness remained very much part of the weft and woof of the countryside. Weddings, christenings and funerals were all collective events which drew in many people from far and wide. Neighbouring tenants and crofters supported one another when some were stricken by the misfortunes of bereavement, disability or financial loss. As the sons and daughters of the large families of the small tenants grew to adulthood they would take service as ploughmen and maid servants in other districts, so extending family networks far and wide. Gossip, good or bad, and plenty of it, was a popular source of news and rumour which helped bond the people together as well as sometimes fracturing relationships if the reputation of a family was shamed in the telling. In the long winter evenings in the kitchen or the bothy after a day’s work, there were stories and jokes to be told, singing to be enjoyed, making music with fiddle, bagpipe or melodeon, playing games and cards and ‘speeran guesses’ (posing riddles). Books were generally too expensive for the farm servant community until the later nineteenth century. But broadsheets and chapbooks were widely read, as was the remarkably popular People’s Journal, the biggest-selling periodical in Scotland among the working classes both in country and town for most of the nineteenth century.
The new rural world also had a rich popular culture. Many of the rituals and festivities of days gone by survived but also meshed with others which emerged in response to the different patterns of living and work after improvement. By the early nineteenth century, the twice-yearly hiring fairs were firmly established in the small towns and villages of the countryside. Apart from the serious business of gaining a fee for the next term, the fairs were great social occasions, a time to renew acquaintance with old friends from isolated farm steadings, enjoy the craic (good banter and chat), partake of a drink or two, and perhaps meet a new lad or lass. The ending of one year and the beginning of the next on 31 December and 1 January was a special time in rural and urban Scotland since it combined an inebriated wake for what had gone before with hopeful celebration of what was yet to come. Thanksgiving Sunday for a successful harvest, or hairst, usually took place in October and was also an important date in the farming calendar. Another event of great antiquity was the harvest home, or kirn, when the fields had all been shorn and grain stored for the year. The centrepiece of the kirn supper was the preparation of a distinctive concoction known as meal-and-ale. One recipe advised: ‘A bottle of stout, half a bottle of whisky and two bottles of brisk ale were poured into a large milk plate, and a bowlful of sugar stirred into it. The oatmeal was strown into the mess gently, till it was of the consistency of not too thin porridge’.2 Beef, fowl and plum-duff often followed until the tables were redded (cleared) and the dancing started, usually lasting into the wee small hours: ‘with many folk far from sober, and some of them under the table. Neighbours were invited, of course, and every farm had its meal-and-ale in turn. Once upon a day you could be worn out by the time they were all of them put past.’3
The daily lives of the farm servants, whether at work or leisure, took place under the watchful eye of the farmer or of his grieve (foreman), the so-called ‘iron men’ of the new agriculture. The working day for the horsemen began at 5 a.m. and, with hurried meal breaks, lasted until 6 p.m., or until darkness fell. In the larger farms the labour force resembled military regiments with their hierarchies, rules, predictable monotonies, set working hours and barrack-like living quarters: ‘there was a tyranny about the great touns; their men were as firmly shackled by the cry of a hungry beast or a week of fine weather as any modern factory hand to the punch-clock at the plant gate’.4 It was said that the unrelenting manual work in all weathers bred men who were hard and dour.
The daily cycle of their labours was well captured in one of the most famous ‘bothy ballads’ of the time, ‘Drumdelgie’:
Oh ken ye o’ Drumdelgie toon
Where a’ the crack lads go?
Sra’bogie braw in a’ her bouns
A bigger canna show
At five o’clock we quickly rise
And hurry doon the stair
It’s there to dorn oor horses,
Likewise to straik their hair
Syne, after workin’ half an hour,
To the kitchen each one goes;
It’s there to get oor breakfast
Which is generally brose
We’ve scarcely got our brose well supt
And g’en oor pints a tie
When the foreman cries, ‘Hullo, my lads
The hour is drawin’ nigh.’
At sax o’clock the mull’s put on,
To gie us a strait wark;
It tak’s four o’ us to mak’ to her,
Till we could wring oor sark
And when the water is put aff,
We hurry doon the stair,
To get some quarters through the fan,
Till daylicht does appear
When daylicht it begins to peep,
and the sky begins to clear,
The foreman he cries oot, ‘My lads,
Ye’ll stay nae langer here!
There’s sax o’ you’ll gae to the ploo,
And twa can ca’ the neeps;
And the owsen they’ll be aifter you,
Wi strae raips roon their queets.’
But when that we gyaun furth
And turnin’ oot tae yoke,
The snaw dang on sae thick and fast
That we were like to choke
The frost had been so very hard,
The ploo she widna go;
And sae oor cairtin’ days commenced
Among the frost and snaw.
Oor horses being but young and sma,
The shafts they didna fill,
And often needed the saiddler lad
To help them up the hill
But we will sing oor horses’ praise,
Though they be young and sma’;
For they outshine the neiper anes
That tip the road sae braw
Sae fare ye weel, Drumdelgie,
For I maun gang awa’;
Sae fare ye weel, Drumdelgie,
Your weety weather an a’.
Fare ye weel, Drumdelgie,
I bid ye a’ adieu;
I leave ye as I got ye –
A maist unceevil crew.
[ken – know; toun – farm steading; braw – fine; boun – bounds; corn – feed oats; straik – stroke; brose – oatmeal and water dish; pints – laces; mull – threshing or meal mill; wark – work; sark – shirt; oot – out; ploo – plough; sax – six; ca’ – carry; neeps – turnips; owsen – oxen; raips – ropes; queets – ankles; cairtin’ – carting; saidler lad – lad with a whip; neiper – neighbouring farm; maun – must; gang awa – go away; unceevil – uncivil; weety – wet; crew – work force of a farm]
The ballad vividly brings out the continuous round of hard toil from before dawn until dusk. Dressing and then eating a meagre breakfast was done in a hurry (‘pints’, or boot laces, not even being tied in the rush) under the watchful eye of the foreman. Even before dawn broke, the hour when labour in the fields usually started, there was still strenuous work to be done beforehand manning the barn-mill. The frost was so deep that the ploughs could not turn the earth but there were plenty of other outdoor tasks to be carried out while the snow storm lasted. It is hardly surprising given the unrelenting daily round that the ballad ends on a sour note which is very typical of the genre. Only the bond between the ploughman and his pair of ‘young and sma’ horses gives more of a glimmer of pleasure and contentment among the daily grind. The horses were fed and groomed before the ploughman had his own breakfast and though they might need the whip to climb the hill, he still proudly sings their praises as a better pair than any in the neighbouring farm.
