The Two Cousins Episode 2: A Childhood in Victorian Stornoway

The Two Cousins

Episode 2: A Childhood in Victorian Stornoway

Iain Smith

 

Robert MacIver's autobiography As a Tale That Is Told (1968) is informative.

But he was a reluctant author of his own autobiography:

 

“When I had reached the age of grey-haired reminiscence and was told I should write my autobiography, I swore I never would. No one told the truth about himself and no one knew the truth about himself. Everyone is a prejudiced witness of the events in which he participated and of the situations in which his lot was cast.”

 

So begins what is (in large part) a delightfully written book, composed by an 84-yr-old author.

 

MacIver begins by describing the Stornoway of his birth and his youth: a town of tranquillity for ten months in the year, whose population almost doubled for the two months of the herring season. His father was a successful merchant. (Much modern research suggests that successful male scholars of the turn of the late 19^th century in Scotland were, contrary to Scottish mythology, products of relatively prosperous families. Certainly Robert and his somewhat younger first cousin Hector fit that pattern.)

 

In 1887, MacIver entered the local Nicolson Institute. His academic promise showed early: in discussing his classmates, he says that “the fact that I could beat them at reading and spelling gave me confidence”.  Also early was his religious non-conformism, despite his having a highly religious father; and again this was the beginning of a lifelong pattern.

 

MacIver was not totally inspired by the Nicolson Institute where he says there were “routine lessons by uninspiring teachers”.  Eighty years later, shortly after the autobiography was published, I personally can remember one Nicolson Institute teacher unwilling to forgive MacIver for this act of disloyalty to his alma mater. For Robert had written:-

“There was nothing at school to arouse my incentive. During these years the school had been descending from bad to worse. Our Nicolson Institute had been the leading school in the outer islands and had acquired a fine reputation over the north of Scotland. But it was under a headteacher who had been gradually deteriorating.”

Then one day

“the school had been placed under a new administration. When I went to school on Monday the old headmaster had disappeared. There was a new head and there had been a general shakeup……he certainly knew his job, and once he had reformed the system everything went smoothly enough. We all came to respect him, although he did not evoke any feeling of warmth”

We can put this in the historical context of a history of Robert’s school:-

“In January 1893, the then headmaster, Mr Forbes, was placed in charge of the new Secondary ………….The school was now the most advanced educational centre in the islands and, under the influence of its next headmaster, Mr WJ Gibson in 1894, the Nicolson really began to take off. Gibson was one of the greatest and most enlightened educationalists of his day and in his later years, was awarded the CBE for his efforts - the first headmaster in Scotland to be so honoured.”

And Robert MacIver is indeed documented in the same source as a beneficiary of this new regime:

“Mention should be made of the growing importance of the Secondary Department. In 1898 the first two pupils to leave the Nicolson and enter directly into University were Donald Maclean of Bragar to Aberdeen and Robert M MacIver of Stornoway to Edinburgh, each of whom graduated with first class honours and went on to have distinguished academic careers. From then, and up to the present day, there has been an ever increasing number of pupils proceeding from the Nicolson into tertiary education.”

Robert MacIver’s own testimony to the effect of a new head some 120 years ago is worth quoting today. For it would stand up rather well to what is written currently about how schools achieve excellence:

“The changeover was a turning point in my life. There was now something to strive for.  Paths were opening to the future. When I heard there were to be prizes for excellence, I felt it was a call to me, and I was eager to respond. The new discipline was an uncomfortable shock to our school habits. Our listlessness met with sharp reprimands. Punctuality was insisted upon. Homework, negligible before, was imposed, although not excessively. But once the initiation stage was over schooling became meaningful to most of us. Something had been missing from my life, and now I knew what it was. I owe a great debt to this headteacher  -W.J. Gibson – and in retrospect I realise that I never properly acknowledged it . In youth we take so many gifts as if they had dropped from the sky.”

 

And his distinction between the “traditional routinised fashion” in which his maths teacher taught and the absence of an “inkling of the beauty of mathematical reasoning or of its significance for some understanding of the spatial framework of all that exists” would also stand up well to modern distinctions between surface rote learning and deep meaningful learning.

In his leisure time, MacIver enjoyed aspects of Stornoway now gone - some departed long ago, some lost more recently: “I visited the lofts where they repaired the sails, the boat-building yards, the spaces under the docks where they worked on the piles, the smoky pungent-smelling line of sheds where the herring was kippered.”

So MacIver, aged 16, approached the question of going to university. MacIver aimed for a university bursary. Such bursaries were the product of university endowments of the 19^th century; and they still exist today - but with their relative size and significance ravaged by the inflation of the last 100 years and by the overtly cautious, yet disastrous, investment policies imposed on the endowment trustees. The typical £40 -£90 or so a year that such bursaries provide today would perhaps pay for a couple of decent university textbooks or for a month of beer (depending on the student’s inclination); in my own student days in the 1960s, they were a welcome and non-trivial addition to the (by then almost universal) £360 student grant; but in 1898 they were in excess of the entire annual salary of a road labourer.

Maclean (dux of the school in 1897), and his close friend MacIver (dux of the school in 1898) were the first Nicolson pupils to attempt direct entry to university without having spent an intermediary year or two in a mainland school. MacIver and Maclean both succeeded. Aged 16, Robert MacIver took the steamer from Stornoway and then the train on to Edinburgh University. He and Maclean were pioneers on a journey that thousands have since taken. As he crossed the Minch on a blustery September night, MacIver reflected that “I would never make my home on that island again, beyond my summer visits.”  Nor did he.

(to be continued)

Iain Smith was formerly Dean of Education in the University of Strathclyde.