Mass clearance in the Highlands had ended by the later 1850s, though some individual evictions continued. Also, in early 1856, after a full decade of misery, conditions began to improve for the majority of the population. The potato crop once again regained its former abundance, though it never regained its former dominance in the Highland diet. Instead, there was a very marked increase in the consumption of imported meal. So significant was this that it became common practice to feed the indigenous grain crop and part of the potato crop to the cattle to sustain them during the winter months while reserving imported meal for human consumption. An equally important expansion occurred in the purchase of tea, sugar, jam and tobacco. Until the 1850s these articles had mainly been rare and expensive luxuries, but by the 1890s tea drinking had become universal in the crofting districts and a familiar part of the domestic way of life.
These alterations in diet were the most obvious manifestations of more fundamental changes in the nature of crofting society in the aftermath of the famine. To some extent, the declining significance of the potato may have reflected the relaxation of population pressure in some districts as emigration persisted and the ranks of the cottar class were thinned in most localities outside the Long Island. But the new dietary patterns were also to be found in the Outer Hebrides, where the old problems of population congestion and land hunger remained. A greater variety in foodstuffs, in fact, was simply one part of a wider and deeper social transition which affected all areas of life. In the 1870s and 1880s the majority of the population of the western Highlands became less dependent on the produce of the land for survival and even more reliant on the two sources of income and employment, fishing and temporary migration, which had proved most resilient during the famine itself. They entered more fully into the cash economy, selling their labour for cash wages and buying more of the necessities of life with their earnings rather than producing them themselves.
Manufactured clothes and shoes, ‘shop produce’ as they were known in the region, steadily replaced the home-made varieties in the two generations after the famine. A new mechanism of credit facilitated these developments. Shopkeepers, merchants and fish curers supplied credit on which meal and clothes were bought until seasonal earnings from fishing and temporary migration became available. The running accounts were then partly paid off on the basis of these returns, but more often than not debts persisted from year to year. In Strath in Skye, ‘Every man is in a hurry to get the spring work past and be off to his work on sea and land all through the kingdom and when they return, if their earnings have succeeded well, they pay the shop, and the shopman supplies them on credit, as they require it.’1 In Lewis, the fishing crews purchased on credit in the curers’ shops the meal, clothing and other necessities required for their families. Settlement took place at the end of the season; fishermen were credited with the price of fish delivered by them to the curers and were debited with the price of their purchases.
The new structure depended ultimately on five factors: the recovery of the prices for Highland black cattle; a steep fall in world grain prices in the 1870s and 1880s; a revolutionary expansion in steam navigation in the western Highlands; the growth of the indigenous fishing industry; and a further increase in the scale of temporary migration and casual employment outside the Highlands. These specific influences need also to be viewed against the longer perspective of the decisive change in the economic circumstances of the west Highland population which took place from the later 1850s and continued into the 1860s and 1870s. The period from the end of the Napoleonic Wars to the potato famine had been one of contracting income and falling employment. Then the three decades after the crisis saw a significant recovery in both earnings and jobs which was not wholly offset by either rising costs or new demographic pressures. Even given the important qualifications which will be discussed below when living standards are considered in more detail, there had been a relative improvement in circumstances.
Price trends, between the 1850s and the 1870s, were to the advantage of the people in the crofting region. This was a dramatic reversal of the pattern before 1846. Cattle prices continued the recovery which had begun in 1852. Crofters’ two-year-old heifers in Lewis, selling at 30s.–£2 in 1854 fetched £4–£5 by 1883. Those tenants who possessed small stocks of sheep gained from the upward swing in prices which lasted until the late 1860s. The fact that they were much better fed on grain and potatoes during the winter months added to the marketability of cattle. The principal aim was now one of maximizing the potential of stock not simply in the traditional manner to pay rent but as a source of the funds employed to purchase meal and other commodities.