Cottar families, the dominant social formation in the countryside before c.1750, had been entirely stripped out of the system by the early nineteenth century. Wage-earning married servants, hired for a year, and single male and female servants contracted for six months, now comprised the vast majority of the farm labour force. There had always been some landless servants in the fermetouns but their numbers now swelled into a great rural army which outnumbered all other workers. In the rich arable lands of the south-east region they were married men for the most part who lived with their families in small cottages within the farm steadings. The same class could also be found in other districts, but in most parts married horsemen were vastly outnumbered by the young bachelors who had come to their first jobs on the farms in their early teens. As men of skill and reputation, the ploughmen, fully trained after two years of apprenticeship, would doubtless have had a greater sense of pride in their work and status than Highland crofters scratching a living from poor land or toiling in the gathering and burning of seaware to make kelp in the islands and coasts of the north-west region. The ballads sing of their skills and reputation, as in ‘The Praise of Ploughmen’:
Ye lads and lasses a’ draw near,
I’m sure it will delight your ear
And as for me I’ll no be sweir
Tae sing the praise o’ ploughmen
The very King that wears the crown
The brethren of the sacred gown,
The Dukes and Lords of high renown,
Depend upon the ploughman.
The gardener he cries out wi’ speed
I’m sure I was the first man made,
And I was learned the gardener trade
Before there was a ploughman.
Oh gardener, lad, it’s true you say;
But how long gardener did you stay?
I’m sure it was just scarce a day
Ere y became a ploughman.
The standing of the horsemen in rural communities was burnished at the ploughing matches which became popular in the localities after improvement. Judges ‘would be looking for furrows as neat and as regularly set together as the pages of a book’ if they were to award a prize.5 A champion ploughman was a figure of high repute in his local area who could earn more than his fellows and be offered a higher fee at the next hiring fair. A ploughman also had a strong sense of craft pride, which was fortified and protected by initiation as a brother of the Horseman’s Word, a fraternal secret society based on Masonic ritual open only to those who worked with horses on the farm. The society originated in north-east Scotland, then spread throughout the Lowlands and eventually into England. At the conclusion of the ceremony of initiation, which took place at dead of night, the novice was given a secret word which, it was said, when merely whispered to a horse would make the animal compliant. Rumour also had it that the word was likely to have the same effect on young women. The penalties for those who revealed the secret to anyone outside the society were self-inflicted and awesome. The initiate promised:
So help me Lord to keep my secrets and perform my duties as a horseman. If I break any of them – even the last of them – I wish no less than to be done to me than my heart be torn from my breast by two wild horses, and my body quartered in four and swung on chains, and the wild birds of the air left to pick my bones, and these then taken down and buried in the sands of the sea, where the tide ebbs and flows twice every twenty four hours to show I am a deceiver of their faith. Amen.6
The horsemen might have seen themselves as the princes of the farm, but they could not function without the support of many other hands. Of crucial importance were women workers. By 1871 over a quarter of all permanent farm servants in Scotland were women, and they also formed the majority of the seasonal labour force at the busy times. The reliance on female labour was distinctively Scottish as nothing like the same dependency existed in the southern and Midland counties of England. By custom females were paid half the male wage. They carried out all the work of the farm except those which directly involved the management of horses: sowing, reaping, weeding, hoeing, singling and pulling turnips, gathering in the potato crop and spreading manure. Women had also a monopoly of milking and cheese making. Small family-run farms in the south-west region especially depended on the labour of wives and daughters. The lives of these women were likened by some observers to those of black slaves, so all-consuming were the hours of work and so tiny the pittance paid by fathers to unmarried daughters under the ‘tyranny of family labour’. It was said that women were such a significant part of the workforce because the heavy industries in Scotland of iron, steel, engineering and shipbuilding drew off so many men from the countryside to better-paid jobs in the towns and cities.
The ‘orra man’, or ‘other man’, was a master of all trades. He could plough, manage cattle and put his hand to the repair of the farm tools. During the busy season of grain and potato harvests, all the permanent servants were joined by day labourers from the villages, together with Irish and Highland migrants who came annually from much further afield. Then there were the shepherds, the ‘lonely men of the glens and the hills’. They were highly paid, their status and wages equalling those of the farm grieves, but they lived a life of lonely isolation for most of the year, and, if single, usually had only their faithful collies for company or perhaps from time to time a boy apprentice. The job was monotonous outside the busy times of lambing, dipping, shearing and the arduous task of smearing the sheep to protect them from parasites. But during harsh Scottish winters shepherding could become a dangerous occupation, when the men risked their own lives for the safety of their flocks. It was reported that on one fateful Sunday in the town of Moffat in the Borders, twelve shepherds who had died during severe blizzards were buried in the kirkyard on the same day. Being apart from society over many years could also take its toll: ‘In time he could take to drink, and his teeth blackened by long years of tobacco usage and a reliance on primitive hygiene; in his hill bothy he made his porridge once a week in the big bothy pot and then poured it into the drawer of a chest, it was said – there to be cut in cold slices when he needed it.’7
The first half of the nineteenth century was lotus time for the country tradesmen who were now detached from the steadings and lived in villages or plied their crafts in the neighbourhood of the farms. There had always been trades in the old style farming like millers, weavers and smiths. But improvement revolutionized demand for skilled men. First, iron replaced wood in countless small details, such as household utensils, hinges, locks and much more. The supply of timber also became more abundant. Wood sawn in straight angles and shapes was essential for the joiners who helped construct the new steadings and farm houses. Wooden fitments transformed house interiors with a hallan (partition or screen) at the door to reduce drafts, box beds, benches, seats, shelves, dressers. Iron-framed ploughs also hugely increased repair and construction work for country smiddies (blacksmith workshops). In this period, they became akin to small social centres to which the menfolk would gravitate to gossip and hear the latest local news. The cultivation of land by the work horses was an additional boon for the smiths as iron shoes had to be replaced at regular intervals. Following in the train of improvement was also a great rebuilding of the countryside. To function to best effect the steadings on the larger farms needed adequate barns, milkhouses, grain lofts, stabling and cart sheds. These works led to an unprecedented demand for masons and joiners as well as the supplying trades of sawmilling, brick and tile making, and quarrying. Only later in the nineteenth century did the good times tail off as transport development of road and rail helped businesses in the urban areas to colonize the countryside and undercut many small rural enterprises.
