Stories and musings: February 2011

Murdo Macdonald of Crola in Kinlochresort

This is a story that I know through a combination of my (long-dead) father, the Uig Historical Society[1] , the archives of the University of Glasgow and several other friendly sources.

My father was born in Shawbost in the Outer Hebrides in 1908 to a family that were very poor even by local standards of the time. Their story is well-documented by his younger brother Calum.[2]

But, by 1932 or thereabouts, a combination of his own father’s encouragement and a Carnegie scholarship had allowed my father to escape from poverty and he had become a head teacher. So he went to Crowlista in Lewis, 24 years old or so.

In the village obviously he had to meet the ministers and the doctor who (along with the head teacher) were the entire middle class of an otherwise working class community.

He was however a bit surprised when one minister said:

“You must meet Murdo Crola, a local postman, a man who has never been to school. When I first came here, a few years ago, Murdo and I went for a walk along the local cliffs. And, as the sun was sinking in the Western sky on a beautiful evening over the vast expanse of the Atlantic Ocean, I could not help but say two lines from the Odyssey. Murdo said to me ‘Yes, minister: the Greeks also loved the sea’ and then quoted to me the next two lines of the Odyssey.

John, this is no ordinary postman”.

My father sought out Murdo Crola the postman and they became friends.

Now what follows is an exceptionally unusual story.

Crola in Uig on Loch Resort is a very beautiful place; isolated today as much as it was in 1907 when Murdo was born there. Today the houses are still standing, but deserted. ( I have visited it twice).

Its rationale was, as I was told, a bit of fishing and crofting and a place where deep sea trawlers came for shelter and to take on water. (But was also related to gamekeeping).

Why was child born in 1907 never sent to school? The probable answer: it was very costly for Education Boards to discharge the legal obligations they had inherited from the 1872 Education Act. So, as happened in parts of the Highlands and Islands, his older sister Kate (who died not very long ago) was sent to school in Scarp: the Board had no choice but to send her to school somewhere- because she had no elder sibling. She then went home, was designated as his teacher and given a small stipend; and that satisfied the legal requirements of the 1872 Act. (Although it is also possible that this arrangement was made in part because of Murdo’s health.)

Kate taught her little brother Murdo to read and to write; and he got so enthused about reading that, when the trawlers came into Loch Resort to get fresh water, he begged off them whatever reading material they had.

Crola was, and is, very remote. On Sunday evenings, the walk to the Church was 12 miles across a rough track. By the time Murdo was 8 years old, his Granny was too infirm to make the walk. One Sunday, the family went to church to listen to a distinguished visiting preacher. When they got home, Granny inquired “What did the preacher say?” Murdo’s parents explained that the preacher had been “very powerful”; but so powerful that the gist of the sermon had passed over their heads. The 8-yr-old Murdo said “Granny: let me tell you”; and did so. The Granny allegedly said, at the end of this disquisition by the 8-yr-old “My beloved grandson: you are a child who will either bring great distinction to this family- or great disgrace.”[3]

Murdo grew up, always reading a huge amount. He read religious literature; and became devout about that. He read a huge amount of socialist literature: Orwell, the New Statesman and Gollancz Left Book Club; and became devout about that. And he studied other things: certainly English literature. Meanwhile he acquired a job as the local postman and he worked on the parents’ croft. But hated the sheep: he regarded them as the obstacle to what he really wanted to do. Because he was clear about that. He wanted to go to university and get a degree. But how could a boy who had never been to school get to university? So he addressed his mind to that small problem.

Murdo wrote to the University of Glasgow; and he got a reply explaining that, although the University increasingly used Highers as a selection device, it still ran a completely separate preliminary entrance examination of its own (essentially a relic of the time when that would have been its main form of selection). That reply got Murdo thinking.

He and my father kept in touch with each other, loaning each other books and talking about politics; and much else. One day my father was teaching; and, as he looked out the window, he could see Murdo descending off the hillside towards the school. He asked Murdo why he was visiting in working hours, and Murdo said “John, could I come inside and sit at the back of the classroom?” Murdo did that for an hour and then slipped away, having said to my father “I often wondered over the years what it would be like to go to school and be in a classroom”.

