Visiting the Island of Lewis: a Hebridean oddysey

A Lewis Odyssey

 

Iain Smith, Sam Tullis & Robert Locke

 

[Background note : Lewis and Harris is an island of the Outer Hebrides in the Atlantic Ocean. It has been part of Scotland for much of the last 900 years.]

 

 

 

 

Saturday 25 April 2015

Drive Glasgow to Ullapool. Snow shower at Aviemore. We board the new Loch Seaforth ferry ; and battle across the Minch in a heavy swell for some two hours or more.

Sunday 26 April

The morning dawns - with snow falling outside as we tuck into a good hotel breakfast. Fortified, we set out for a walk.

Sunday walkers

Our walk takes us through the town and across Glen river into the Castle Grounds

 


 (look carefully) a very disconsolate heron



Despite the snow showers, there is a good view from the Castle Grounds of Stornoway harbour.

Stornoway Harbour from Castle grounds

The castle has a controversial past: built about 1847 or so by Sir James Matheson, then the biggest and most notorious drug-dealer in the world. A man who makes the drug dealers of modern Scotland or Mexico look small time.

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Muriel Mackenzie is a lady who has chosen to be a missionary teacher in the land of her forebears: previously she taught in Glasgow with my two pals. She takes my pals for lunch, while I visit my brother's house and collect a Merc to use for later travel.

Then Muriel drives my pals and me to her ancestral heartland: Uig.


An Uig Beach; near Timsgarry

She shows us the remains of her grandmother's house: what is left of a traditional 2-roomed straw-thatched dry-stone "black house”.

Muriel at Granny's House

And we climb to the top of a hill to look both south-east into Harris  and west towards Aird Uig. It is cold, and plenty snow lies on the hills. But the snow showers have died out.
 


Looking South- East: Harris hills

 

Looking West : Aird Uig

 
 
Monday 27 April

We drive 30 miles north of Stornoway to the very tip of the island. First we walk on the machair land and the spectacular beach at Europie. (Not far away, as a result of the sands, there are well-drained, high-lime, low-acid - and therefore high-yield-  crofts.) The weather is kind; and we play around on the dunes and on the beach, just as one of us was wont to do in that very place some 60 years ago. 

Two little boys at Europie

Big boy on Europie beach

Then we visit the Butt of Lewis lighthouse and view with awe the cliffs and seas. The lighthouse, inevitably, is a Stevenson construction; and it is thought that, as a child, RLS may have visited it.

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Then the short drive to Port of Ness, its history now well-documented by Comunn Eachdraidh Nis or the visitor. And here lived and worked John F Macleod, builder of the "sgoth" boats and, on 1 January 1919, the hero of the Iolaire disaster.



Port of Ness Harbour

 

Port of Ness acquired a pier about 1835 : the number of  boats fishing from there quickly climbed from five to thirty. By about 1890-1914, life for some in Ness was quite good: fishing (mostly cod and ling) was plentiful and lucrative. An information board of Comunn Eachdraidh Nis at Port tells us that that a ling would sell for one shilling at a time when an average daily wage was three shillings.

 But there was a cloud in the generally sunny skies. “high-tech” boats i.e. steam-powered drifters, mostly not locally owned, came to dominate the fishing: the Ness “sgoth” was in essence obsolete very early in 20th century. By 1922, things had become very grim. The privations of 1923, notably in Ness, are well recorded by Roger Hutchison and Jim Hunter.  They were probably a major contributor to emigration, notably on the Metagama (1923) and the Marloch (1924).

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We drive down the west coast, taking in the community centre (Comunn Eachdraidh Nis) at Cross : cake and coffee; an impressive World War I display; and school archives from the 1940s and 1950s, where I quickly find photographs of my father, of my middle brother, of me and of some well-remembered teachers.
 

On to Bragar, my father's ancestral village; and where he and others of my family are buried.

 

 

Bragar: l to r - Grandfather; Grandmother; oldest Uncle; (then) Father, Mother

In Bragar we also visit Jewel, the younger of my only two surviving aunts. We have a great time with her.  Jewel has just invested in an I-Pad.


The weather has turned foul.