At the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the long boom which had sustained the huge wartime profits of British agriculture came to an abrupt end. After c.1812 there was a downward trend in grain prices, a marked fall in the wage levels of farm labourers and a visible increase in the numbers out of work on the land. Unemployment, initially caused by a temporary decline in the fortunes of the farming class, was then exacerbated by the postwar demobilization of large numbers of soldiers and sailors and a persistent natural increase in rural population. In some parts of the British countryside the labour markets rapidly became saturated, triggering desperate and violent disturbances of the labouring poor. The most threatening outbreaks were in the southern and eastern counties of England. Angry risings by farm labourers took place in East Anglia in 1816, again in the same region in 1822, all over the south and east of England in the famous ‘Captain Swing’ riots of 1830, and again, though more scattered, in 1831–4. Furthermore, these spectacular episodes were paralleled by the more common incidence of casual violence, of stacks being fired, of animals maimed and fences destroyed.
Protest also took place in a few parts of the Scottish Highlands, in rural Ireland and in Wales, but not in Lowland Scotland. The tranquillity of the region was noted by contemporary observers, who drew a contrast with overt unrest in other parts of Britain and also with the spirit of revolt coming to the surface in some of the towns and cities of the industrial west of Scotland which finally erupted in the ‘Radical War’ of 1820. As one East Lothian farmer commented in 1812:
during this season of scarcity and distress, when part of the labouring classes in other districts of the Kingdom, almost driven to desperation and madness by the want of employment and the high price of provisions have committed the greatest outrages against individuals and property, the lower orders in this district have sustained the pressures and hardships of the times with a degree of patience and regularity of conduct which entitle them to the highest confidence and respect from their superiors in rank and fortune.8
Again, during the difficult winter of 1817–18, the Justices of the Peace in the south-eastern Lowlands, after the most careful enquiry, found no evidence of any rise in social tension and agreed that there was therefore no need to appoint a single special constable. Kincardine magistrates reported somewhat smugly in 1820, the year of the disturbances by weavers and other workers in the south-west, that ‘there was scarcely a murmur to be heard, and our “little community” is too much of an agricultural cast for the spirit of radicalism to take root in it’.9 In the year 1830, William Cobbett, the English radical, came north to find out why the Scots were quiet while the English burnt the ricks. It was a good question and trying to answer it helps to bring out some of the distinctive features of rural Lowland society after the era of dispossession.
One salient contrast between the two regions was their differing systems of recruiting labour. By the end of the Napoleonic Wars, farm workers in the southern and eastern counties of England were paid and hired in a variety of ways depending on local custom and agrarian specialization. In general, however, the old system of long-hires and the tradition of boarding labourers within farms and paying them in kind had been abandoned. Instead, most workers by the early nineteenth century took their earnings on a daily or weekly basis. They had become a casualized labour force likely to be at risk from both short- and long-term unemployment. Furthermore, they were in the main hired from neighbouring local villages rather than boarded within the farm steadings. Increasingly these labourers were paid in money with only vestigial remains of traditional allowances in kind. In sum, a very significant number of farm workers in the south of England were accustomed to volatility in money wage-levels and to the direct impact of price changes on their material condition. Since they lived in villages with their fellows rather than in the farm steadings supervised by the masters they were also likely to be less amenable to the social discipline of the farming class.
In the Lowlands of Scotland the structure of labour payment and recruitment differed markedly. Payments in kind, though they varied in detail, still formed a very substantial part of the wage reward for most workers. In the south-eastern Lowlands and parts of the east-central district, as noted earlier, most permanent farm workers were married ploughmen, or hinds. As far as life’s necessities were concerned, they were insulated from the market when fee’d. The allowances of the hind included stipulated measures of oats, barley and pease, the keep of a cow and ground for planting potatoes. The rental of the cottage was paid for by the labour of his wife and daughters during harvest. Fuel was carted from town at the master’s expense and, by law, he was also obliged to provide for the hind for six weeks when he was unable to work because of ill-health. Single men and women servants, who were most common in the north-east and south-west Lowlands but were also important elsewhere, obtained board and lodging within the steading in addition to a cash wage. The system undeniably provided Scottish farm servants with an enviable security compared to their counterparts in southern England. They were guaranteed food and shelter according to familiar and acknowledged standards. But, crucially, these advantages were only provided for those who were employed.
The contract of service was also different north of the Border, with most farm workers hired for periods of a year or six months. This was caused in part by contrasts in the labour markets and agrarian structures of the two regions. Labour was in surplus by the end of the eighteenth century in southern England. The region had become an area of cereal monoculture and, as the acreage under the grain crops grew as a result of the wartime rise in prices, large fluctuations in the seasonal demand for labour developed in parallel. On the one hand, more workers than ever before were required at harvest; on the other, the widespread adoption of the threshing machine from the early nineteenth century took away a traditional winter task from men on the farm. Therefore, because of the marked differences in labour needs at different seasons, masters in the south and east had an incentive to eliminate the principle of the long-hire and instead take on men only when they needed them.
In the Scottish Lowlands, however, the tradition of long-hires was perpetuated because it fitted in so well with farmers’ needs. From the late eighteenth century, agriculture came into direct competition with manufacturing and mining for labour. Industrial and agrarian change proceeded simultaneously and, more importantly, often in close geographical proximity in the Lowlands. Indeed, most spinning and weaving of textiles took place in the countryside, while before the 1830s industrial and agricultural work were rarely wholly separate activities. But ironically it was precisely at this time that improved agriculture demanded a more specialist and dedicated labour force. Yet, because of the elimination of the cottars and the counter-attraction of the towns, the farming class found it increasingly difficult to maintain the necessary pool of extra workers. These varied pressures, therefore, not only forced a marked increase in agricultural money wages but also embedded the long-hire, at least in part, as a means of securing labour.