A further expansion in sea transport facilitated both cattle and sheep exports and grain imports. In the early 1850s a single small steamer had plied the route between the Clyde and Portree in Skye once every fortnight. Three decades later two larger vessels sailed to Skye and Lewis every week and a further three ships visited Barra and North and South Uist. These developments in communications were both cause and effect of the changing way of life in the region and the basis of the closer involvement of the people in the money economy. Above all, they allowed the population of more areas to take full advantage of the sustained fall in world grain prices which took place after the opening up of the interior areas of North America by railroad and the new steamship connections established with the purchasing countries in Europe. In the early 1840s meal imported from the Clyde sold at an average of £2.2s. per boll in the Outer Hebrides; by the 1880s average prices were close to 16s. per boll. It was the enormous decline in costs which encouraged the practice of feeding cattle on grain produced at home and allowed earnings from cattle sales and other activities to be devoted to the purchase of cheap meal from outside.
Pivotal to the whole system of increased trade, credit and money transactions was a vast expansion in seasonal employment opportunities. The indigenous white and herring fisheries of the Outer Hebrides achieved a new level of activity and prosperity. Fishing stations were set up at Castlebay, Lochboisdale and Lochmaddy. The number of fish-curing companies increased from seven in 1853 to fifty in 1880. In the early 1850s about 300 small boats were active; three decades later around 600. The organization and capitalization of the industry were dominated by men from the east coast, but Hebrideans gained from the new opportunities for seasonal employment. The developing steamer services and the injection of capital from the east had given the winter white fishery in particular a fresh and vigorous stimulus. Casual jobs were also available on the sporting estates as stalkers and ghillies and in the labour squads needed to build the infrastructure of roads and lodges of the new recreation economy. There were seasonal opportunities, too, in sheep smearing, which involved working a mixture of butter, tar and grease into the fleeces to afford protection against vermin: ‘Since one man could only smear about twenty sheep a day and since a quarter of a million were annually smeared in Inverness-shire alone, labour was obviously much in demand … During the 1860s and 1870s the wages paid for casual labour of this type rose steadily and more or less doubled between 1850 and 1880.’2
Finally, the expansion in temporary migration which had begun during the famine was sustained after it. Virtually all sectors – agricultural work in the Lowlands, domestic service in the cities, the merchant marine, general labouring (such as in the gasworks of the larger towns) – produced more opportunities for Highland temporary migrants than before. Because of this, ‘seasonal’ migration more often became ‘temporary’ movement with absences extending not simply for a few weeks or months but for the greater part of a year or even longer. The seasonality of different work peaks made it possible to dovetail different tasks outside the Highlands and at the same time alternate labour in the crofting region with work opportunities elsewhere.
The classical example of the latter cycle was the interrelationship between the winter white fishery in the Minch, the spring herring fishery in the same waters and the east-coast herring fishery during the summer months. This last was the most dynamic sector and the source of a great stream of income which percolated through the entire Inner and Outer Hebrides in the 1860s and 1870s. From 1835 to 1854 the annual average cure in Aberdeenshire and Banffshire increased moderately from 428,343 to 495,879 barrels. In the 1860s and 1870s, however, the industry boomed. The average cure rose from 602,375 barrels between 1865 and 1874 to 902,665 in the period 1875–84. During the same phase the number of herring boats on the east coast grew by 51 per cent while the total of fishermen and boys rose by 60 per cent from 1854 to 1884. An increased field of employment opened up in consequence for the population of the western Highlands and Islands. It was estimated that 30,000 men and women came in a great annual migration to the fishing ports up and down the east coast from the Gaelic-speaking areas of the far west. On the surface, therefore, the evidence for improvement in living standards seemed compelling.
The emigration of some of the poorest classes of Highland society did allow a more rapid recovery from the trauma of the crisis of the 1840s than would otherwise have been the case. Cottars and squatters often placed a burden on the over-stretched resources of crofters and these pressures doubtless diminished when the numbers of these semi-landless people went into decline during the famine and its immediate aftermath. The period from 1856 to the later 1870s did appear to be one of considerable material progress in the western Highlands. Crofting rents on several estates were paid more regularly than before and the problem of accumulating arrears was not as serious. Consumer goods were imported on a much larger scale. The gathering of shellfish for consumption during the summer months, a practice which had long been one of the principal manifestations of the chronic poverty of the region, seems to have declined, though it retained its importance as a source of cash income into the second half of the twentieth century. Numerous contemporary commentators who could recall the deprivation of earlier times were also sure that a considerable amelioration had taken place in the decades which followed the famine.
