Murdo and Annabella and a perfectly
ordinary family
by
Iain Smith,
Ann Mennie
& Joan Forrest
October 2014
1. Murdo and Annabella
Murdo’s parents, siblings and early
life.
Murdo Smith was born in North Bragar on 22nd
June 1883. He was the son of Mary (nee Campbell) and of John, married 1872.
Murdo had three older brothers: Norman (born 1873),
Finlay (born 1878)
and John (born 1881).
He then acquired two younger brothers: Donald
(born 1885) and
Kenneth (born 1891).
Murdo also had two sisters: Effie,
born 1876 and Catherine, born in
January 1888 .
Parents
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John and Mary
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Children
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Norman
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Effie
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Finlay
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John
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Murdo
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Donald
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Catherine
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Kenneth
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(In the 1881 census (3 April 1881) there was
a 5-yr-old daughter “Eric”; the 1901 census showed up a 25-yr-old Effie resident at 14 North Bragar with Norman, Murdo, Donald, Kenneth and Catherine. We had however initially
failed to trace her birth certificate. We now looked in the parish of Barvas
for girls called “Eric” born about 1875; and they abound. Effie (recorded, even on her birth certificate, as “Eric”) was born
on 5th January 1876; and was the daughter of i) John Smith
(“fisherman”, and apparently illiterate, judging by his cross on the
certificate: hence in no position to correct the Registrar’s -recurring - error with “Effie”s); and ii)
Mary née Campbell. The “Eric” appears to be a mistaken transliteration of a
Gaelic variant of “Effie”.
So Murdo
did indeed have an older sister Effie
as well as a younger sister Catherine.)
Schooling
All the siblings, boys and girls,
seem to have attended school from age 5 to about age 13 in consistency with the
laws -although not always the practice- of the times. Murdo -and his siblings- became literate, albeit not in their native
language. We certainly know that Murdo
became an avid reader of books and of political journals.
Crofts
Murdo (although he engaged in crofting in
Bragar from an early age) had at no time any crofting tenure or rights either
to house or to land. These rights, enshrined in the 1886 Crofting Act, were generally
destined for the first-born. This is a system common in much of Europe for at
least 1000 years, one which lives on and it has led to much sea-borne
migration, some temporary and some permanent, by younger landless brothers. The
legendary Vikings were only the best known examples: Murdo, John, Donald, and
Kenneth were to follow, some departing further and more permanently than
others. (Devine is generally informative on this issue. Although, for working class rural Hebrideans,
the issue only achieved real relevance in the late 19th century and
onwards.)
Much of the
family history that follows is by Murdo’s
second son Calum. His daughter Marjorie did much to shape the
manuscript into publishable form.
Murdo spreads his wings
Murdo joined the Royal Naval Reserve (a
maritime equivalent of the Territorial Army) in 1899, giving his age as 18
rather than 16.
Many of his male contemporaries, including three of his brothers, did the same.
RNR records show a Murdo Smith of North Bragar giving his
date of birth as 12 May 1881. We have also found RNR records for his three
brothers. The match of the dates of birth on them with birth certificate data
is erratic. For all who joined, including Murdo, there were beneficial financial
consequences. For some of them, but not for Murdo, the consequences were deadly.
About the
same time, Murdo went fishing for
several months each year, following the seasonal herring hunt along the west
coast of Scotland; up to Wick, Thurso and Kirkwall; and down the east coast as
far as Great Yarmouth and Lowestoft. Along with the itinerant fishermen, who
crewed the boats and caught the fish, went the fishing girls, gutting, salting
and barrelling the herring; and transported, mostly by sea, sometimes by train
and (once only, and memorably) by plane,
around the various fishing ports.
This was a
migratory industry which went on until the 1950s; but had peaked from about 1850
or so into the 1880s and then again about 1890 to 1913. It looks as if John
Smith and his eldest four sons (Norman,
Finlay, John and Murdo himself)
were predominantly fishermen (and RNR reservists) rather than agrarian
labourers, at least in their younger years; possibly following the west and east
coast migration of herring pre-marriage, and settling for local fishing,
probably mostly white fish pursued in sailing boats, post-marriage. Relative to
what happened post-1920, the years to 1913 were mostly good for that.