Shortage of workers, however, could not have been the only factor, because after 1815, when they became more plentiful, there was still no incentive to move towards casualization. An additional influence, therefore, was the impact of land and climate. Few areas in Scotland had either the soil conditions or the favourable weather of the great grain-growing districts of south-east England. Apart from commercial pastoralism in the hill country, mixed agriculture, fusing both cultivation and stock breeding, was the norm throughout most of the Lowlands. The regime needed abundant acreage under turnips and artificial grasses to feed cattle and sheep, and that in turn led to an extension in the working year because of the multiple tasks of weeding, dunging, singling and, most importantly, of intensive and regular ploughing associated with this crop sequence. In essence, then, the social effects of agrarian change in a mixed-farming region were almost the reverse of those in a specialist cereal zone. Since work was spread evenly throughout the year, farmers had a vested interest in recruiting labour over long periods.
This was vital anyway because of the crucial position of the horseman in the agricultural workforce in Scotland. As already shown, the key to the Scottish farmer’s policy of hiring was the need to use his work horses as economically as possible. Horses cost much in both feed and maintenance whether they were at work in the fields or unoccupied in the stables. It became essential, therefore, to spread work for the horses throughout the day and the year and to ensure they functioned as efficiently as possible when at work. Thus, each ploughman assumed responsibility for a pair and his entire routine from the early morning to evening was concerned with their preparation, working and final grooming. Experienced ploughmen had therefore to be permanent servants living in the farm steading near their horses and engaged on the long-hire. Furthermore, while giving security to the worker when in employment, these contracts also helped to reinforce the farmer’s powers of labour discipline. The hired servant was entirely dependent on his master during the period of contract and it was also suggested that the very personal interaction of bargaining between each of them at the feeing (hiring) markets made for an individualized relationship which weakened collective solidarity among farm workers. Doubtless, also, the custom of boarding unmarried servants in the steading and often feeding them in the farm kitchen made it much easier for the farmer to impose surveillance on them.
Only the bothymen were said to be less amenable to social control. They slept, ate, drank and passed their time off work in the evenings in rough and spartan barracks, or bothies. They had the reputation of being more detached from their employers than other workers and, so it was said, likely to be more restless and easily discontented. For instance, while Chartism in the 1830s seems to have had little appeal for Scottish farm workers in general, it did attract some adherents from the bothy districts. Also, in the same areas attempts had been made earlier to pursue action over grievances. In 1805, for example, an organization of farm servants in the Carse of Gowrie was suppressed under the Combination Acts. In 1830 the same area was agitated again. A meeting at Inchture, near Dundee, brought together around 600 ploughmen to be addressed by trade unionists from the city. A committee was elected to extend the movement throughout Perthshire and to press demands for an 8–10 hour day and payment of overtime. But the bothy system was not common in most farming regions in the Lowlands. It was virtually unknown in the south-east, and in the north-east bothies were rare outside the old red sandstone areas of southern Kincardine and parts of the coastal plain of Moray and Nairn. In the Carse of Gowrie in Perthshire, bothies were more numerous because there was a good deal of stiff, clay land requiring large numbers of horses and ploughmen to work the land and an obvious incentive therefore to build basic accommodation for single men.
Because the ploughmen were the specialist horsemen of the new agriculture, general labourers had to be brought in for other tasks such as harvesting or to carry out draining and ditching work, which became a rural obsession from the 1840s. Superficially, they bore a resemblance to the labourers of southern England; both were hired on a short-term basis and both were paid mainly in cash. Yet their intrinsic differences were more important than their apparent similarities. Day labourers in Scotland formed only a minor part of the workforce. In the 1790s, 20 per cent of agricultural workers in Dalmeny parish, Fife, were day labourers; 10 per cent in Gask, Perthshire; 7 per cent in Oldhamstocks, Berwick; 1 per cent in Auchentoul, Fife; 5 per cent in Barmie, Elgin; 11 per cent in Edzell, Forfar. Indeed, many of them were actually the wives and children of married male servants. In the south-east, for example, the cash wages of dependants formed a useful addition to the income of households paid in kind. Scottish farmers therefore did not have to keep a large pool of underemployed labourers in the fashion of southern England in order to meet the exceptional requirements of harvest time. The Highlands and Ireland provided a large and growing reserve army of seasonal workers, and the rest could usually be hired from neighbouring villages.
Most farm workers were therefore largely insulated from the volatility of the labour market because of the long-hire system, and this might help to explain the stability of the rural Lowlands in this period. However, this rests on the assumption that most workers on the land continued to find jobs in these years. Measurement of employment at any time before the late nineteenth century is difficult since there is little possibility of quantifying numbers in or out of work in precise terms because of the absence of suitable data. Nevertheless, some insights from the contemporary press and in parliamentary papers can help to provide a general profile of the labour market. An invaluable source until the later 1820s is the Farmer’s Magazine, which published very detailed quarterly reports on each agricultural region in Scotland. These not only provide full comment on prices and products, but also describe conditions of employment among various grades of farm labour.
From this evidence it would seem that after 1815 short-term unemployment was reported in 1817–18, 1821 and 1827, but little indication of the problem of structural unemployment which caused such misery in the rural areas of the south of England. Also, the severity of unemployment in these exceptional years varied both regionally and between different groups of workers. In the crisis years, in the south-east it was single servants hired on six-monthly contracts who usually went without a fee. That experience was much less common among married ploughmen, who formed a majority on most farms there. But the south-east was likely to be most vulnerable when grain prices collapsed from the wartime peaks because of its emphasis on cereal cultivation. Most other areas were in a more fortunate position. In the central district, which included the counties of Fife, Perth and Stirling, there was a more nuanced response. Few complaints were recorded that agricultural workers had much difficulty in finding jobs.
The contrast was even more striking between the pattern in the south-east and the north-eastern counties of Banff, Kincardine and Aberdeen. Here the more balanced agrarian structure and the development of land reclamation projects after 1815 ensured a greater vigour in the labour market than elsewhere. In 1816–17, for example, the north-east began to shed farm workers later than the south-east and to take on additional hands at an earlier stage, when the temporary crisis had begun to pass. Again, 1821 was a bad year in the south-east but hardly at all in Aberdeen and Banff. Throughout the period, indeed, half-yearly money wages for single male ploughmen in these latter counties were consistently 15–20 per cent higher than those offered in the Lothians and Berwickshire. Crucially, no evidence was recorded of the growth of a significant surplus of labour of the kind which caused social instability in southern England and, as will be seen in the next chapter, was also starting to emerge in the western Highlands and Islands as the bi-employments of military service, kelp burning and fishing during the Napoleonic Wars suffered protracted decline.