Nevertheless, the majority of the people continued to endure an existence of poverty and insecurity after 1860. Life was still precarious and could easily degenerate into destitution if any of the fragile supports of the population temporarily crumbled. Between 1856 and 1890 there was a series of bad seasons which recalled some of the worst years of the potato blight. In 1864 ‘the cry of destitution in Skye has been as loud as ever and yet from no part of the Highlands has there been a more extensive emigration’.3 Conditions on Mull were at that time also briefly reminiscent of the tragic days of the 1840s. On the Duke of Argyll’s estate rent arrears escalated, especially among the small tenants. Food, seed and labour had to be provided for the people who had suffered great hardship since 1862. Four years later distress was again experienced by the population of an island which had sustained a decline in the numbers of its inhabitants from 10,054 to 7,240 between 1841 and 1861. In the Bunessan area ‘many of the poor are actually starving’.4 Once again meal was made available and public works started. It was successive bad seasons in 1881–2, affecting the whole of the western Highlands, which not only caused much suffering but also provided the initial economic impetus for the great crofters’ revolt of that decade. Over 24,000 people received relief in these years. Conditions deteriorated once more in 1888. In the Outer Hebrides ‘actual starvation’ was predicted and the inhabitants once more were supported by charitable organizations from the Lowland cities. The chamberlain of the Lewis estate himself estimated that there had been at least nine seasons between 1853 and 1883 when the proprietor had had to advance varying amounts of seed and meal to the crofters.
At best, then, ‘recovery’ was modest and continued to be punctuated by years of distress. Typhus remained common in some localities because of poor living conditions and poor sanitation. Cattle continued to share living accommodation with human beings. Domestic squalor persisted and disconcerted observers from outside the Highlands accustomed to higher standards. Mass clearances were a thing of the past, but insecurity of tenure remained a fact of life: ‘Others, not a few, continue quietly evicting by legal process and clearing by so-called voluntary emigration. The lawyer’s pen supersedes the soldier’s steel.’5 Moreover, the heavy impact of landlord authority was felt in other ways.
It is known that successful action to control subdivision was already taking place on some properties, especially along the western mainland, before the famine. This probably helps to explain why several parishes in that region had already reached their peak populations by the census of 1841. However, in most areas of the Outer Hebrides after the famine, regulations against subdivision of crofts were still lax. Nevertheless, for the remainder of the crofting region, there is abundant evidence not only that opposition to subdivision was more widespread after the 1850s but that the mechanisms of control had become more efficient. The result was that by the 1880s, along the west coast north of Ardnamurchan, in Mull and in other islands of the Inner Hebrides, the cottar class was disappearing rapidly or had vanished entirely from the social structure. The fear of the burdens they might inflict on the poor rates, bitter memories of the famine, and the assumption that the proliferation of poor cottar families had been a principal and powerful cause of earlier grievous destitution combined to harden opposition to them. These influences ensured subletting was often crushed whatever the human costs. It was yet another sign of the radical change in landlord policy which had taken place since the early nineteenth century. The boom in labour-intensive activities encouraged fragmentation of holdings to c.1820; their collapse or stagnation thereafter caused a trend back towards consolidation of holdings into sheep farms which grew stronger during and after the great subsistence crisis.
Control of subdivision meant that no additional or separate households could any longer be created within a single tenancy. Only one member of a tenant or cottar family was permitted to set up home after marriage on the lot. Even that could only be done by sharing the father’s house until he died. In practice, however, regulation was even tighter than this and often designed to reduce rather than simply regulate the numbers of households. As one observer put it: ‘landlords … weed out families by twos or threes … an absolute veto was placed upon marriage … when a young man is guilty of that he may look for a summons of removal’.6
These were not the exaggerated claims of an over-enthusiastic pamphleteer. Duncan Darroch, proprietor of the Torridon estate in Wester Ross, later admitted to the Napier Commission that the regulations which prevailed on his property meant that the young emigrated ‘and the elderly members generally go on the poor’s roll and, as they die out, the cottages are taken down’.7 In Arisaig it was alleged that the offspring of families who reached the age of twenty-one had to go and live elsewhere unless allowed to remain ‘with the written sanction of the proprietor’.8 There had in the past been a good deal of subdivision of crofts on some parts of the Lochaber estate of Cameron of Lochiel. By the later 1840s, however, these practices were outlawed:
The present proprietor is enlarging rather than subdividing and his regulations against the increase of population are of the most stringent and Malthusian character. Two families are strictly prohibited from living upon one croft. If one of a family marries, he must leave the croft; and a case has even been brought under my notice, in which the only son of a widow, who is in joint possession of a croft with his mother, has been told that if he marries he will be compelled to leave the estate. Severe penalties are also threatened against the keeping of lodgers. The unlucky crofter who takes a friend under his roof, without first obtaining the consent of Lochiel, must pay for the first offence a fine of £1; and, for the second, shall be removed from the estate.