In 1935 or so, my father left the area for another post. But Murdo and he kept in touch, rendezvousing on occasion in my paternal grandparents’ house in Stornoway. They corresponded. My father’s letters are lost (at least to me); but Murdo’s letters, from 1^st July 1935 to 19^th April 1939, were preserved by my father; and inherited by me.

In these years, Murdo speculated as to when he might go to university; he wrote Gaelic hymns (for he was no mean Gaelic poet); he did his duties as a postman; he wrote about the politics of the 1930s, international, national and local.

In the first letter[4] he writes

“I can only plead guilty to a charge of culpable neglect in not having written and forwarded books sooner. Nor have I any extenuating circumstances to offer, my only one being that day after day I allowed time and opportunities to slip through my fumbling fingers; a reason which may recall to you Shakespeare’s lines ‘Oft the excusing of a fault doth make itself the worst by this excuse’” [5].

And, in a comment which might interest Iain Duncan Smith, he says:

“Since I saw you I had a talk with a man engaged in necessary labour, work indeed as indispensable that if he -and his co-workers- should withhold his labours ….within a week it would produce chaos and confusion as the German blockade failed to achieve in four years. But does the country give him the equivalent of what it costs to sink a submarine? Of course not; ….(it gives him) what keeps them in passable condition, and his uniform a torn and patched pair of dungarees.

[Now a bit I find astonishing from a devout Hebridean Presbyterian of the 1930s; a bit my father must have found odd and disturbing – my father like most male Hebrideans hated talking about such things].

Murdo writes: “This man, representative of his class, is willing to work as many hours as he can, but he is married to a young wife. If they have ever heard the phrase ‘birth control’, they probably think it a mid-wifery (sic) practice or… a different term for polygamy. So the little wife has a large brood. She looks an obvious case of malnutrition – our polite term for prolonged starvation. The over-worked father expressed to me the wish that he was still ‘on the dole’ as it is impossible for him to earn as much as he (previously) received in this manner”.

Then he goes into a more frivolous mode about a religious pamphlet.

“It may interest you to know that I gave a copy of this to the three Uig ministers (yes, including the Rev ‘Windy-Wordy’ of orthodox fame). I did not expect to hear any quotations from it in their pulpits. Worse for them - and for us”.

As 1935 moved on, he turned his attention to the General Election – where the local sitting National M.P. was being opposed by a 21-yr-old student, Malcolm Macmillan. And he was writing letters to the Stornoway Gazette under the name of “Responsible Citizen”, letters that are to this day in the Gazette archive.

Spurred on by his reading of the Daily Herald and the Forward, Murdo argued (in his letters to my father) that there was too much concentration on statistics and not enough on the underlying misery. Murdo was much obsessed with unemployment and poverty. He wrote “Few people have the imagination to see and the tenderness to feel that behind the figures of employment schemes lie the pathos of lovers who cannot marry and the anxiety of mothers who cannot afford food for their ailing sickly children”[6].

And he quoted Carlyle “Mournful enough that an honest worker on English soil looks wistfully for what the horse he is driving is sure of – food and shelter”.[7] .

His letters are full of quotations from books. And he explains why this is so: “Living here in solitude in ‘the back o’ beyond’ the only thing which makes its loneliness tolerable, at least to me, is that the door of reading is open to a larger world of fact and imagination”. [8]

He celebrates the fact that Macmillan had won the Western Isles for Labour (“It was the first time I felt consciously proud of belonging to the Western Isles”) but warns against complacency in future elections. (As it happened, Macmillan held the seat for 35 years).

In 1937, he is engaged in the Glasgow University entrance examinations. “I got a pass certificate for Gaelic and Greek, but failed, by what Principal Macgregor tells me was but ‘very few marks’, in English. I wrongfully assumed that there would be a range of optional questions, so I gave but little attention to the prescribed texts……I was so late in taking up the study of Greek – I didn’t know its alphabet until last September- … that I had to concentrate mostly on it …..which probably cost me my English Pass”.[9] (Principal Macgregor was the Principal of Trinity College, then a semi-autonomous part of the University of Glasgow)

But by October 1938 he has succeeded: - “I was successful in my recent Examination. I got 80% and imagine that I lost most of the other 20% through sheer nervousness. Anyway at this stage a Pass is as good to me as 100%.”[10] But “unfortunately, due to domestic circumstances, I am unable to enter University this year..,.. I feel it with a keener sense of disappointment than I care to give expression to:-

But let us cheerful acquiesce

Nor make our scanty pleasures less

By pining at our state.”[11]

(Some, but not all, of his interaction with Glasgow University is still verifiable in the archives of the University of Glasgow: my thanks to the University of Glasgow archivists.[12] And there is at least one surviving person, now aged 90, who remembers Murdo attending the Nicolson Institute in Stornoway to sit these examinations.)

