Eric Richards, The Highland Clearances (2000, 2008)

Didn’t think I’d sit down and read this cover to cover – you’d think it would become repetitive as he takes each locality in turn, but he draws on such a wide range of information that he manages to show the particular features of each situation, and each tragedy emerges as unique.

This is a book that had to wait for its time to be written – there is a universal loathing of the Highland landlord class and their agents, the factors, so Richards is a brave man, even now, to attempt an even-handed treatment of the Highland Clearances. Without in any way detracting from the dreadfulness of what happened to the evicted families, he challenges the reader to say what else the landlords could have done to manage their over-populated, poverty-stricken estates. Indeed, it emerges from his detailed accounts that the most inhuman clearances were those carried out by trustees after landlords had bankrupted themselves trying to maintain the population through the famines of the mid 19^th century. (Notwithstanding the violence of the Sutherland clearances, the people were provided with somewhere else to go.)

One surprising thing is the amount of capital (fortunes made in the Empire or brought in through marriage) that was sunk uselessly in attempts to establish manufacturing and fishing industries in the Highlands. The fickle herring moved elsewhere. Kelp was a success for a time, but was replaced by imported chemicals.

The story of these recurrent failures is instructive in the sense that they provide a measure of the difficulties which confronted and broke even the best motivated, most prosperous, and most humane of landlords. (p.411)

Ultimately, sheep farming and deer stalking were the only activities that brought an economic return for Highland landlords.

Richards points out that the same process of clearance went on all over Europe, with the small peasants being pushed off the land as commons were enclosed and large farms created. (In fact, Tom Devine has coined the term ‘Lowland Clearances’ to encourage people to see the Agricultural Revolution in Lowland Scotland through this sympathetic lens.) Towards the end of the book, Richards quotes Jeanette Neeson’s Commoners on the English Enclosures: “‘The sense of loss, the sense of robbery could last forever as the bitter inheritance of the rural poor’” (p.405). This might seem an exaggeration in the English context, where there seems little folk memory of the peasant past, but it is still the English countryside that defines whatever ethnic consciousness the English have.

What was exceptional, then, about the Highland Clearances? This is a theme that runs through the book. One answer is their scale, with whole settlements being emptied at once – though this was not the only type of clearance, and much of the eviction was piecemeal and not dissimilar to rural depopulation elsewhere. However, the late arrival of agricultural change in the Highlands meant that the blow fell harder and more suddenly than in many other places.

The distinctive social system of the Highlands, the patterns, of local authority, its unusual priorities in the utilisation of its landed resources and the geography itself, all joined to render the Highlands less able to accommodate the urgency for change which descended on all quarters of western Europe in the late eighteenth century. (pp.41-42)

One puzzle that Richards doesn’t manage to solve, though he states the problem with his usual clarity, is why the population of the Highlands expanded so quickly from the late 18^th century on, especially in the least favoured agricultural regions, the west and north. He is resolutely unsentimental, and doubts whether the land could have sustained the people even if it had been made over into their ownership. And there would still have been a large body of landless cottars and squatters, almost invisible to the historical record.

Then there was the near-destruction of a whole culture and way of life – though that, as Richards points out, has as much to do with Culloden and its aftermath as with the Clearances.

Another compelling answer is the anachronistic survival of a culture that was, though Richards doesn’t put it this way, basically tribal in its relationship with the land. The tribal leaders had only fairly recently reinvented themselves as property owners, and their right in law to evict their tenants were at odds with a persisting sense of the clan’s customary right to the tribal territory. It was the old moral economy that eventually reasserted itself, against the whole flow of history, in the Crofters Act. As Richards says, “Ultimately, the story has always been about who should possess and control the uses of the land” (p.xiv).

Ian Jack, ‘The Country Formerly Known as Great Britain. Writings 1989-2009’

Jack is a writer with a coherent vision, a commitment to the values of a lost world, the Great Britain of the late Victorian era and the first half of the early 20^th century. He identifies these values in the small coin of everyday life, he teases them out of major events, and he recognises them when he finds them lingering in India, just as much as in reminiscences of his mother.

The essay ‘The 12.10 to Leeds’ is typical of his approach. Exploring the background to a series of fatal rail crashes in the late 1990s, he immerses himself in the history of the railways, in the physics and engineering of the wheel on the track, in the politics and economics of the denationalisation, and in the work of the men whose job it is to inspect the rails. He emerges with a thorough understanding – which he communicates in clear, direct terms – of how all of these factors combined to produce the tragedy.

More than this, however, he expresses the tragedy of such failures being allowed to happen in the country that invented the passenger railway. He does not complain that we have lost the sense of “technological mission” exemplified by the Permanent Way Institution, “founded by a group of railwaymen in Nottingham in 1884”, whose publications acted “to inspire the institution’s membership of permanent-way inspectors with an idea of vocation, of historical mission, in their long, often lonely, days and nights spent walking along miles of track” (pp.43-44). It is enough to point to this high-mindedness to show how different their time was from our own.

In ‘Women and children first’ he sets out to find the truth about the final tune (was it the hymn ‘Nearer, my God, to Thee’ and if so to what melody) played on the deck of the sinking Titanic by the band, led by Wallace Hartley. He doesn’t find out, and it doesn’t matter, because this is just the warp on which to weave his thoughts about the Titanic generation, who went on to fight the First World War. He notes that Hartley came from the middle class. “It may have been a heroic class or a foolish one” – it was this class on the Titanic where the difference between the male survival rate and that of the women and children was greatest. Although these men had access to the boat deck, they behaved “nobly and stoically” and only 8% of them survived.

I wish he had been able to give a reference for the observation of “somebody” that the First World War was when “God died in Scotland” (p.31). This is something worth following up. I’ve been very aware since working on Tobar an Dualchais that the heart went out of communities after that.

Some of the reminiscence in the book is rather commonplace – the details of the past that we are invited to savour are often the same ones that anybody of a certain age would recall. There are moments, however – and it is worth reading the book to find these – when Jack writes with heart-stopping poignancy. (In some ways, the book is like a series of tremendously good funeral orations.)

I was particularly moved by his account of a dream in which he saw members of his family in a typical Scottish urban setting, to the repeated words, “These people and this scene are dead”. I’ve had dreams in which the dead have paid me a visit, and I’ve wakened, as he did, overwhelmed with emotion, which lasted for days. He writes, “I woke up in tears. I had lost my childhood, the people I loved, the kind of country I came from – there would be nobody else who knew me as these people had done, memories could no longer be exchanged, the sense of isolation from the past would be permanent and absolute.” (p.189)

The final words of the book sum it up: “Always and everywhere, this unequal struggle to preserve and remember.” (p.325)

For some reason, it made me think of Milton on his blindness:

Thus with the year
Seasons return; but not to me returns
Day, or the sweet approach of ev'n or morn,
Or sight of vernal bloom, or summer's rose,
Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine;
But cloud instead, and ever-during dark
Surrounds me, from the cheerful ways of men
Cut off, and for the book of knowledge fair
Presented with a universal blank
Of Nature's works to me expunged and razed,
And wisdom at one entrance quite shut out.