There is ample evidence in the Cameron of Lochiel papers that summonses of removal were issued to any crofters who infringed these regulations.9
Control of subdivision in Lochcarron meant that ‘families as they grow up are sent out to shift for themselves’. In Ardnamurchan and Mull landlords not only restricted subletting but also pulled down houses on the death of the occupants in order to cause ‘a thinning of numbers’.10 On the Duke of Argyll’s estate in Mull the regulations against subdivision were also rigorously enforced, and the older tradition of subletting to kinfolk had disappeared entirely.11 Instead, the children of tenants had no alternative but to go. At Glenshiel regulations against subletting were given as the main reason for a sharp decline in marriages. Attempts to limit subdivision on the Macdonald estates in Skye had begun before the famine but were only partially effective. From the 1850s, however, it became the ‘inevitable rule … that subdivision of lands by crofters is rigorously prohibited’.12 Eldest sons were informed that they alone had the right to succeed to the croft held by the father on the basis of primogeniture. It therefore was in their interest to prevent the holding from being divided among other members of the family. Elsewhere on the island controls were enforced with equal resolution. One tacksman on the Macleod estates ensured that at marriage the couple would have to move. It was alleged that ‘If a son married in a man’s family, the father dared not give him shelter even for a night.’13
This degree of intervention in family life and the attack on the old traditions of inheritance ensured that crofting society remained far from settled in tranquillity in these decades. The simmering tensions finally came to the surface on the Isle of Skye in 1882. The disturbances there in that year came to be known as ‘the Battle of the Braes’. It had several features associated with the sporadic and familiar outbreaks of lawlessness in the past. The protest began in the townships of Gedintailor, Balmeanach and Peinchorran, which constituted the district known as Braes on Lord MacDonald’s estate on the east coast of Skye, some eight miles south of the island’s capital of Portree. The crofters petitioned the landlord to have traditional grazing rights on Ben Lee returned to them. The factor rejected the request, but the people replied by stating they would no longer pay rent to Lord MacDonald until their rights were restored. The landlord then attempted to serve summonses of removal on a number of tenants on the grounds that they were in rent arrears. On 7 April 1882, however, the sheriff officer serving the summonses was accosted by a crowd of around 500 people, and the notices were taken from him and burned. Ten days later, the law returned in force, strongly supported this time by a force of fifty Glasgow policemen. They managed to arrest those who had assaulted the sheriff officer but not before about a dozen constables received injuries at the hands of a large crowd of men and women throwing stones and wielding large sticks. The Battle of the Braes was followed by similar actions of protest at Glendale in Skye at the end of 1882.
These disturbances had several features which recalled the ineffectual protests against clearance in the decades before the 1860s: the use of rudimentary weapons; the central role of women; deforcement of the officers of the law; intervention by the police; and the localized nature of resistance. However, the Battle of the Braes has come to be regarded as a historic event because it signalled a decisive change of direction from past episodes of protest. For one thing, it had been the people who first took the initiative to try to regain grazing rights which they had lost over seventeen years before. This disturbance was therefore proactive rather than reactive. For another, the rent strike, which had been employed with deadly effect on numerous Irish estates in earlier years, was a new tactic which proprietors found difficult to combat without contemplating mass eviction, a policy that was becoming politically unacceptable by the 1880s. The Battle of the Braes and other disturbances suggested that landlordism was now encountering a different type of opposition, but it remained small in scale, confined to only a few estates in Skye, and at this stage the authorities were only dealing with a minor land dispute. This soon changed. Previous episodes of resistance had petered out in failure and imprisonment for the participants, but the Braes skirmish was the prelude to more widespread acts of subordination which were sustained on a number of Highland estates for several years afterwards and involved the consolidation of rent strikes, occupation of sheep farms, destruction of farm fences, collective assaults on sheriff officers, and the mutilation and killing of livestock. The Scotsman reported in some alarm in October 1884 that:
men are taking what does not belong to them, are setting all law at defiance, and are instituting a terrorism which the poor people are unable to resist … Rents are unpaid, not because the tenants cannot pay them, but because in some cases they will not, and in some cases they dare not.