In the same 1938 letter Murdo rails, in a letter to my father, against the Scott family who owned (at that time) all of North Harris. “In a time of poverty, they send 54 hinds of venison from North Harris to their rich London friends: while hundreds on their estate in Harris are starving”. Even more interestingly, he discourses on how many of the exploited conspired in admiring their exploiters.

And advises my father “If you have a shilling to spare, buy Bernard Shaw’s ‘Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism, Capitalism, Sovietism and Fascism’ It is published in the ‘Pelican’ series of books at 6d each”[13]

The next month[14], he thanks my father for a parcel of books; “Jeans’ ‘The Mysterious Universe’ I had bought some years ago: all the rest are new to me”. He then launches into a long disquisition on the materialistic interpretation of history; and why he thinks it compatible with Christianity. Among the points he makes to defend the Church, he says “My grandfather had ten of a family and none of them was quite illiterate, because of the small schools founded and supported by the Church”.

And he quotes Browning:-

“I cannot chain my soul, it will not rest
In its clay prison; this most narrow sphere—
It has strange powers, and feelings, and desires,
Which I cannot account for, nor explain,
But which I stifle not, being bound to trust
All feelings equally—to hear all sides:
Yet I cannot indulge them, and they live,
Referring to some state or life unknown.”[15]

He refers to the author AA MacGregor. [Alasdair Alpin MacGregor (1899 - 1970) was a Scottish writer and photographer, known for a large number of travel books. And for denouncing drunkenness in Stornoway, a point on which his Wikipedia entry is very coy: “MacGregor was forced to be critically realistic about certain aspects of life on the west coast in his book The Western Isles”[16]]

“Comrade Macgregor has given an unsolicited testimonial to Messrs Booze Stornoway Ltd. King Alcohol has enough loyal subjects there. But they are not quite such a ragged army as A A Macgregor imagines he saw”. (This comment from the teetotal Murdo was typical of island reactions, even from anti-alcohol Hebrideans, to MacGregor).

He goes on “he and I crossed swords, or pens rather, in the now defunct ‘Scots Observer’ and he published a full apology. I saw him here one day since, and asked him to tea. He came in and talked like a gramaphone(sic) out of control….I don’t think he is a bad sort at the depth (sic) but it would be better if his censor was not so often unemployed”. (Compton Mackenzie had very similar opinions of MacGregor).

There are four more letters in 1939. He discusses land reform and religion: - “The Church question in Uig from 1870 was primarily a land question. The Free Church minister did not take the Land League’s side; and that was the occasion of the first breach of the Free Church ranks in Uig. They did not know that they were entering the most Tory Church in

Scotland

, and it would take me too long to enumerate how. It is significant of this connection between both that all the new settlers in Uig, Reef, Ardroil and Carnish are nearly all ‘Seceders’ ” (i.e. left the Free Church to join the Free Presbyterian Church).[17] [18]

He writes much about politics, and scathingly about Cripps. (In early 1939 Cripps was expelled from the Labour Party for his advocacy of a Popular Front with the Communist Party and anti-appeasement Liberals and Conservatives) .