One of the reasons for the favourable equilibrium of jobs and labour in the rural Lowlands was the buoyancy of industry. The decline of linen spinning and stocking knitting in the countryside was compensated by a sustained expansion in linen weaving in the east-central districts. Weaving increasingly became a specialized activity, carried on mainly in rural villages rather than farm cottages, and so became a real alternative to agricultural work, since wages, although they fell after 1815, proved more resilient than in the cotton-weaving districts of the west. But probably even more important was the response of Scottish agriculture to the postwar depression in grain prices.
Lowland farming was better placed than the specialist wheat-producing regions of southern England. The range of crops grown, the significance of animal rearing and fattening, and the relative unimportance of wheat cultivation, except in the south-east, lent the agrarian system a versatility which regions of grain monoculture manifestly lacked. The grains commonly grown in the north, oats and barley, were notably less affected by the slump in prices than wheat. Between 1805 and 1812 the average annual price for wheat in the south-east zone, according to the Haddington fiars (annual grain price averages used to determine clerical stipends), was 85/- per quarter. Between 1813 and 1820 it fell by 7 per cent to 5/- per quarter. On the other hand, the decline in barley and oat prices was much less acute. Barley fell by about 9 per cent between 1813 and 1820 in relation to the average of 1805–12; oats by 1 per cent.
Scottish farmers had another basic advantage. Some of the money costs of agriculture were less onerous north of the border. There was no payment of tithes in kind: they could be valued and, when valued, did not afterwards increase. Poor Law assessments were still only a marginal and indirect burden on Scottish tenant farmers compared to southern England; landlords paid half the amount directly, and the remainder was passed on to their tenants. But as late as 1839 only 236 out of 900-odd parishes had assessments and the majority of these were to be found either in the south-east or in the growing towns and cities of the central belt. A more important cost, however, was labour, and here the continuation of payment in kind as an integral part of the total wage was again of considerable significance. When grain prices were depressed and pressures on cash resources increasing, it made economic sense to maintain in-kind rewards and so cut down on money outlays.
The resilience of the labour market, however, is still surprising. True, it was only much later in the nineteenth century that mechanical reapers and other key innovations started to replace some workers. Nonetheless, even earlier, improved agriculture did undeniably bring savings in labour costs. Ploughing was now carried out by single men and two horses. The threshing machine and the import of coal, instead of peat dug and dried on the farm, released many from old tasks. With the removal of the cottars, farmers also secured much more control over labourers and were able to force their concentration exclusively on farm work and so boost their productivity.
But while fewer hands might be needed for some tasks, in other aspects demand for workers continued to increase because of the more intensive cultivation of potatoes and barley. For the first time, from 1821–2 a major export trade developed in potatoes from the counties of Perth, Stirling, Angus and Kinross. The real agricultural potential of the north-east as a cattle-fattening region was also unlocked from the later 1820s as a result of the growth of steamship connections with London. Previously beasts destined for the southern market had had to be sold lean and under-priced. The Lothians and Berwick, where grain farming had always been of most significance, also began to move at this time towards a more closely integrated regime of arable cultivation and stock fattening.
All those developments, to a greater or lesser extent, soon led to an increased intensity of work on a given area of land. Employment expanded in the north-east because more acres were absorbed into cultivation by the draining of stiff, clay land and the extension of turnip husbandry. The impact of this development is clearly evident in wage rates. Money wages for single male servants in Aberdeenshire had reached a wartime peak of eight guineas per half year in 1810. By 1816 this figure had been sharply reduced to just over £4. Thereafter, however, the recovery became obvious. Rates rose to £6 in 1820, steadied around that figure until 1823, reached £7 by 1825 and remained at about that level until the early 1830s.
In the south-east, agrarian adjustment resulted in heavy investment in drainage schemes and generous additions of rape and bone dust to boost turnip yields. These advances had a visible impact on the job prospects of single female servants and day labourers. Female money wages in East Lothian and Berwick showed an impressive stability in spring and summer from about 1819. Indeed, between 1819 and 1825, Whitsun wage rates for women were actually higher than those for men on three occasions. This, of course, was as much a reflection of the demand for women domestics in nearby Edinburgh as proof of the more vigorous labour market in agriculture. The same qualification could not, however, be applied to male day labourers. Between 1815 and 1817 unemployment was acute among this group as investment plans were abruptly curtailed. But in the following decade day labourers apparently only encountered similar problems in 1827.
In the same postwar decades of the 1820s and 1830s being considered here, the people of the north-west Highlands and Islands had been caught in a contracting vice of an inexorable increase in population on the one hand and the collapse of the economic activities which had sustained them for a time before 1815 on the other. The future looked increasingly desperate, since only sheep farming seemed likely to have any prospect of profit. Landowners were also starting to agonize about how they could manage to rid their estates of the growing ‘surplus population’ of destitute people. The contrast with the experience of the communities in the rural Lowlands had now become stark in the extreme.
As in the crofting districts of the Highlands, the root cause of the social crisis in southern England was the emergence of a gross imbalance between a rising population and limited employment opportunities. Indeed, fewer labourers were leaving the agricultural districts of East Anglia, Suffolk, Surrey, Sussex, Middlesex, Kent and Hampshire precisely at the time when grain farming was itself in acute difficulty after the Napoleonic Wars. There was thus increasing pressure on the regional Poor Law at a time when farmers and landlords were less able or less willing to raise their rate subsidies to provide support. Indeed, the attempts to cut the Poor Law dole was a major factor in the discontent which triggered the ‘Captain Swing’ riots all over the south and east of England in 1830.
The demographic experience of the Lowlands in Scotland was again different. In the later eighteenth century, migration from the rural counties, although it had already begun, was occurring at a relatively slow pace. The safety valve of migration and emigration then became of much greater consequence in the nineteenth century. Indeed, between 1801 and 1851 many parishes in the Lowlands showed a net decline in numbers as the movement from country to town began to accelerate. The vital fact was that Lowland counties were able to shed potential surplus numbers more effectively than the southern regions of England or the Highlands. For example, the way labour was housed in some Lowland regions influenced the movement of younger workers. In districts where there were few others then employing farmers and unmarried servants, ploughmen had to come from a distance at their first engagement, and when they married might have to move on again because of the scarcity of family cottages. So in Perthshire the dependence on unmarried men was great enough to cause a drain from agricultural labour at the age of marriage. In the mid-nineteenth century between a quarter and a third of the men in that county who had been servants or agricultural labourers were likely to leave for some other occupation by the time they were thirty.