The paper claimed that if the law was not enforced quickly ‘the condition of the islands will soon be as bad as that of Ireland three years ago’.14
The Scotsman was prone to exaggeration on the issue as a stout supporter of the landlord interest. There was little ‘Irish’-style agrarian terrorism in the Highlands at this time, and most disturbances were confined to a few districts. The western mainland was peaceful for the most part and even in the Hebrides, where there was most overt discontent, disturbance was mainly concentrated in Skye and, to a lesser extent, Lewis. Direct action did occur in South Uist, Tiree and Harris but tended to be much more intermittent than elsewhere. In part the notion that the entire region was aflame and lawlessness everywhere rampant was the result of the extraordinary success of the publicity given to the disturbances in the Scottish and English press.
However, the incidents in Skye were deemed so serious that the government sent an expeditionary force to the island, the first since the time of the last Jacobite rising in the eighteenth century. The decision unleashed an almost hysterical reaction from some of the press. A violent armed confrontation between troops and people was eagerly anticipated as the North British Daily Mail carried such sensational headlines as, ‘Threatened General Rising of Crofters’ and ‘Dunvegan Men on the March to Uig’. The sixteen newspaper correspondents who were sent from the south and two artists from the Graphic and the Illustrated London News were disappointed, however, when the expected violent conflict did not materialize. Marine detachments did stay on in Skye until 1885 and on their departure from Uig in June of that year they received a friendly farewell reception from the local people. The troops stationed at Staffin seem to have developed a particularly close association with some of the inhabitants. According to one observer they had shown a considerable interest in the young women of the district: ‘They gave more of their time to the god of love than to the god of war’!15
In fact, the distinguishing feature of the events of the 1880s, or the ‘Crofters’ War’ as it came to be described, was not so much the spread of violence, intimidation and lawlessness throughout the Highlands as the fusion of an effective political campaign for crofters’ rights with a high-profile series of acts of resistance, of which the refusal to pay rents and the ‘raiding’ of old lands were the most significant. By the early 1880s a crofting lobby had grown up in the southern cities consisting of land reformers, Gaelic revivalists, second- and third-generation Highland migrants, and radical liberals. From these groups and existing committees there was formed the Highland Land Law Reform Association (HLLRA), Comunn Gaidhealach Ath-Leasachadh an Fhearainn, with a strategy loosely based on that of the Irish Land League. It sought fair rents, security of tenure, compensation for improvements and, significantly, redistribution of land. The Association took the motto ‘Is Treasa na Tighearna’, ‘The People are Stronger Than the Lord’. The development was crucial. Not only did the HLLRA link the crofters’ cause with external political interests, it also, through proliferating branches and district committees, helped to end the localism which had impeded collective action in the past.
The most remarkable example of this new attitude came with the appointment of a Royal Commission into the condition of the crofters and cottars in the Highlands and Islands under the chairmanship of Lord Napier and Ettrick. The government had responded to the threat of even more extensive civil unrest and growing public sympathy for the Gaels. The Commission took evidence throughout the crofting region from spring to the winter of 1883 and its report was finally published in 1884. When it appeared it was much criticized, not surprisingly by landlords, who saw ‘communism looming in the future’ as controls on their powers of private ownership had been recommended.16 It was also criticized by a majority of the people because they thought it fell far short of their aspirations. The recommendations ignored the problem of the cottars and were confined to those who possessed holdings rented at more than £6 and less than £30 per annum. Nevertheless, the Napier Commission’s Report was a symbolic victory for the crofting agitation as, for the first time, a public body had admitted the validity of the land rights of the people, even though they were not recognized in law. The Royal Commission also proposed that the state should provide a degree of protection for the interests of the crofters. The report was reluctant to offer perpetual security of tenure but advocated that government should instead assist crofters to purchase their holdings. It was a radical change from the kind of assumptions which had governed external intervention in the Highlands during the famine years of the 1840s and 1850s.