“What do you think of our Local Branch supporting Sir Stafford Cripps? Likely enough, Comrade Cripps is sincere – as sincere as Hitler or Cromwell. Only a sincere man is capable of going to extremes; but Sir Stafford has never been much of an asset to the Labour Party….. When I entered the Lochcroistean schoolhouse to vote at the Election, I was confronted by a placarded saying of his, placed in a prominent place by the National Liberal supporters to frighten the electors against the party who condoned such a man!”[19]

In September 1939, Murdo took ill, and entered hospital in Glasgow. On the outbreak of World War II, he was sent home (this was the policy for all but the most critical of hospital patients – to clear space for anticipated war casualties). Some of my father’s family blamed this for Murdo’s subsequent demise, but I do not think my father held that view. Murdo, my father believed, had a brain tumour; other sources attribute his death to an unsuccessful operation for goitre.[20] Back in the hospital in Stornoway, he wrote his last religious poem – “Do Lorg ‘s Do Bhata Treun”. It was retrieved from under his pillow after he had died. Here is the last stanza from it:-

Thig aig a lorg seo feartan ur

Tha cumhachd triuir na Trainaid leis

Gu'n tig an truaghan leis on uir

Gu'm faigh e crun nach criochnaich leis

Is ged a rannsaicheadh tu chuis

Cha tuig thu tus a dhiomhaireachd

Ach gabh e, seinnidh tu a chliu

A stigh an Cuirt na Siornuidheachd[21]

And so Murdo died, his ambition to go to university unrealised. He was 33 years old.

Murdo was a learned man and a most exceptional postman. (My apologies to Alan Johnson.)

Postscript

So what kind of story is this?

Some of the readers of earlier drafts of this have already pointed out that it is a story that, in a slightly different form, happened across the

many times in generations past. In that sense it is almost a non-story. Although few such stories are quite as extreme as this one. (It has been unusual in the

for at least 140 years never to have been to school at all).

It is also a story that, as I have told it, may well still have some inaccuracies. Much of it was told to me when I was a boy less than 10 years old by my father, whose friend Murdo had already been dead for some 20 years. But it (at least most of it) is cross-verified by Murdo’s own letters, by the totally independent version of it on the Uig Historical Society website, by University of Glasgow archives and by some still extant witnesses to his life.

My father more than 50 years ago told me an inspirational story. A story that he wanted the next generation to know. So I have now helped, I hope, to relay that story to a further generation.

Iain Smith

January 2011.

Acknowledgments:-

To many family relations who have helped me with this, not least my cousins Annice and Ann.
To the Uig Historical Society, who (unknown until recently to me) had already chronicled substantial amounts of this story. I hope I have added a little to their story.
To the Secretary of the University of Glasgow and the archivists of the University.
To Professor Jim Hunter, Professor of Scottish History in UHI.
To Professor Donald Macleod, Professor of Systematic Theology,

Free Church of Scotland College

To Hector Morrison, Principal of Highland Theological College UHI.
And to a father who told his 10-yr-old son a story so entrancing that it has gripped the son for the rest of his life. Which is what all good teachers and all good parents do with 10-yr-olds.

[1] see http://www.ceuig.com/archives/593

[2] Smith, C 2010 Around the Peat Fire (Anthology Edition) Birlinn

[3] The account of this that I inherited from my father and that currently told on the Uig website disagree a bit in detail, but agree in substance.

[4] Letter of 1 July 1935

[5] A very reasonable paraphrase of what is actually in King John. Act iv. Sc. 2.

[6] Letter of 5^th November 1935

[7] This is actually a summary of a paragraph in Chapter 4 of Carlyle’s “Chartism” rather than a direct quotation

[8] Letter of 2^nd December 1935

[9] Letter of 30^th November 1937

[10] Letter of October 1938 (no detailed date)

[11] The quotation, unattributed by Murdo, is from Robert Burns (The Epistle to Davie, a Brother Poet, January, 1785)

[12] Personal communication from the archivist. (ref: R10/5/5 in the University of Glasgow archive)

[13] See http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/s/george-bernard-shaw/intelligent-womans-guide-to-socialism-capitalism-s.htm

[14] Letter of 1^st November 1938

[15] Pauline 1832

[16] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alasdair_Alpin_MacGregor

[17] Letter of 12^th January 1939

[18] There are various views on the Highland Church and land issues. See, for example, p157 in Andsell D 1998 The People of the Great Faith Acair. A more recent publication on church history in the Outer Hebrides (Macleod, J 2010 Banner in the West Birlinn) makes almost no references to land tenure issues.

[19] Letter of 10^th February 1939

[20] http://www.ceuig.com/archives/2391

[21] http://www.ceuig.com/archives/2391

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