The Two
Cousins
Episode
3: Young Hector
Iain
Smith
The most
extensive chronicling of Hector MacIver’s early days is in a joint
autobiography produced by his wife Mary MacIver long after Hector was dead.
(The book is out of print, but still readily available.) Hector was born in the
village of Shawbost in the Outer Hebrides in 1910. His father was a merchant;
and his mother a teacher. Although MacIver’s father later went bankrupt, the
family were affluent by the then standards of that village. Indeed I can remember
my own father (a little older than Hector, and living in the same village)
describing the MacIver household as full of books when his own house had none.
Hector and his family lived in a slated “white” house, at a time when most of
the village houses were in thatched “black” houses.
MacIver’s
account of his childhood is detailed in places and sketchy in others (with
little to say about his years in secondary school), and it is in places
factually inaccurate. (There may have been reasons why his
brother Neil went to secondary school in Kingussie but it was certainly not, as
MacIver asserts, because the Nicolson Institute in Stornoway (founded 1871) was
not yet in existence. And later his description of the town of Stornoway as
being asleep when the naval yacht Iolaire
foundered so disastrously on 1 January 1919 outside Stornoway is wrong: there
were hundreds on the quayside)
But the picture
of his childhood village is fascinating. Among the features he vividly
describes are many that, even then, would have seemed inconceivable in lowland
Scotland; and that are now, for the most part, long gone, even in Shawbost.
Some of them vanished in Hector’s own lifetime; almost all the remainder have
vanished in the near half-century since his death; and the surviving few mostly
exist in greatly diminished form.
The thatched
black houses that he describes, with the fire in the middle of the floor and in
winter the cattle at one end of the house had, with the exception of a few
preserved as museums, vanished by the end of the 1950s: a retrograde step for
those of a romantic mind, a huge step forward for those more concerned with
infant mortality and with general domestic comfort. The Viking-descended
water-driven mill for the oats and the barley had fallen into disuse long
before the 20th century was half old; the cultivation of the oats
and the barley which lasted well into the 1970s has now vanished; the digging
of the native peat for use as a fuel survives, but at a rate a fraction of what
it was a century ago. The monolingual English infant teacher with the
monolingual Gaelic infant class has gone, at least in that stark form: not
least because there are very few monolingual Gaelic children entering infant
school.
Only his
description of the treacherous Atlantic and of the winter storms powering
themselves in from the ocean would be as applicable today as they were almost a
century ago.
MacIver writes about
the tasks of the village: “I began to take an interest in the work of the
croft: ploughing, harrowing, planting potatoes, gathering kelp on the seashore,
women spinning, men weaving and so on.”
His description
of boys stealing turnips from the crofts would have applied, some 40 years
later, to the village where I was brought up; as would the New Year theft of
carts and other agricultural implements which, in the name of celebrations,
were dumped in the village pond. Today these customs are dead. The boisterous
Hebridean village lads of today, even if they are so minded, have no access to
turnips or to carts: they are reduced to the primitive joys of the iPod and the
MP3 Player
Aged 12, Hector
goes to the Nicolson Institute for his secondary schooling. While the Nicolson
was founded in 1871 and had formal secondary education from 1893, it was 1898
before it first sent 2 pupils (both boys) direct to university. Of these 2 boys,
as we have seen, one (Robert M MacIver) was the first cousin of Hector. What
Hector did in 1922 or so i.e. attend the Nicolson Institute and then (in 1927) go
directly to university was by then a moderately common pattern – although in the
1920s still not nearly as common as it is today.
MacIver records
that he went to Edinburgh University to study English, British History, Moral
Philosophy and Fine Art. There he met Sorley Maclean, the finest Gaelic poet of
his age, Norman MacCaig and Sidney Goodsir Smith.
On graduation,
Hector trained as a teacher; and, as with so many Scottish teachers of the 30s,
initially found employment hard to come by. This appears to have been a spur to
start a significant amount of both broadcasting and journalism. He records that
it was through broadcasting that he met Louis MacNeice and Dylan Thomas, both
of whom became significant figures in his life.
One of the best
sources of information on Hector MacIver’s adult life was published in 1970, a
few years after his death, and has recently been re-published. It was
“published in the honour of Hector MacIver,
who was born in the island of Lewis in the Hebrides on 3 August 1910 …… He was
a writer, a broadcaster, a talker, a speaker, and he produced plays. He was a
gifted man, and a gifted friend…………. He was not famous in the usual sense, but
he made contributions to more than one of the fields under discussion and he
did have a kind of fame. It went by word of mouth and seldom reached the
newspapers; it was as oral as the world of his origins”
The same source
says something of MacIver as a writer. In a 1934 Scottish periodical of essays
(which included essays by Hugh MacDiarmid, Neil Gunn and Eric Linklater)
“one of
the best essays was Hector MacIver’s piece on the Outer Isles. It seemed to me
full of exciting promise and I took it for granted that we should see much more
of his writing.”
And a source of the times quotes an extract from Hector’s essay:
“In all the Hebrides, Benbecula is the sea's dearest child. That is why the returning tide races so quickly over the sand, hurrying with pouted lips to kiss its shore. And when the night's embraces are over, the sea leaves Benbecula again, like a mother bird going to forage for its young.”
(to
be continued)
Iain
Smith was formerly Dean of Education in the University of Strathclyde. He
welcomes feedback at i.r.m.smith@strath.ac.uk.
