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 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.