The Two Cousins Episode 3: Young Hector

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 20^th 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.