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At Garenin, there are well-preserved and restored  traditional 2-roomed straw-thatched dry-stone "black house”. Only after the 1886 Act gave security of tenure to crofters did it make much sense to invest in home improvements; and it took over half a century for the larger and healthier mortared-walled and slate-roofed “white houses” to become common and to acquire electricity and running water. The “black houses” at Garenin were inhabited into the 1970s.

Above and below: Wet afternoon at Garenin

Inside Garenin Black house



Harris Tweed weaving: Garenin

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We visit the  ancient Callanish stones and the excellent modern visitors centre associated with them.

 

 

 

 



Back in Stornoway, we visit An Lainntair  (Stornoway cultural centre) if only to watch the shipping in the harbour; and have an excellent curry back in our hotel.


Tuesday 28 April



We drive to Holm



Iolaire Memorial, Holm

 

Here died over 200 people on 1 January 1919, the majority of them Hebridean sailors returning from naval war service. One of them was my grand-uncle John.
 
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We travel a few miles from Holm towards the Eye peninsula, the district also known as Point. Much of Point consists of relatively recent settlements, but Aignish the first village is different, largely because of its fertile machair lands. In particular it has an ancient graveyard and chapel, the latter now in the process of being restored:



 Eaglais Na H-Aoidhe



 




We visit a friend of mine mid-morning for tea/coffee and biscuits. Given that she is 96 years old, I feel obligated to help in this process. She says “Iain, you are much improved.”

As with Port of Ness the late 19^th century was a time of considerable buoyancy in the fishing industry in Point. We visit the old Knock school, set between Aignish and Swordale and now an interesting and lively community centre. Here studied three of my grand uncles, who became fishermen, a grand uncle who became a missionary in Africa and my maternal grandmother.



John Munro (“Iain Beag”) son of a fisherman was born in 1889 in Swordale and raised in Aignish. He also was educated in Knock School; went to the Nicolson Institute where he was dux in 1911; and was killed in France in 1918. He wrote about the Lewisian gneiss:-

What wonder tho’ thy hills be weather worn,

And surface bare of blooming trees, until

Th’ unfeeling, thoughtless ever, call thee bleak?

Know they the sorrows that have o’er thee passed?

The scars thou bear’st to show how thou has felt

The grind of grating ice, ton upon ton

And oceans broad, that capped the long gone world?

 

 

 

 

We have lunch in Aignish with my cousin and co-author Murdo, who talks with enthusiasm about his sheep. He also has insights into the deep divide in the crofting community on the merits and demerits of wind turbines (of which we have seen many in the last three days).

 

 

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We go to Lews Castle College to be given a guided tour by my cousin Donnie

Cousin Donnie and colleague
Copyright : Lews Castle College

    
   I once made a speech in this place:-

Old codger makes a speech: August 2013
Copyright : Lews Castle College

"But let me turn for the moment to the foundation of Lews Castle College. Four people met in a room in Stornoway in 1950. They had a dilemma that most of us will never face.

They were part-owners of a castle; and they were unsure what do with their castle.

These 4 people in 1950 eventually reached a conclusion:  'Let us make this castle a place of learning.' And that is how Lews Castle College UHI began. Wise people they were. And their decision was a significant one. Out of a building created from infamy, they created an institution for good."



Wednesday 29th

It is wet and bleak. Ian Minty takes us for a tour. The Shoe Burn , he tells us, was called that because it was where rural visitors to Stornoway paused to wash their feet and put on shoes.




We repair to the hotel, have coffee and cake; and I monitor the harbour for the arrival of the ferry:-

Loch Seaforth  and Stornoway harbour



At 1400 hrs we set sail for Ullapool.


A day later I write to the hotel on Facebook:  "Three of us stayed with you for 4 nights 25-28 April. We enjoyed the experience!"

30 April at 23:24

• 

   
• County Hotel  "Thanks Iain Smith - delighted to hear you enjoyed your stay. Haste ye back!"

IS
13 May 2015
 

An educational story

JL Robertson: an educational story

Iain Smith

 

John Lindsay Robertson was born in Stornoway in 1854, one of twin boys. His mother was from Montrose, his father was a “Ship Master” (1861 census) and “Ship Owner” (1871 census) from Stornoway and they lived in a 3-roomed house at No. 17 Kenneth Street, subsequently migrating to No. 29. So Robertson belonged to a reasonably affluent family. He was educated at the local General Assembly School i.e. one of the church schools that preceded the 1873 foundation of the Nicolson Institute in Stornoway.

