The Two Cousins

Episode 1: Maternal wisdom

Iain Smith

 

 

My mother encouraged her three sons to explore the world with enthusiasm.  And was only occasionally discouraged by what they claimed to have found.

Her sense of humour once extended to saying to me:

“Your two younger brothers have their faults. But, because they were born in an era of the National Health Service, at least they came free.

You, born in 1947, cost £5. Sometimes I wonder if we spent that money wisely.”

I hope she would have enjoyed what I have written.

Quite a long time ago (almost 20 years now), I sat one evening with someone who, like me, has spent most of his life in academia. As the night wore on we got into a silly game and asked ourselves the question “Who were the best academics ever to come out of the Outer Hebrides?” This is an illogical question; but that did not stop us from exploring it.

We agreed on our first two names: First, Robert M MacIver; second, Hector MacIver.

Two weeks later I related an abridged version of this conversation to my octogenarian mother. “Isn’t it remarkable they had the same surnames?”  My mother said “Not at all. They were first cousins from a talented family: the family who established MacIver’s Garage in Bayhead in Stornoway.”

Knowing that Robert and Hector were born 30 years apart (although both died about the same time), I thought that my mother must be wrong. However, as a good Lewis son, I stayed silent.

About 10 years later, after my mother had died, I checked with the genealogist Bill Lawson by e-mail, and got the almost instant reply: “Like all Lewis mothers, your mother was right.”

Robert Morison MacIver was born in Stornoway in 1882 and lived as a child first on North Beach Street and then on Bayhead (I suspect where, many years later, MacIver’s Garage was established by his father); his mother came from a Stornoway family; his father, although by then living in Stornoway and flourishing as a merchant in the Harris Tweed industry, had come from North Shawbost.  R. M. MacIver died 88 years later in the United States, in 1970; having established a reputation as one of the world’s greatest sociologists. There is no Hebridean who can match his academic accomplishments. His autobiography “As a Tale That is Told”, published late in his life, is long out of print.

His first cousin Hector (almost certainly they never met) was born in North Shawbost in 1910 and died in Edinburgh aged 55 in 1966. He had a reputation that is chronicled in a festschrift (i.e. tribute) “Memoirs of a Modern Scotland” (Editor: Karl Miller - and recently reprinted by Faber) and in an “autobiography” published by his wife (married to Hector from 1958 to his death). The latter is out of print. Hector’s claim to fame, while undoubted, is a more shifting and ambiguous one than that of his first cousin. He was a friend and confidant (and drinking companion) of - among others - Hugh MacDiarmid, Dylan Thomas, Louis MacNeice, and Sydney Goodsir Smith. One price for their acquaintance, given that much of it was spent in the Café Royal in Edinburgh, was just possibly the liver cancer that killed him at a comparatively early age. Drinking with Dylan Thomas was never a particularly healthy activity.

So one spent 88 years in this world; one 55 years. But, in very different ways, these first cousins from a North Shawbost family moved and shaped the lives and views of many people. And were held in awe by many: on a national stage in the case of Hector, on an international stage in the case of Robert.

In their native island even during their lifetimes they were either unknown (by the majority) or regarded with scepticism (at best) by that minority who did know them. Today in the Hebrides they are almost totally forgotten.

Let me try to chronicle in monthly episodes why these two remarkable cousins should be better remembered.

Is it an accident that they were both so gifted? Possibly; although, if so, it is a remarkable roll of the dice of fate.

Were they inheritors of gifted and shared genes? Possibly, and likely to me, although that is an unpopular theory nowadays.

Were they children who were both nurtured in a rich and educationally stimulating environment? There is some evidence of that. Robert’s father was a comparatively rich 19^th century tweed merchant who later established a successful garage business; and both the mother and father of Hector in the 1900s were certainly among the more affluent and middle class people in North Shawbost. Not a particularly difficult claim to fame in the North Shawbost of 1910, but possibly influential nevertheless.

Were they both visited by a gift of God? Perhaps. Although, if so, they both quickly showed a distinct lack of appreciation of the great Donor of their talents. A lack of appreciation that probably contributed  to the way in which they became unappreciated by the community from which they came. They were both agnostic prophets, in their distinct ways. But “prophets who had no honour in their own country”.

I began to write this story as a narrative. I simply wanted to chronicle two people who are less remembered than I thought they should be.

But the more I wrote, the more I found myself asking what intellectual, spiritual, political, moral and social beliefs I myself had acquired from my Lewis upbringing. The more I researched and the more I wrote the less certain I became about the answers.

These are stories I have written simply to entertain and to inform.

 (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.