The temporarily
migrant Hebridean males and females managed some socialisation, sometimes
flamboyant, with each other; and Murdo
Smith, perhaps 20 years old, met one fisher girl Annabella Macleod, daughter of Angus Macleod and of Marion (nee
Macaulay) from the adjoining village of Shawbost in Lewis. Their partnership
was to last more than 50 years.
In
Fraserburgh, far from home, on 29th August 1907, Murdo and Annabella married;
and the newly married couple, on returning home, lived on
a croft at 48 North Shawbost with Murdo’s
father-in-law and mother-in-law. The father-in-law tenanted the croft: he had
no sons, but two daughters, one of them Annabella.
The older daughter Mary Macleod (by then Macaulay) already lived elsewhere in
Shawbost with her husband. So neither Murdo
nor his wife (although they both engaged in crofting) had title to the house or
to the land in Shawbost. Murdo, at
least judging by pre-1920 birth certificates, went on fishing.
Murdo and Annabella start
a family.
A first son was
born on 20th November 1908
. He was called John, presumably
after his late paternal grandfather.
Murdo’s
second son, or the second to survive infancy, Calum
was born on 29th May 1912. Two preceding boys, also called Calum,
had not survived for more than 3 weeks of infancy.
A daughter
was born on 5th January 1914 and named Mary Ann.
In 1914 Murdo went to war in the navy, i.e.
mobilised with his older brothers Norman,
Finlay and John;
and remained away from home for much of the time until May 1919. In Bragar ,
145 people approximately did war service. Of these, 92 had pre-War been in the
RNR (almost all of them would have been fishermen) and were mobilised on 4
August 1914 - by Winston Churchill - to serve in the Royal Navy. 12 of these
died during the War, and then 7 drowned on 1 January 1919 on the Iolaire.
In Shawbost, Annabella and her parents tilled the land, cut peats, spun wool and
weaved tweed: the years 1903 to 1906 had seen considerable growth in the Harris
Tweed industry, although it was the 1930s before it became highly significant.
In late 1916
Angus Macleod died (i.e. Murdo’s
father-in-law and Annabella’s father).
The title of the house and tenancy rights of the croft passed to sister-in-law
Mary Macaulay. But, given that both her husband and Murdo were away at war, this had no immediate effect.
Shortly
afterwards a third son was born to Murdo
and Annabella on 27th
April 1917
and – unsurprisingly- called Angus.
(Murdo’s brother John aged 37 of 11 South Shawbost, with 180 fellow-islanders and
some 20 ship’s crew, drowned in the “Iolaire” disaster on his return journey to
Lewis on 1 January 1919.
John left a widow and four children.)
Murdo returned safely in mid-1919 and
resumed crofting (and carting).
In 1920, a
second daughter was born on 17th June,
to be called Johanna after her
recently deceased uncle John. (A contemporaneous first cousin of
Johanna’s, the daughter of Finlay,
was dubbed Johnina. Life, even at birth and christening, added unwanted
handicaps to Hebrideans of the female gender.)
The tenancy
of the croft at 48 North Shawbost was reclaimed without acrimony by Murdo’s sister-in-law Mary (to whom it
belonged) and her husband John Macaulay.
Migration from village to town.
At some
point (probably early on) between July 1920 and August 1923, Murdo, Annabella and family migrated –
to near the town of Stornoway. Why? Broadly there were four possible reasons:-
1. A general post-War economic
depression; and, although some 720,000 UK service personnel had died between
1914 and 1919 and some 800,000 had been maimed, some 2 million able-bodied
males, including Murdo, had been demobilised
and returned to an unforgiving and unpromising labour market.
2. The loss of access to crofting land;
and crop failure in 1922/1923 (well recorded by
Hutchison and by Hunter).
3. The prospect of urban employment.
4. Decline of fishing. The herring, cod
and ling were still there: the days of unsustainable over-fishing and species
extinction awaited the replacement of drift nets and of serendipitous searching
for fish shoals with trawl nets, sonar and other technological wonders. But other factors intervened: a
declining fish market was increasingly dominated by steam trawlers.