 By the 1871 census he is still living at home aged 17; and is a “pupil teacher”. “Pupil teacher” generally indicated a student staying on at school beyond the usual school leaving age of 12 or 13 and possibly intending to become a certificated but non-graduate teacher through a course in a teacher training college. This was a common and quite well-funded route for both males and, increasingly, females in mid to late 19^th century Scotland. “Pupil teachers” were paid up to £20 per year, over £2000 at 2013 prices; and many of them at 18 were then awarded bursaries to attend college.

Some pupil teachers however, always males, used this as a route to university; and this appears to have been what Robertson did. By 1871, Scottish universities had become increasingly rigorous in their entrance standards, and it was to be 25 years or more before these standards could be met by study in Stornoway or indeed in much of rural Scotland. So Robertson seemingly at some point migrated to a mainland “higher school” (perhaps Inverness Royal Academy or Aberdeen Grammar School or the Royal High School in Edinburgh). He then attended the University of Edinburgh and graduated with distinction in Arts (MA) and then in Law (LLB). He packed a lot into the decade of the 1870s.

 In 1880 (aged 26) he became an HMI (i.e. Her Majesty’s Inspector of Schools) - “Her Majesty” was of course Victoria rather than Elizabeth. We know that inspectors at the time were recruited on the basis of academic distinction rather than experience in school teaching. Much to the dismay of the main teacher union, then as now the Educational Institute of Scotland, some school inspectors of that era had no school teaching experience at all.  Whether Robertson himself had briefly been a schoolteacher after graduation is uncertain but he had of course some years of experience as the apprentice “pupil teacher”.

In 1888, the local school boards of Barvas, Lochs and Uig in the Island of Lewis and ten others, all in the Highlands, were in financial difficulties, largely through low attendance and poor payment of tuition fees; and they applied to the government for special assistance. This was granted, subject to government having some administrative control. It was JL Robertson who was appointed the administrator of the scheme; and he was promoted to Chief Inspector of Schools (HMCI).  

As Professor Bone describes

Robertson was a Stornoway man who, though quite young as an inspector, was admirably suited by background, temperament and energy for the responsibilities now entrusted to him. He had a shrewd understanding of the attitudes of the Highlanders and, by an unusual combination of tactfulness and audacity, he brought them to accept the Department’s policy. The attendance figures were raised sharply and, though strict economy was practised, educational advances were made in the schools by the broadening and brightening of the curriculum. ....... it was generally admitted that he was just and sincere, and within a few years the position was becoming satisfactory again with the return of the boards to a position of solvency.

By 1890 the three Lewis boards were indeed balancing their books and the others followed at various stages. School fees in elementary (primary) Board schools were abolished in 1890. They then relied, as their local authority school successors do to this day, on a combination of government grant and local rates. 

Thereafter JL Robertson’s main responsibilities were as chief district inspector for the Highlands and Islands.

Across Scotland, attention had come to focus on what we now call “secondary education”.

In 1892, the first state grants for secondary education appeared (10 years earlier than in England) and were used to build up schools in smaller towns as well as to strengthen existing ones……. They formed an effective national network able to prepare both for the universities and for business careers.

This was partly fuelled by the government’s foundation in Scotland in 1888 of the Higher Leaving Certificate. It quickly became, as with remarkably few changes it remains today, the major benchmark for university and college entrance. There was considerable agreement that secondary education should be expanded, especially for bright but poor students; but great controversy as to how. In a complex debate, the central decision was between the School Boards developing their own “higher grade” provision as opposed to the existing secondary provision of “endowed schools” and “higher schools” e.g. Kelvinside Academy, Inverness Royal Academy, Glasgow High School (which were independent of the Boards) remaining under individual control but receiving government grant to fund “deserving” poor scholars or to expand their provision.

In essence both sides gained. Govan School Board on one side was particularly prominent and proactive with the foundation of no less than five “higher grade” schools. Hillhead High School (founded 1885) and Hyndland School (founded in Partick in 1887) are still-functioning memorials to that. On the other side, existing independent secondary schools also received government grant to expand their provision; some of them (e.g. Inverness Royal Academy, Aberdeen Grammar School and Perth Academy) are today simply part of the state-funded system.

