The Two Cousins: Episode 7

Episode 7: Hector goes to War

Iain Smith

In Episode 5, we left Hector MacIver teaching in Edinburgh and pursuing various literary interests.

One of MacIver’s school students, Robert Taubman, paints a vivid picture of MacIver as a very young teacher at the Royal High School in Edinburgh in 1934.

From Taubman’s description of the MacIver writings we get an impression why some of these caused Hector’s reputation in his native island to become a mixed one:-

“He wrote stories (for little magazines that are now untraceable) that were as close to the life of the Western Isles as he could go. It was the life of a pre-industrial imaginative people……… He had a certain notoriety at home as an enemy of the Kirk; but he was susceptible to the splendours and the spleen of the Gaelic pulpit and the language of damnation, and when a word like ‘fornication’ appeared in his stories it didn’t look so much stark as theological.”

Quite; but the view in Hector’s native village in the 1930s may have been just a touch less generous.

Certainly Hector was vocal in his opposition to the churches of his native island. In one piece he wrote:-

 “As interpreted by the Presbyterian ministers of the Hebrides, life is identified with ascetism and repression. The crucifixion of the body is the monotonous theme of all their discourses. Drinking, dancing, music and recreation are officially condemned. But these gentlemen in their fanatical and destructive campaign forget that such taboos cannot be imposed on country people, whose nature is to set more store on human values than on ascetic ones. And the more their human wants are denied, the more they tend to excess.”

World War II came; and MacIver joined the Navy. He writes modestly but eloquently about what was a hazardous occupation – an officer on board a destroyer on convoy duties in the North Atlantic.

“…in the midst of all this rigorous routine there were moments of pleasure and excitement-quite apart from the occasions when we were attacked- for attack and counter-attack became also part of the routine. A destroyer, by the very traits of her character, never fails to provide excitement; her movements are unpredictable, her vitality inexhaustible. In the very smoothest of seas, a shiver of life from her engine rooms runs through her whole fabric; she resembles the pulsating body of a greyhound preparing for the chase; and if she decides to turn in her tracks, as she often does, she exercises her narrow circle with the neatness of compass and pencil upon paper.

Anyway, for a whole summer, while we escorted convoys up and down the coast with our ship keeping guard, marshalling the long column of merchant ships and rounding up vagrants, I watched her with interest. I already felt that if, some day, I went back to my profession, I should often be tempted to digress from the strict theme of literature to talk for a moment about destroyers.”

 

His friend Neil Gunn writes to him “I wrote a book on the herring industry of a century ago, ‘the Silver Darlings’, and it’s to be filmed in the north later this year’.  As does Chris Grieve (Hugh MacDiarmid):-

“Sorry my reply is belated. The trouble is that working as an engineer on munitions, I have excessively long hours and practically no time to myself at all….. However hard physical work (hitherto unknown to me) has suited me well enough in every other respect, physically, psychologically and pecuniarily (sic) - and I venture to hope that you have a like tale to tell…”

 

One of Hector’s naval commanders was Angus, the Marquis of Graham, later the Duke of Montrose and famous (or infamous) in the 1960s in Ian Smith’s Rhodesian government. Graham had learned Gaelic at Balliol (where else indeed would a Scottish aristocrat choose to learn Gaelic?); and went to Shawbost on leave with MacIver. There he not only conversed with the locals in Gaelic: he also addressed an assembly of Nicolson Institute pupils in Gaelic.

As in other places in his autobiographical writing, MacIver’s belief in the supernatural comes through. He writes about an American officer with whom he had become friendly:-

“One day, when I was at sea, I turned to see him coming along the deck towards me. I was astounded for I knew his presence was an impossibility. He was smiling as if eager to share a good joke with me, but as he came closer, he suddenly vanished. Later, I found that his ship had been sunk, just at that time, with the loss of all hands.”

Despite being torpedoed twice (and on one of these occasions having a fellow-officer repel with an oar his efforts to climb aboard a half-filled lifeboat -  in a sea where exposure to low temperatures gave one a life expectancy measured in minutes), MacIver survived the war. He goes on holiday to Lewis after being demobbed and heckles Iain Macleod (later Chancellor of the Exchequer) who was the – unsuccessful – Conservative candidate for the Western Isles in the 1945 General Election.

 

At this point, having resumed his job as an English teacher, MacIver’s (often sketchy) autobiographical essay comes to an end; but his story was subsequently picked up by his wife.

Mary MacIver provides a fascinating explanation why so many people were attracted to Hector:-

 “I’ve always felt I missed a great deal, losing my Irish background and Hector embodied it for me. I think this was true for other people also, no matter how distinguished they were. People like Hugh McDiarmid, Louis MacNeice and Dylan Thomas saw in Hector not just a fascinating personality in his own right, and a wonderful raconteur, but also the representative of a world they would like to have grown up in  or, in Chris’s [Hugh McDiarmid’s] case, to have had much more personal contact with.”

In the cases of the first two, this is a plausible view; with Dylan Thomas, whose attitude to things Welsh was notoriously ambivalent, it seems more dubious.

Dylan Thomas [whose birth centenary is 2014] wrote to Hector with typical Thomas prose: “I do so hate it here in this toadish valley among slow rabbits and sly cows. Oxford is near, but full of young men. Our pub is cold and wild with dominoes.” Why Thomas disliked rabbits that were slow or cows that were sly or (for that matter) men that were young is not explained.

A later letter from the Thomas village of Laugharne does however explain one dislike “I am writing this with a vile Biro junior which cuts through paper and table-top, spits greased, mock-ink at shirt, eye and wall, and whose writing fades, sometimes conveniently, almost at once.”  The invention of László Bíró was indeed then fairly undependable.