In all the birth certificates up to
1920, Murdo is described as “fisherman”. In all the birth certificates after
1923, Murdo is described as “general labourer”. (We return later to this.)
(Murdo’s brother Kenneth (also land-dispossessed) had taken earlier and even more
radical migratory action back in 1911. We have traced his emigration record: he
had sailed from Glasgow to Montreal, ominously on the Cassandra, departing 22nd April 1911
for a job as a labourer. He was killed in Canada on a construction site in 1922. )
In 1923,
twins were born on 1st August at 16 Laxdale: Annabella and Kenneth Murdo,
the latter called after his recently deceased paternal uncle and after his
father. John, their 14-yr-old eldest brother, registered their births.
So now there were 7 children.
Between 1924
and 1933, they lived in the village of Newvalley, about one mile outside the
town of Stornoway.
(In 1926, a third one of Murdo’s brothers, Donald,
died (in Stornoway of tuberculosis) aged 41, having followed a merchant navy sea-faring
career.
Murdo’s mother Mary, still alive in
Bragar at the age of 76 or so,
had now seen the death of three of her sons: she herself was to die in 1932.)
Murdo
and Annabella had an eighth child on
8 May 1926 at 23 Newvalley:
they called him Donald John after two
of his deceased paternal uncles.
The last
child Donald Murdo was born on 3rd
May 1928 .
He was called after his maternal great grandfather and his maternal great great
grandfather. Calum’s book explains that the multiple
use of the names John, Murdo, and Donald was not an issue for Murdo and Annabella: each use referred to a separate ancestor.
Parents
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Murdo
and Annabella
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Children
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John
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Malcolm/Calum
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Mary
Ann
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Angus
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Johanna
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Annabella
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Kenneth
Murdo
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Donald
John
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Donald
Murdo
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In 1933, the
family moved from the private tenancy in Newvalley into a much superior municipally
owned house in Stornoway itself.
(Finlay,
Murdo’s brother and senior to him
by five years, died aged 62 at 14 North Bragar on 25th June 1941.
Murdo’s eldest brother Norman died at 11 North Bragar aged 70
in December 1944.
So now all his five brothers were dead.)
Murdo worked, still a labourer, until his
retirement in 1948. He had been almost forced to retire in 1946, the false age
he had given to the RNR in 1899 (see above) having been carried forward into
other government records.
He was left with almost 10 years: to read, to preside over weekly political debates
with sons and daughters still in Lewis and to teach draughts to the older of
his grandchildren.
Murdo and Annabella celebrated their golden
wedding in 1957, with 8 of their 9 children and with the bridesmaid of 1907 present.
Murdo died in 1958; and Annabella in 1966.
2. Comparing generations
Murdo and siblings in summary :
Generation A
To recapitulate, they were the
children of John Smith (1845 -1894) and of Mary Campbell (of Arnol descent;
died 1932).
Norman (1873-1944 ). Fisherman; RN sailor; and crofter.
Effie (1876-?).
Finlay (1878-1941 ) . Fisherman; RN sailor; and crofter.
John (1881-1919). Fisherman; RN sailor.
Murdo (1883-1958). Fisherman; RN sailor; crofter; road labourer.
Donald (1885- 1926). Merchant navy sailor.
Catherine (1888-?)
Kenneth (1891- 1922). Construction site worker in Canada.
Notable
summary points:-
1. All were educated to the age of 13;
but none subsequently stayed on in education.
2. All the males worked in manual
occupations, occupations which had existed for centuries. Mostly they worked
with old technologies: wooden boats, sails, oars, long lines, drift nets, horse-driven
ploughs and carts, spades, picks and shovels.
3. Only two of the six brothers lived to
the age of 65 and none of them beyond the age of 75.
Murdo and Annabella’s children in
summary : Generation B
Murdo (1883-1958) and his wife Annabella (1883-1966), as we have seen,
had 9 children who grew up to adulthood:-
i)
John (1908-1970) School
Headteacher
ii)
Calum/Malcolm
(1912-2002)
Scottish Hydro-Electric Board office worker
iii)
Mary Ann (1914- 1984) GPO career
iv)
Angus (1917-1994) Motor
mechanic
v)
Johanna (1920-1977) Housekeeper
vi)
Annabella (1923-2005) Telephone Exchange operator, then supervisor
vii)
Kenneth Murdo (1923-1992) Oil
tanker driver
viii)
Donald John
(1926-2014 ) Artist and art
teacher
ix)
Donald Murdo (1928- 2007) Factor,
Stornoway Trust
Notable
summary points:-
1. All were educated at least to the age
of 14; three -all males- went on to higher education, a high proportion for
children of the early 20th century.