The subsequent legislation, enshrined in the Crofters Holdings (Scotland) Act, 1886, differed in some key respects from the Commission’s recommendations, but it too represented a decisive break with the past and began a new era of landlord–crofter relations in the Highlands. Security of tenure for crofters was guaranteed as long as rent was paid; fair rents would be fixed by a land court; compensation for improvements was allowed to a crofter who gave up his croft or was removed from it; crofts could not be sold but might be bequeathed to a relative and, with certain restrictions, the compulsory enlargement of holdings could be considered by the land court.
This legislation did not immediately find favour with the land reformers, especially since it gave only very minor concessions to crofters’ demands for more land. But its historic significance should not be underestimated. The Crofters Act made clearances of the old style impossible, breached the sacred rights of private property, controlled landlord–crofter relations through a government body and afforded the crofting population secure possession of their holdings. The balance of power between landlords and small tenants had been irrevocably altered after 1886, but in fact that was already becoming apparent earlier. In December 1884, Cameron of Lochiel noted that the current of political and public opinion was flowing fast against the landed interest. The following month about fifty Highland proprietors and their representatives met at Inverness to discuss the crofting agitation and agreed to provide crofters with leases, consider revision of rents and guarantee compensation for improvements in an attempt to draw the teeth of discontent. It was a remarkable and tardy attempt at developing a more benevolent form of landlordism introduced only because of the weakening position of the landed élites. The proposals were rejected as the HLLRA decided that they confirmed that the landowners were finally on the run. As the Oban Times gleefully reported: ‘the Highland lairds are on their knees’.17 Final victory seemed only a matter of time.
In historical perspective the events of the 1880s are indeed remarkable. Crofters had not managed to secure the return of lands from which they had been removed during the clearances; that would have amounted to expropriation of property and remained politically unthinkable. Yet by imposing legislation which made the tenancy of a croft heritable, the state had in effect deprived the landlord of most of his former rights of ownership. No other class or group in late-nineteenth-century mainland Britain were given such protection as were the crofters of the Highlands in this way. How and why they managed to achieve such privileges is the question which will be discussed in the final section of this chapter.
The agitation in Skye was triggered in part by economic problems. The winter of 1882–3 was reckoned to have been one of the worst since the disasters of the 1840s. The potato crop was partially destroyed and earnings of migrant labourers from the east-coast fisheries, a key source of income in Skye and the Long Island, had fallen dramatically. Problems became more acute after a great storm in October 1882 which damaged or destroyed many boats, nets and much fishing gear. The resulting stress may help to explain why no-rent campaigns became so popular within the crofting community. Even when there was some recovery from the difficulties of 1882–3, cattle prices fell throughout most of the remainder of the decade. By the late 1880s two-year-old heifers which might have fetched £7 or £8 in 1883 were worth less than £2. The period was also one of difficulty in sheep farming as the British market for wool and mutton was swamped by imports from the Antipodes. The big flockmasters suffered most, with many surrendering their leases and wholesale conversion of sheep farms to deer forests took place. Small-tenant income was also affected as, by this time, it was also usual for crofters to keep a few sheep.
It is very possible these continuing economic difficulties in the western Highlands fuelled social tensions. Yet there had been bad times before and little unrest. The people had accepted suffering as God’s judgement or as part of the natural law, not as a consequence of the injustice of man. But the difference in the 1880s may have been partly because the generation of that decade had become accustomed to the better times of the 1860s and 1870s and might have felt a sense of frustrated expectations as their living standards collapsed. Nevertheless, the movement of the 1880s was not one of the hungry and distressed. If it had been it would probably not have endured for long. Economic factors, therefore, do not really explain how a few minor land disputes became the catalyst for a widespread land agitation which eventually resulted in a political and social revolution in the Highland region.
One factor was a changing attitude among the people; some contemporary observers commented that they now had more iron in their souls. Certainly the Gaelic poetry of the land war period, as analysed by Sorley MacLean, in the 1930s transmits a more powerful mood of confidence and optimism, and even before the Battle of the Braes there was evidence on some Highland estates of a new level of tenant truculence. By 1880, for example, on the Sutherland estate, agents were apparently willing to allow rent arrears and breach of regulations, rather than provoke the people into further acts of defiance. It is also interesting to note that virtually all the famous incidents of the Crofters’ War were triggered by the local populations rather than responses to landlord action as had been the pattern in the past.