The labour structure in Perthshire was, however, almost unique. Of general significance throughout the Lowlands in promoting migration was the generalized Scottish system of hiring farm servants. The long-hire did offer security of employment for a time, but when it lapsed the majority of workers, and single men especially, tended to discharge themselves and venture to the hiring fairs in search of a better master, attractive conditions and more experience. The Scottish single farm servant was therefore habitually mobile, even if his movements were usually confined to a particular neighbourhood. Furthermore, the feeing market was a uniquely effective medium for relating the number of places to the number of potential servants needed by farmers for periods of between six months and a year. Those not hired at Whitsun (May) or Martinmas (November) were confronted with the prospect of seeking work elsewhere, not having a job for six months until the next fair, or trusting to the chance of being hired as day labourers and accepting the fall in status that implied. Unlike the cottars in the western Highlands it was impossible for them to find any other place on the land, because the iron rule applied in all Lowland leases was that any farmer who dared to subdivide his tenancy would suffer immediate eviction by the authorities of the estate. Nor could the rural unemployed, unlike their counterparts in England, necessarily depend on the Poor Law, because in Scotland the rights of the able-bodied, or the unemployed, to relief were not officially recognized. Moving from the parish of origin, therefore, did not imply a loss of ‘settlement’ rights as it did in southern England and where it acted as a deterrent to migration from that region. Those without a hire had no choice therefore but to move on, either to a village, a town or overseas, because in Lowland farm service the place where they ate, lived and slept always went with the job. The mechanism did not involve any form of direct eviction but was nonetheless a subtly effective system for limiting population congestion on the land.
Nevertheless, as far as migration was concerned, the positive lure of the towns and the opportunities which came from moving overseas should also not be underestimated. Towns and industrial areas more generally provided a greater range of jobs and often better wages than the humdrum life of farm service. Here was another striking parallel between the Scottish Highlands and the English south. In both regions, non-agricultural employment was shrinking in the early nineteenth century as manufacturing in England increasingly retreated to the coalfields of the north, and in Scotland concentrated in the central Lowlands. There were therefore few local alternatives in these two regions to draw rising population off the land. It might also be that as farmers imposed more discipline on their workers, urban places offered lives of more freedom and independence, especially for young adult migrants. A key feature of the Lowlands, unlike the western Highlands, was that few rural parishes were far from towns. The four great city hubs of Aberdeen, Dundee, Edinburgh and Glasgow were set some distances apart across the region, and each had its own distinctive pulling power in the immediate hinterlands of the north-east, central, south-east and western regions. By the census of 1871 one in five Scots lived in these cities; by 1851 it was more like one in three. The urban areas could only have grown fast by immigration because of the lethal effect of their high rates of mortality on natural increase. The majority of the new urban dwellers therefore had to come from the farms and villages of the rural districts. In 1851, for instance, Glasgow took 53 per cent of those not born in the city from Lowland sources, Edinburgh 66 per cent, Dundee 60 per cent and Aberdeen 80 per cent.
In the last quarter of the nineteenth century migration moved up another gear. Now the movement really did become a flight from the land. Between 1871 and 1911 the number of ploughmen and shepherds fell by more than a third and the decline in women workers was even more. It was the young of the rural world who were leaving in greatest number. One early-twentieth-century estimate suggested that half of all workers had left agricultural employment by their twenty-fifth birthday. What had begun as a trickle at the beginning of the nineteenth century had become a flood by its end.
Some of this exodus was caused by the ebbing away of industry from the countryside in later Victorian times. It should be remembered that much industrial activity was still rural-based as late as 1830. In the central Lowlands, and in some other districts, handloom weaving remained an important rural activity even up to the 1850s. Moreover, as already noted, a multitude of skilled trades had grown up as essential supports of improved agriculture. Country blacksmiths were necessary for the making and repairing of the new iron-framed ploughs. Horses replaced oxen in the later eighteenth century and had to be shod regularly, on average every six to eight weeks. The building and rebuilding of farm steadings with houses, byres, milkhouses, barns and stables took place in two main phases during the ‘High Farming’ of the 1850s and again, to a lesser extent, in the 1870s. This created demand on a large scale not only for the building trades but also for skills in quarrying, stone breaking, brick making and sawmilling. In addition, the new-style farming could not have been carried on without millers, joiners, masons, ditchers and dykers. Tailors, shoemakers (or ‘souters’) and country weavers served the needs of the labouring population. The signal importance of this range of trades is often forgotten when writers focus simply on ploughmen, women workers and bothymen.
But these trades were being steadily undermined by urban competition in the second half of the nineteenth century. Already by the 1850s, the technology of power looms was destroying the textile economy in numerous villages in Perth, Fife and Angus and promoting large-scale migration as a result. The development of a myriad of railway branch lines enabled cheap factory goods to be sold far into the rural districts, and so threatening traditional markets for tailors, shoemakers and other tradesmen. This displacement of craftsmen and their families from the smaller country towns and villages became a familiar feature of the rural outflow by the end of the nineteenth century. While some, such as the country shoemaker, vanished into oblivion, others, such as the blacksmiths, continued to thrive as long as the horse economy survived, and in some cases even diversified into agricultural engineering.
Attitudes were also changing among the farm workers. The structure of service in Lowland Scotland resulted in high levels of internal mobility in the countryside. ‘Flitting’ (moving) to another farm, usually in the same parish or county, at the end of the six-month or annual term was part of the way of life. The contract of employment meant that in law servants had only one or two opportunities to move in the year and that focused minds at the crucial periods when there was always the temptation to seek a place elsewhere for better wages, more experience or a change of surroundings. But the reasons for mobility were legion. When asked, one Lothians farm worker between the wars in the twentieth century answered tersely: ‘Possibly the neighbours, possibly the gaffer [foreman], possibly the farmer, possibly the horses. Maybe the horses came first if they didnae have a good pair of horse, or the harness wasn’t up to scratch.’10 For married men the costs of moving were low. A house came with the job and the new employer provided a few carts to move the family and their household belongings. Servants could carry their own locks with them when they flitted. An East Lothian writer noted in 1861 how one married ploughman’s door ‘was literally covered with keyholes, made to suit the size of the lock of each successive occupant’.11 Almost all this habitual movement was localized and over short distances, but it accustomed farm servant families to levels of mobility that could in certain circumstances encourage them to leave the land altogether for a new life elsewhere.