In the Island of Lewis, there was no existing secondary school to expand. The Nicolson Institute had been founded in 1873 by endowment and gifts and had quickly become a Board primary school. Building on moves initiated by his predecessor (the now somewhat maligned Forbes) a new Rector WJ Gibson in 1894 took over the creation and expansion of a secondary department; and bursaries “on the advice of Mr JL Robertson HMI” were awarded for the best incoming students. Hence Donald Maclean of Bragar and Robert Maciver of Stornoway became in 1898 the first Nicolson Institute students to go direct to university.  JL Robertson as District Inspector was also instrumental in the Nicolson Institute acquiring and expanding its dedicated secondary building on Francis Street in 1898.  Portree High School and Kirkwall Grammar School began to follow the same route only a few years later with the support of Robertson. So across Scotland even in remote rural areas some barriers to university access were coming down: and WJ Gibson and JL Robertson were key players in this.

But formidable barriers remained. It was certainly not an accident that the predecessor of Donald Maclean and of Robert Maciver as a Nicolson Institute dux (Dina Macleod) had to settle not for a degree but for a sub-degree qualification, the delightfully titled “Lady Literate in Arts”: Scottish universities began to admit women undergraduates to degree courses only in 1892, and initially the numbers were small. We also know from Maclean census data in Bragar and from Professor Robert Maciver’s autobiography that the fathers of Maclean and Maciver were both prosperous merchants; and this was almost certainly a factor in the educational progress of their sons.  Poor working class boys and certainly girls from remote rural areas in Scotland did not, with rare exceptions, go to university in the late 19^th century.  The stories of the exceptions (e.g. the church-sponsored Rev. Alexander Macdonald, son of a crofter from late 19^th century Swordale) have contributed to a mythology.

If Gibson and other headteachers at school level and if Robertson and a few other chief HMIs inspectors at school district level had played a big part in opening up opportunity, another Scot, one Andrew Carnegie, then made a further intervention in 1901. 

One can think of Carnegie as a 19^th century Donald Trump. He has a better claim than Trump to Scottish ancestry and, at least in his later years, a more secure record in philanthropy. In 1901, Andrew Carnegie decided he would give about a quarter billion US dollars (at today's prices) to Scottish universities. But, never himself having been near a university, he took some advice and decided it should go into a trust which might be expected to generate a spending power of about £50,000 a year to pay tuition fees for poor students. £50,000 per year is about £2.5m a year at today’s prices.

 

The Carnegie Trust says today

 

To put this in context, it should be stressed that, contrary to what is suggested, access to university education in Scotland has not always been free. On the contrary, fees were charged by the universities (originally by the professors directly) which represented a significant barrier to access, and there was no provision for subsistence. There was hot competition for the small number of available bursaries……. It is precisely because student fees constituted such a serious barrier to entry for the ‘qualified and deserving’ that Carnegie was first persuaded to consider this endowment.”

 

By 1904, half of all Scottish university undergraduates were benefitting from the Carnegie endowment. The sons, and indeed by then the daughters, of fishermen and crofters and labourers and shoemakers had found another source of support. It was hard enough for Robertson, Maclean and Maciver, all sons of prosperous families, to have made their ways to university in the 19^th century. But in the early 20^th century, Carnegie made a further difference in opening up paths to university for a wider group.

 

We have tracked for example the 1900s school careers of the great, if tragic, John Munro from Knock school (son of a fisherman) and the almost equally great Murdo Murray from Back school (son of a shoemaker), both examples of rural primary school students from poor backgrounds who accessed secondary education in the Nicolson Institute and subsequently became university graduates in the 1910s. Munro was a teenage prodigy in writing Miltonic verse in his second language of English; no mean Gaelic poet; a war hero; and dead in wartime France before he was 30 years old. Murray was a war poet; a school teacher; an HMI; and -in his elderly years in the 1950s- a Gaelic chronicler of his long-dead school pal Munro.

Success in secondary school provision across Scotland had however put financial pressure on government: for primary students progressing to secondary schooling attracted a high government grant for the School Boards. So Robertson and the government in the 1900s insisted that 13/14-yr-old students in primary schools passed a newly established “qualifying exam” to access secondary education provision: this was an institution which, if not quite as long-lived as the “Higher Leaving Certificate”, blighted the lives of many of us until well into the 1960s.  