This new-found confidence may reflect the growth of a new generation in the western Highlands. All commentators stressed that it was young men and women who were the backbone of protest. They had been brought up in the better times of the 1860s and 1870s and had not known at first hand the anguish of the famine decades which had demoralized so many of the generation of their parents and grandparents. The press often drew attention to the fact that many of the older people in the crofting townships were sometimes timorous and meek while the young were bold, defiant and truculent. A decisive factor prompting them to action was the example of the Irish. Rural agitation in Ireland had led in 1881 to a famous victory when Gladstone’s government passed the Irish Land Act. This granted to tenants the rights known as the ‘3 Fs’: fair rents determined by a land court, fixed tenure as long as the rent was paid, and free sale of the tenant’s interest in the farm which allowed for compensation for improvements. The Irish victory had obvious implications for Highland crofters. In part, information on the Irish agitation was conveyed through the regional Highland press, especially in the columns of the Highlander, edited by John Murdoch, who had lived in Ireland. Indeed, it was suggested by some that he devoted most issues of his journal more to Irish than to Highland matters. Even more important, however, was the personal connection between Skye and Ireland. From about 1875 many Skye men became labourers in Campbeltown and Carradale fishing boats for the summer season in Irish waters, and there can be little doubt that these annual sojourns gave them experience of such Irish tactics as rent strikes. Indeed, the Irish connection goes a long way to explaining why, in its early years, the agitation concentrated mainly on Skye. In a letter to Lord MacDonald’s Edinburgh agent, his factor on the island noted:
Shortly before the term of Martinmas a body of young men, the sons of tenants, most of whom had been fishing at Kinsale in Ireland and had imbibed Irish notions, came to my office and presented a petition which they had almost the whole tenants to sign, to the effect that they demanded the grazing of Ben Lee in addition to their present holdings without paying any additional rent.18
But despite the new boldness of the men of Skye the dispute would probably not have lasted for long if it had not been for significant changes in external attitudes to the land issue. As late as the 1850s protests against clearances had been effectively crushed, the law enforced and the rights of landed property upheld, but such robust assertions of proprietorial privilege had become politically unacceptable thirty years later. At first the due process of law in Skye was followed against assaults on sheriff officers and land raiding. Both police and military were brought in, but the government recognized that it could not contemplate the full use of force because public and political opinion would be hostile to such tactics. The only alternative therefore, was eventually to concede some of the crofters’ demands in order to restore law and order.
The climate of opinion was already changing in the 1870s. In 1879, for example, the estate of Leckmelm on Lochbroom was purchased by A. C. Pirie, an Aberdeen paper manufacturer. He tried to organize ‘improvements’ on his property, which resulted in some evictions, but even these small-scale removals brought forth a huge outcry in the Highlands and resounding condemnation from all sections of the national press, with the predictable exception of the Scotsman. Four years later the Liberal politician J. B. Balfour referred to ‘a considerable body of vague and floating sentiment in favour of ameliorating the crofters’ condition’ which had influenced several members of the Liberal Party’.19 These feelings were apparent at the very highest levels of government. They were shared by the Prime Minister, William Ewart Gladstone, himself and the Home Secretary in 1882, Sir William Harcourt. Harcourt had a key role to play in the unfolding events in the Hebrides as he had spent many years on yachting holidays there and developed a sympathy for the condition of the people of the area. His decisions confirmed that. In November 1882 he refused permission for a military expedition to be sent to Skye and in the same month suggested to Gladstone that a Royal Commission be established instead. Significantly he observed that among ‘decent people’ there was now a view that the crofters had real grievances, and, in the age of an extending franchise, such opinions could not easily be ignored. In 1884 the suffrage was extended to men owning at least £10 or paying the same amount annually in rental. This included many crofters. A year later five Members of Parliament were elected from the Crofters’ Party.