2. Six worked in non-manual occupations.
3. Four worked in occupations which were
technology-driven creations of the late 19th /early 20th
centuries. All of them at work, and at home, used what were then modern
technologies: notably telephones and cars.
4. Seven of the nine lived to the age of
65 or beyond; and five of them beyond the age of 75.
Differences between Generation A and
Generation B
1. Generation B lived longer than
Generation A.
2. Generation B had some access to
higher education; Generation A had none. School and university bursaries of the
early 20th century played a role in that; as did Murdo’s unusually positive views on
such matters.
3. Generation B worked predominantly in
non-manual middle-class occupations; Generation A exclusively in manual
working-class occupations.
4. Technological innovations of the late
19th century and of the 20th century (motor-cars;
electrical power; telephones) influenced the occupations of some of generation
B. (And came to influence the domestic lives of all of them - but only the latter
years of the longer-lived of generation A).
5. Changes in the fishing industry
influenced the lives of the Generation A, sometimes for good, latterly for ill.
They had little impact on Generation B.
(As Hunter makes clear,
trends in 19th century
agriculture, of which more below, made the population of Lewis (which grew from
20,000 to 30,000 in the later 19th century) more dependent on other
forms of income, notably on fishing. Hunter
estimates that in the 1860s and 70s as many as 5000 Lewis male crofters
(perhaps well over half of all rural adult males in Lewis) went for two months
annually to Wick to work at the herring fishing.
The 1880s, when Murdo was born in
Bragar, were initially not good in that respect.
A seasonal wage of perhaps £20 or £30 in 1883 (several thousands of pounds at
today’s values) had declined to £1 or £2 by 1887: an abundance of herring had
saturated the market. But, in 1888, both the white fish and the herring
industry experienced an upturn which was to last for some 20 years or more).
By 1891, Murdo’s oldest
(18-yr-old) brother Norman appears to have been away at the herring season; and
brothers Finlay, John and Murdo
himself were to follow. Almost certainly it was fishing (and the useful Royal
Naval Reserve retainer: itself fishing-triggered)
which provided most of their cash income up until 1914. Crofting provided a
back-up income, mostly in kind rather than in cash: potatoes, sheep, cattle,
oats and peats.
Post 1918, the returning warriors faced a decline of fishing:
i)
the
herring were still there, although now the mechanised steam-driven boats -largely
from east coast Scotland and east coast England ports- required less crew.
ii)
the
1917 Russian Revolution had closed a major pre-War fishing market i.e. the UK
government had decided to close it.
iii)
the
local herring boats in west coast Scotland, still largely sail-driven, needed
capital investment to replace them, capital which was lacking.
; and
iv)
the
local white fish industry was also in trouble: the local sailboats were no
watch for the steam-driven boats from the East of Scotland and from elsewhere.
Lord Leverhulme’s 1920s plans for a
vast white fish industry, firstly in Lewis then in Harris, proved to be
illusory.
This was probably the major factor in Murdo’s migration to Stornoway in 1923. (In 1923/24 fifty-six persons emigrated from
Bragar and Shawbost to Canada.
Most were single males, although not all. Murdo’s
age and the size of his family would have precluded that option.)
6. Crofting legislation affected
generation A: it affected only the early lives of generation B.
(The early years of the
19th century had seen crofts and common pastureland confiscated on
an extensive scale across the Highlands and Islands.
Annabella’s family, on her mother’s
side, had been cleared from fertile parts of Uig (Reef and Valtos) to the
bleakness of Shawbost: in the 1950’s Annabella
could recollect one of her grandmothers, as an old woman circa 1888, still
lamenting her own forcible departure - as a child in the early decades of the
19th century - from the abundance of the Uig machair lands.)