The relationship between the system of employment and migration was even more clear-cut in the case of single servants, the majority of regular workers in the Lowlands. At marriage they faced a stark choice, because in many areas there was a distinct lack of family cottages. Some could continue in agricultural employment as day labourers. In the north-east they might seek to return to the crofts from where many had originally come as young servants. But the number of smallholdings was too few to absorb those who left full-time employment on the farms in their mid-twenties, and anyway the possibility of such a move back to the land was mainly confined only to the north-east area of the Lowlands. Young ploughmen had also been accustomed to a nomadic life, regularly moving from one master to another. At marriage, therefore, many left the land altogether, went to the towns and tried other occupations.
This traditional exodus became a great haemorrhage from the later nineteenth century onwards. The towns and emigration overseas now exerted a magical appeal over the rural young. This was partly due to rising expectations as a result of better agricultural wage levels and the spread of urban values, following the construction of railway branch lines throughout the Lowlands. Life on the land had always been hard, but now many came to see it as intolerable when compared to the working conditions and social attractions of the towns. Before 1914 a ploughman would rise at 5 a.m. to feed and groom his horses, yoke them at 6 a.m. and work until six in the evening, with a break between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. The only holidays were Sundays, New Year’s Day and hiring days. The burden of work on the family farms of the south-west fell very heavily on women. One observer in 1820 called it ‘the slavery of family work’. Dairying near the cities involved very early rising, at about 2 or 3 a.m., because of the popular prejudice in favour of warm milk. Similarly, dairy women in upland farms needed to milk early to ensure that milk could be despatched to town by early-morning trains. Where milk was made into cheese there was, in the words of one commentator:
an enormous amount of continuous labouring, seven days a week during six to seven months in the year … I have seen the women folk on such farms at 3 o’clock in the afternoon in the same garb they had hurriedly donned between 3 and 4 o’clock in the morning, having been constantly toiling, one day succeeding another … it is usual for women on dairy farms to work sixteen hours per day, time for meals only being allowed for.12
Even the leisure activities of farm workers were dominated by work. The bothy ballads were mainly about work and the kirns that marked the end of the harvest season also celebrated work. Compared to the life of hard toil on the land, the town jobs of domestic servant, railway porter, policeman and carter seemed infinitely less demanding. Not only did they pay better than agricultural work in some instances, but they also had shorter hours, more leisure time, and freedom in the evenings and weekends from employers. In contrast, rural life had fewer social attractions. Scottish farm workers were dispersed in cottages, bothies and chaumers (sleeping quarters for single male farm servants, usually above the stables) in the steadings. Long hours and the habitual turnover of labour at the end of each term confined most social life to the occasional fair or agricultural show. The hunger for a more interesting life was confirmed when the Board of Agriculture helped to establish the Scottish Women’s Rural Institutes. They were an immediate success, despite initial male opposition, and five years later had 242 branches and a total membership of 14,000. But for many, and especially the young, this hunger could be fully satisfied only by moving off the land altogether. As the Royal Commission on Labour concluded in 1893:
there is much drudgery and very little excitement about the farm servant’s daily duties, and I believe the young men dislike the former and long for the latter. By the labourers themselves slight importance is attached to the healthy character of country life in comparison with various branches of town labour. That phase of the question sinks into insignificance in their estimation, and only the shorter hours, numerous holidays and ever present busy bustle and excitement of town life or the neat uniform and genteel work of the police constable or railway porter, are present to the mind of our young farm servant.13
A life of hard labour of the farms also had to increasingly compete with the attractions of life overseas. There could be found what was craved by both masters and men – the ownership of land. For both classes, independent status and owning land was impossible in Scotland. But the opportunities were abundant in North America, Australia and New Zealand. European migration to the New World had been under way from the period of the Discoveries in early-modern times, but in the second half of the nineteenth century the age of mass emigration began. This was not simply because of the voracious demand for labour in North America as both the American and Canadian economies experienced unprecedented expansion into new land. It was also made possible by the crumbling of two of the great constraints that had restricted emigration in the past, distance and cost of travel, both of which normally meant that leaving Europe for the Americas was likely to end in permanent exile. Also, the New World had long been seen by most Europeans as alien, covered by densely forested wildernesses where the risks and dangers far outweighed the opportunities.
Emigration, like all other aspects of human existence, was transformed by the transportation revolution of the nineteenth century. Although the cost of steamship travel was actually about a third higher than crossing by sailing ships, the new vessels radically increased speed, comfort and safety. In the 1850s it took six weeks to cross the Atlantic from the Clyde. By 1910 the average voyage time had fallen to around seven days. In the early 1860s, 45 per cent of transatlantic emigrants still left under sail. By 1870 all but a tiny minority crossed the Atlantic in steamships. By drastically cutting voyage times the steamship removed one of the major costs of emigration: the time between embarkation and settlement during which there was no possibility of earning. That also explains the increasing scale of return emigration. By 1900 it is estimated that around one third of those Scots who left came back sooner or later. Going to North America was no longer a once in a lifetime decision.
The steamship was the most dramatic and decisive advance but it was paralleled by the railway, which made it possible for emigrants to be quickly and easily transported from all areas through the national network to the port of embarkation. Agreements were commonly made between shipping and railway companies, allowing emigrants to be transported free to their port of departure. The expansion of the railroad in North America brought similar benefits. By the 1850s the completion of the Canadian canal network and the associated railway development facilitated access to the western USA by allowing emigrants to book their passage to Quebec and Hamilton and then by rail to Chicago. The links between steamships and railways led to the provision of the highly popular through-booking system by which emigrants could obtain a complete package, with a ticket purchased in Europe allowing travel to the final destination in America. The Chambers’ Journal in 1857 described it as a ‘prodigious convenience’ which would ‘rob emigration of its terrors and must set hundreds of families wandering’.