This, as so often with Dylan Thomas, is the writing of a man at ease with words- although sadly not with himself.

 

(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.

The Two Cousins Episode 5

 

Iain Smith

 

We left Hector MacIver (in Episode 3) socialising with literary figures in Edinburgh.

 

By the late 1930s MacIver had obtained a teaching job at the prestigious Royal High School. But he had also now become even more set in the activity for which he became most famous (or notorious):

“How the walls of the Abbotsford or the Café Royal or Milne’s Bar echoed to the talk at this time, on the state of Scotland, as Chris (Hugh MacDiarmid) and Sidney [Goodsir Smith] and I set the Celtic world to rights. Clouds of blue smoke, gallons of beer and whisky, witty talk -heart to heart-, narrowness and prejudice flew out of the Abbot door.”

 

Hector had activities other than teaching and arguing. In a hostelry on Rose Street, Hector one night showed another side of his cultural talents. The musicologist Ronald Stevenson subsequently wrote:

“Within a few minutes of our meeting, we had got on to Scottish music and soon he was singing – I remember his pleasant baritone –songs from his native Isle of Lewis. And very unusual songs they were no ‘sangs o’ the cratur’ but strangely serene psalm songs sung in the Gaelic, with no less than ten, and sometimes more than a dozen, notes to each syllable. Such long-linked melismas I had never heard in any other vocal music.”

 

(This may well be a slight over-exaggeration: melismas –extended notes revolving around a single syllable of language- are found in Gregorian chant.)

 

Author and poet Louis MacNeice already knew Hector. A piece about MacNeice tells us in an aside something of Hector’s literary activity (most of which is now lost):

“MacIver had published on the iniquities of landlordism, the failures of the herring industry, subsidy and the dole, and the collapse of Lord Leverhulme’s attempt to set up manufacturing industry on Lewis.”

 

 

Hector’s friendship led to MacNeice visiting Lewis and staying with Hector’s family in Shawbost. This proved a somewhat traumatic event for all concerned:

“Louis had stayed with my family and me at An Gearraidh Buidhe and was supposed to be travelling with his wife. Actually he was not married!.... More than twenty years after, my family still became virulent when discussing the ‘immorality’ of his visit.”

 

Another writer explains

“Then, in 1937, (MacNeice) undertook a visit (apparently Longmans advanced £75) to the Hebrides. He was accompanied by his current crush, Nancy Sharp (she had recently left her husband, William Coldstream) who illustrated the subsequent book.”

 

A later writer (admittedly of the, allegedly liberal, 1960s) puts it more bluntly:-

“My English teacher, Hector MacIver, was his friend, the dedicatee of I Crossed the Minch which in 1938 launched the ribaldries of the poem “Bagpipe Music” while recording, though rather discreetly, how MacNeice ran off with the wife of the painter William Coldstream : surely deserving a Nobel Prize for libertinism.”

One description of the book says

 

“Following loosely in the footsteps of Johnson and Boswell, MacNeice describes with distinctive candour the people, customs and landscapes of the Hebrides. Alienated from the way of life he encountered in the islands yet utterly fascinated by it, Louis MacNeice provides a unique insight into a now vanished culture and, as such, the book is a fascinating social historical document of Scottish rural life in the late 1930s.”

The book included two poems that are generally acclaimed. The first quatrain of Leaving Barra reads:-

The dazzle on the sea, my darling,
Leads from the western channel
A carpet of brilliance taking
My leave for ever of the island.

 

And then there is the rightly and much renowned “Bagpipe Music”:-

It’s no go my honey love, it’s no go my poppet;
Work your hands from day to day, the winds will blow the profit.
The glass is falling hour by hour, the glass will fall for ever,
But if you break the bloody glass you won’t hold up the weather.

 

One has to search a little to find what effect Hector MacIver had on “I Crossed the Minch” other than being a genial host. But one critic picks out where in “I Crossed the Minch” there is clear evidence of MacNeice and MacIver collaborating in analysis of the difference between a dance in Shawbost, part of the “Celtic timelessness”, and a concert in the town of Stornoway - where the dancers were “becoming objectified, alienated products of the music industry.”

Or, as MacNeice himself put it in “I Crossed the Minch”   “… one could thank God that one was not a citizen of Stornoway….European man at his worst.” The point that MacIver and MacNeice seemed to be making was that the culture of entertainment in Shawbost was an indigenous local product; the culture of Stornoway they saw as an importation.

One 21^st century Hebridean critic has written to me:

“MacNeice's view of Stornoway. What did he expect? For centuries the town has been the antithesis of rural Lewis: anti-Gaelic, weak in religious faith, hedonistic, eager to adopt imported behavioural trends (e.g. cinema-going, flapper attire in the late 20s, complex female hairstyles). Cailleachs [old ladies]from distant townships like Gravir or Brenish would actually stop to stare at the latest outlandish fashions among the gilded urban youth.”

 

How much Hector appreciated MacNeice’s book is apparently (and sadly) unrecorded. This would have been interesting to know, not least because of what is said by one reviewer (in 2007) on the book’s re - publication:

 

“MacNeice moans about the Island people, the drab landscape, ‘the monotony of heather’, the food…... He gropes his way over the Islands with his eyes and ears closed. The only conversations he records are with people of standing; the editor of the Stornoway Gazette, which was produced in English, schoolteachers or his middle class friends………. The locals he mentions only in passing as a means of providing him hospitality which he appears to accept as his right. The Gaelic language he holds up as a barrier to local conversation”

 

 

 

Between one thing and another, one can understand why the book was as poorly received in Stornoway as it was in the MacIver home in Shawbost.

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.