A perusal of the school log of Shawbost School in the 1900s suggests that Shawbost was doing poorly in “qualifying exam” results:  so one can understand why William T Ross the then Shawbost head fell out with JL Robertson; and for his pains was exiled to Scarp School for the residue of his career - a Hebridean equivalent of being sent to Siberia. 

Other rural schools in Lewis, like the Knock and Back Schools of Munro and Murray, were doing well in this new regime.  Government reports for the years 1910 to 1914 extolled what had happened in developing secondary education in Lewis as a prime example of the superlative nature of government education policy: some public relations hype in the governance of Scotland does not change over the years.

In 1912 JL Robertson was given an Honorary LL.D. by Edinburgh University. A generation or more later (1952) , Professor Robert M Maciver, the Nicolson alumnus who had profited from the route to university opened up by Robertson and Gibson, received a similar honour from Edinburgh; as, a further generation or more on from that (2008), did another son of the Hebrides, Matthew Maciver, Chief Executive of the General Teaching Council for Scotland. Matthew Maciver had in the 1960s been an undergraduate holder at the University of Edinburgh of a JL Robertson bursary.

 In 1912, Robertson was also more widely influential in Scottish social development. He was a member of the small and high-powered Dewar Committee:  

The report presented a vivid description of the social landscape of the time and highlighted the desperate state of medical provision to the population, particularly in the rural areas of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. The report recommended setting up a new, centrally planned provision of care that within 20 years transformed medical services to the area. This organisation, the Highlands and Islands Medical Service …….. acted as a working blueprint for the NHS in Scotland.

In 1915, Dr JL Robertson became Senior Chief Inspector. i.e. the top HMI in Scotland. In 1919 he was awarded a CB (Companion of the Order of the Bath). In 1921 he retired. He subsequently gave a £5000 donation for educational purposes. From a man whose maximum career salary would have been £900 per year this was not an inconsequential sum: it is over £210,000 at 2013 prices. A residue of this money, sadly eroded by inflation, remains today with Comhairle nan Eilean Siar.

Records held by Tasglann nan Eilean Siar in Stornoway  say of Robertson:

When he died in Inverness, six years after his retirement ………. his popularity was clear in the extent of the activity surrounding his funeral; when his body was returned to Lewis the flags on the island were at half mast and all businesses were closed at noon. All schools throughout Lewis were closed and ‘the senior boys of Nicholson [sic] Institute headed the funeral procession, which included the Lewis Pipe Band, the Brethren of the Masonic Lodge, the Provost, Magistrates and Councillors of Stornoway and members and officials of all the other public bodies’. In addition, ‘there was a very large and representative attendance of the general public, including people from all parts of the island’. Sir George Macdonald, the Secretary of the Scottish Education Department, extolled his virtues and said ‘Few men in our time have laid their native country under so deep an obligation as he has done’.

It is unlikely that many Scottish educational luminaries of today will receive such a send-off.

Back in the 1870s Robertson had faced five barriers to university access for Hebrideans, many of which also applied elsewhere in Scotland:-

1.     One had to be male.

2.     One had to stay on in education beyond the age of 13: and forego the wages available to teenagers, notably in the (relatively lucrative) fishing industry of the time.

3.     One required access to a school which was teaching to University entrance standards: the Island of Lewis and the Hebrides had no such schools.

4.     Someone had therefore to pay the mainland school tuition fees; and the associated costs of travel, food and lodgings.

5.     Someone had to pay university tuition fees; and the associated costs of travel, food and lodgings.

John Lindsay Robertson surmounted these barriers in the 1870s: he was male; he had affluent parents; and most certainly he was talented and hard-working.

He then played a significant national role with others in lowering these barriers for subsequent generations.

He should be better remembered than he is.

 

(Among the many sources on which we have drawn, we especially acknowledge:-

TR Bone (1968)  School Inspection in Scotland 1840-1966  Edinburgh;

D Macdonald (1978) Lewis: A History of the Island Edinburgh

Nicolson Institute (1973) Centenary School Magazine Stornoway

Tasglann nan Eilean Siar (2014) at http://ica-atom.tasglann.org.uk/index.php/dr-j-l-robertson-bequest-3;isad )

 

 

 

(Iain Smith is a part-time writer of Lewis origins.)