Some of the leading railway companies in Canada played a vigorous proactive role in the emigrant business. They recognized that the railway was not simply an easy and rapid mode of transport for new arrivals from Europe, but was also the most effective way of opening up the wilderness and prairie territories to permanent settlement. The mighty Canadian Pacific Railway Company (CPR) vigorously promoted emigration because of this. In 1880 it had been allocated 25 million acres of land between Winnipeg and the Rocky Mountains by the Dominion government. In order to generate profit, the company had to increase traffic through expanding areas of settlement, and to achieve that goal embarked on an aggressive marketing campaign in Britain designed to stimulate emigration to the prairies. Scotland was specifically targeted and agents of the CPR toured the country areas, giving lectures and providing information. The CPR even sought to limit the hardships of pioneering by providing ready-made farms in southern Alberta, with housing, barns and fences included as part of the sale.
A veritable explosion in the quality and quantity of information available to potential emigrants took place. The Emigrants’ Information Office opened in 1886 as a source of impartial advice and information on land grants, wages, living costs and passage rates. Circulars, handbooks and pamphlets were made available in greater volume and were valued because of their avowed objectivity. Even more important were local newspapers. The Aberdeen Journal was a significant vehicle for raising interest about emigration in the rural communities of the north-east. Advertisements for ships’ sailings, information on assisted passages, numerous letters from emigrants and articles on North American life were very regular features as the country population was relentlessly bombarded with all the facts about the emigration experience. Overseas governments and land companies also became more aggressive, professional and sophisticated in promoting emigration. In 1892, for instance, the Canadian government appointed two full-time agents in Scotland who undertook tours of markets, hiring fairs, agricultural shows and village halls. The illustrated lecture, using the magic lantern, was a favourite device. W. G. Stuart, the agent for the north, was even able to deliver his presentation in Gaelic if the audience asked for it.
From the 1870s to the Great War, the Canadian government’s aim was to settle the Prairie West with immigrants who would establish an agricultural foundation for the Dominion. The key influence on the strategy was Clifford Sifton, the Minister of the Interior from 1896 to 1905. He pioneered the first emigration communications strategy by flooding selected countries with appealing literature, advertisements in the press, tours for key journalists who then filed flattering copy on their return home, paying agents’ fees on a commission basis for every immigrant who actually settled in Canada, and giving bonuses to steamship agents for promoting the country in the United Kingdom. The rural districts of Scotland were particularly targeted because of the historic links with Canada and their population of experienced farmers and skilled agricultural workers.
The Lowlands, as noted, had very high levels of internal mobility. That most rural parishes in the 1860s already experienced net outward movement of people is crucial to an explanation of the roots of emigration. The Scots were mobile abroad, in large part because they were also very mobile at home. There is now some evidence that from the later nineteenth century the volume of emigration varied inversely with that of internal migration. People in country farms and villages searching for opportunities elsewhere seem to have been able to weigh the attractions of the Scottish towns against those of overseas destinations and come to a decision on the basis of these comparisons. In the decades 1881–90 and 1901–10, for instance, there was heavy emigration, with 43 and 47 per cent respectively of the natural increase leaving the country. In the same twenty-year period, movement to Glasgow and the surrounding suburbs fell to low levels, while there was actual net movement out of the western Lowlands. On the other hand, during the 1870s and 1890s emigration declined but larger numbers moved to the cities and towns. The pattern suggests a sophisticated, literate and mobile population which had access to sources of information in newspapers, letters from relatives and intelligence from returned migrants that allowed informed judgements about emigration to be made. It also highlights once again the key importance of the transportation revolution which enabled the historic and habitual internal mobility of the rural Scots to be translated fully into international movement.
Lowland rural emigration was not induced so much by destitution or deprivation – as in the Highlands for long periods – as by the lure of opportunity. Throughout the nineteenth century and early twentieth, Canada was the great magnet for those who wished to work the land, while rural tradesmen and industrial workers tended to opt more for the USA. In his novel Sunset Song (1932), Lewis Grassic Gibbon wrote a memorable evocation of rural life in the Mearns district of north-east Scotland in the years before the Great War. He depicts the restlessness now affecting the young men who worked on the farms of the area. One of his characters, Will Guthrie, had decided, like others, to leave for North America: ‘soon as he’d saved the silver, he was off to Canada, a man was his own master there’. From emigrant letters and newspaper articles one can piece together the attractions of emigration for both small tenants and farm servants. A primary incentive was the possibility of owning land for themselves which was impossible at home. Land was cheap to acquire and increasingly made available for purchase in developed form by land companies and by the Dominion and provincial governments. In Canada and Australia land was plentiful, whereas in Scotland even affluent farmers were dependent on their landlords, with tenure regulated by detailed leases enforceable at law and other sanctions. The Board of Agriculture in 1906 reviewed the reasons for the decline in the rural population and concluded with respect to Scotland that:
Many correspondents refer to the absence of an incentive to remain on the land and of any reasonable prospect of advancement in life, and it is mentioned in some districts, particularly in Scotland, many of the best men have been attracted to the colonies, where their energies may find wider scope and where the road to independence and a competency is broader and more easy to access.14
The last word should go to Joseph (Joe) Duncan, the able and shrewd secretary of the Farm Servants’ Union, when he commented on the volume of emigration in the years before the Great War:
There has been a fairly steady stream of emigration from the rural districts of Scotland, rising at times into something of a torrent, such as we have just had within the last three or four years.
It is interesting to note the counties from which emigration has been the greatest. By far the greatest emigration has taken place from the counties of Elgin, Nairn, Banff and Aberdeen. This is probably accounted for by the fact that there are fewer industries in these districts and less chance for farm workers changing occupation within their own districts.
It is in these counties too that the largest number of single men employed on the farms are to be found, while the fact that it is the custom there for the bulk of wages to be paid at the end of the six months, produces a system of involuntary saving which provides the young men with the necessary cash to pay for passage abroad …
The emigration has been less in the counties south of this where the wages are higher and where the opportunities of entering other employment are greater. Emigration has generally been to Canada, Australia coming next, and increasingly, and then, much behind these, New Zealand and the United States.
Emigration has helped to increase wages and has also contributed to the independence of the workers remaining. It is the case today all over Scotland that there is a scarcity of suitable men for the farms, and although there seems now to be a slackening in emigration it is not likely that any large increase in the number of competent men will take place.15