The 1886 Crofters Act gave to Murdo’s father John, to Annabella’s
father Angus and to thousands of others: security of tenure; rights to a fair
rent; title to the “improvements” on the croft i.e. the house; and a right to
bequeath the croft and croft house. Rents came down by around 20%-30%; and some
72% of the rent arrears in Lewis and Wester Ross – mostly arising from the bad
days of the early 1880s - were written off. So Norman and Finlay benefitted from this in
Bragar (and spent all of their lives there). What 1886 Act did not give was any
rights of extra land to the landless or the cottar or the squatter. So the
other four brothers did not benefit, especially when the Act explicitly forbad
sub-letting of crofts.
In Shawbost Angus
Macleod (and then in 1919) his older daughter benefitted; but not his younger
daughter Annabella or her husband Murdo.
(Elsewhere in Lewis (e.g. in Park, in Aignish and in Melbost) or in Harris
(e.g. Taransay) or in the Southern Isles (e.g. Vatarsay), the landless aspired
to reclaiming nearby land from which their ancestors had been evicted some 50
or more years earlier
and ultimately had some if limited success; but the landless in Bragar (and
Shawbost and Arnol) had, with the minor exception of Dalbeg Farm, no nearby
lands to which to aspire.)
So Norman, who inherited his father’s croft at 14 North
Bragar in 1894, and Finlay remained in Bragar; Murdo and John (from 1907 and 1909 respectively) established
squatter or cottar possession in Shawbost; and Donald and Kenneth about the
same time migrated respectively to careers in the merchant marine and in
Canada: which is presumably why 1914-19 local war records exist for the first
four; but not for the last two.
7. Four sons of Generation A were in the
Royal Naval Reserve..
As a result they were mobilised on the outbreak of war in 1914. Some writers
have described this as “conscription”: but conscription did not appear until
1916. Of these four, three returned safely; John
did not.
Of the six males in Generation B, four were conscripted in
WWII. All four survived.
8. Of
Generation A only Murdo lived in
municipal housing; and then only 1933-1958, much less than half of his adult
life. In urban Scotland of the late 19th
century, private rented accommodation was the working class norm; in rural
Scotland it was the “tied house” or, in some counties, the “croft house”.
7 of the 9 of Generation B spent most of their adult working lives in either
rented or "tied" public-sector houses, mostly council housing. Donald John (owner-occupier 1958-2014)
and Calum (owner-occupier 1959-
2002) are the exceptions to that.
(If one reflects on who owned what houses
in Scotland over the last 150 years that makes sense. Glasgow built its first
council house scheme only in 1919; and "owner-occupation" was then, and
remained for decades, comparatively rare.)
9. The Lewis-based males of Generation A
(apart from Murdo himself) did not
experience: running domestic water; electricity; mains gas. This was partly a
function of age, partly of early mortality and partly of rural location.
From 1933 onwards, all of Generation B lived in a house with running
water and mains gas and, subsequently, electricity (the house and the mains gas
were Lord Leverhulme legacies to a local community trust);
and only John subsequently ever
experienced anything different - for a period in rural Lewis: “the schoolhouse
with a bathroom and running water through the taps was looked upon as a little
mansion house in the centre of Lionel village." ;
mansion indeed, but it had no mains gas, and electricity arrived only about
1951 (courtesy of the newly created North of Scotland Hydro Electric Board).
The differences between Generation A and generation B were not wholly random.
Many of them can be ascribed to economic, social, military, epidemiological and
technological factors.
p217 Hutchinson R (2003) The
Soap Man: Lewis, Harris and Lord Leverhulme Edinburgh;
p341 Hunter J Last of the Free: A History of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland 1999
Edinburgh
Four of Finlay’s grand-daughters
achieved musical fame in the 1960s as the Macdonald Sisters. The oldest one Kathleen is a graduate
of what is now the Glasgow Conservatoire, formerly the Royal Scottish Academy
of Music and Drama. A different strand of Finlay’s
grand-daughters continues with another grand Bragar tradition i.e. the
delicatessen.
Hutchinson R (2003) The Soap Man: Lewis,
Harris and Lord Leverhulme Edinburgh; p341 Hunter J
Last of the
Free: A History of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland 1999
Edinburgh