These latent sympathies for the crofters were exploited to the full by pro-crofter propagandists, of whom one of the most effective was Alexander McKenzie, editor of the Celtic Magazine. McKenzie had been using this publication to draw attention to the social problems of the western Highlands since 1877. In 1883, however, he published his bestseller, A History of the Highland Clearances, which conveyed in emotive prose the harrowing details of some of the most notorious removals. It was not a work of historical detachment but a compendium of landlord misdeeds. Works like McKenzie’s portrayed Highland proprietors as heartless tyrants who had ruthlessly betrayed their responsibilities and their people.
The contemporary press also played a key role in publicizing the crofters’ cause and influencing public opinion in their favour. Here was a publicity machine with which even the wealthiest landowner could not hope to compete. As one reporter who covered the events of the 1880s noted later: ‘Printed paper in the shape of newspapers proved the most deadly tool against the Highland landowners.’20 The fact that coverage was so extensive, not only on the part of the Scottish papers but also in the English press, reflected the deep interest which existed throughout the country in the Highland problem. This new awareness was facilitated by the revolution of communications in the Western Isles. By the 1880s a network of steamer connections had spread throughout the Inner and Outer Hebrides. In addition, the telegraph now allowed eyewitness reports of disturbances to be published soon after they took place, and this made the Crofters’ War one of the first popular agitations in Britain in which the media of the day played a significant part not only by reporting but also by actually helping to influence the course of events.
External political and cultural forces were also important. Crofter political awareness was raised by the methods and campaigns of Charles Stewart Parnell’s Irish Nationalist Party and the Irish Land League. Though the disturbances in the north were not as some suggested a ‘Fenian conspiracy’, there can be little doubt about the general Irish impact, especially through the writings and speeches of the charismatic John Murdoch, editor of the Highlander, who had been politically active in Ireland for several years before and was acquainted with some of the leading personalities of the Irish agitation. There was also powerful support from the Highland societies which were now active in the Lowland towns. Until the 1870s they had been almost exclusively devoted to convivial and cultural pursuits, but by the end of that decade the Federation of Celtic Societies was being criticized in some quarters as being far too political. Activists, such as the eloquent and energetic Professor John Stuart Blackie of the University of Edinburgh, projected a potent message of combined literary romanticism and political radicalism. The regional Highland press was increasingly sympathetic, notably the Oban Times from 1882, when Duncan Cameron became editor, and provided a faithful and detailed record of speeches and meetings of the HLLRA at local level which lent both cohesion and momentum to the agitation. Land reformers in mainland Britain and Ireland took up the crofters’ cause and it received particularly important support from reformist sections of the Liberal Party in Scotland. Second-generation Highlanders in the southern cities were also deeply influential in certain areas.
This motley alliance came together to become an effective crofters’ lobby. The people of the disturbed districts had helped themselves, but they gained a great deal from the unparalleled levels of external support which provided experienced leadership, political muscle and organizing expertise. The most remarkable demonstration of this contribution came in the months after the setting up of the Napier Commission. Government may have seen this as a way of defusing tension and deflecting opposition, but instead it became a catalyst for further agitation and the creation of a more effective organization, especially when it became apparent that the witnesses to the Royal Commission would be guaranteed immunity from intimidation. This was a crucial development since bitter memories of the reign of terror of the clearance period endured among the older men whose evidence of past events was vital to the crofters’ case. Until the Napier Commission sat for the first time in May 1883 at the Braes in Skye, every effort was made to prepare evidence. Alexander McKenzie and John Murdoch toured the region and provided advice, and at the end of 1883 the HLLRA of London published three pamphlets in Gaelic and English addressed to the crofting community, highlighting past wrongs and encouraging agitation in favour of security of tenure, fair rents and reallocation of land, as well as other aims. Local people were urged to form district branches and use peaceful and constitutional methods in pursuit of their demands. When branches were established, rules were drawn up by central headquarters in London.
But the crofters’ movement did not simply become the creature of external sympathizers in these years, although they did contribute a great deal. One of the most significant events in the organizational process had been the decision taken by west-coast fishermen at a mass meeting in the port of Fraserburgh in the north-east in August 1883 to form land reform associations on their return home. Furthermore, subversive and illegal activity on some estates persisted despite the official opposition of the HLLRA. The successes achieved represented a joint victory for the crofters and their new allies, who were able effectively to exploit the new and more sympathetic climate of opinion which had emerged in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. It was this which generated the power and tactical leverage that previous generations had lacked.