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 6

The Two Cousins

Episode 6: Robert revisits Stornoway

Iain Smith

 

 

 

We last left Robert MacIver (in Episode 4) in Aberdeen. There the draft of his first book had won a Carnegie award. He married – to an Aberdonian, Ethel Peterkin.

But he moved on:-

 

He was appointed in 1915 to a post in political science in Toronto. So MacIver left the University of Aberdeen – resulting in the end, for some decades, of any teaching of sociology in the University of Aberdeen.

 

Temporarily leaving his pregnant wife and his first child behind, Robert sailed for the New World, a journey he regarded as a permanent migration. “I had no expectation of ever remigrating to my native land.”

 

The Canadian years saw MacIver:-

i.                 establish himself as well-regarded author;

ii.               begin to establish himself as someone who could be called upon by governments;

iii.             live through a period of thorough disillusionment with the post-War world.

 

His first book was The Community: A Sociological Study (1917), well received by most, apart from a review by Robert E Park –then one of the world’s foremost sociologists. The praise from the many counted less for MacIver than the criticism from Park. However, beneath MacIver’s benign manner, there seems to have been a trait of steel which manifested itself at several points in his life: he attributes Park’s views as much to a Park defect as to a MacIver inadequacy.

There followed Elements of Social Science (1921), a book “of modest, thin, back-street longevity” in the words of the author. It may indeed have been modest but it contains one of his best known quotations; and one which explains why MacIver did not always endear himself to American sociologists of the subsequent decades - who were often dedicated, first, to the pursuit of the empirical rather than the philosophical; and, second, to the strict measurement of social data.

 

“We are apt to think we know what time is because we can measure it, but no sooner do we reflect upon it than that illusion goes. So it appears that the range of the measureable is not the range of the knowable. There are things we can measure, like time, but yet our minds do not grasp their meaning. There are things we cannot measure, like happiness or pain, and yet their meaning is perfectly clear to us.”

 

In 1927, he migrated from Canada to the United States to become head of department at a college of the University of Columbia. “On a September morning we all arrived in New York, to make, as it turned out, the United States our homeland ever thereafter.” His journey from Stornoway to New York had been a long one chronologically (1898 to 1927); and academically and psychologically. He remained in the University of Columbia for some 23 years, for most of that time being professor of political philosophy and sociology.

Some 10 years later after going to the USA, Robert revisited his native island. This is chronicled in a contemporary essay which he later appended to his 1968 autobiography. So what did the great sociologist (and one who specialised in the idea of “community”) make of Lewis in the late 1930s? He writes well and yet with deceptive simplicity, his prose verging on poetry. As a description of Stornoway in the early 20^th century and as a recollection of teenage life there in the 1890s, it is hard to surpass:

 

“How unchanged the little town seems, especially to those who come from the changeful world without. The same kippering sheds, the same barrels and herring troughs, the same quays, the tides still ebbing and flowing between the same walls, the little boys still fishing off the same stone steps…. the same sombre religion, just as the same tides come up the bay. The traveller feels, perhaps with surprise, how deep are the roots of that life and custom from which he has gone apart. He has changed, but it abides.

“Here the spur of ambition first urged me to strive towards dawning goals. Here I was nursed in the strong uncomfortable language of heaven and hell, offering the oppressive alternatives of lurid damnation and meaningless bliss, and shook myself free at length, with vast relief, from their ancient spell. Here I learned, from the silent starry nights, the immutable eternity of law that rings about our little lives. Here I heard the secret voice of nature, borne through the winds and the waves, telling of life and death. Here lived my comrades and first friends, my rivals and boyish foes. Here was my home, where a father toiled for me and a mother watched over me with indomitable love. And here the light shining in the eyes of a girl first stirred profounder deeps, as an angel might descend to trouble the pool, and left me alone and wondering, subdued by a breathless, fearful joy.

 

“Such a land has bred its own people. Where the earth yields so little to their toil, men must follow the sea as well. A grave and patient race, they are content with little. They wring meagre crops of oats and potatoes from their crofts, and eke them out with the precious harvests of the sea. Precarious in another sense as well, for the sea is never to be trusted, and every village nurses the tragedy of the men………………and the boats that do not return.

 

“this people is much-enduring and sombre-minded. They have few comforts and few recreations, and even the later incline to melancholy. Their native songs are for the most part minor and plaintive, telling of far dreams and ancient yearning, of parted love and eternal farewell.”

 

His characterisation of Lewis religion (comparable to that of his cousin, who wrote similar things at a similar time) is a bleak one. As is his judgment of its effects on local culture:-

“It holds the quintessence of this religious spirit, which has none of the boisterous joy in salvation evinced, for example, by the east coast fishermen or the blithe sense of liberation from sin that, for example, the Salvation Army proclaims…..

“It regards art and beauty as lures of the devil or at best as profane pursuits unworthy of the seriousness of life. “

One can understand why Professor MacIver, despite his renown, did not endear himself to the community from which he had arisen.

 

It was his last visit to Lewis, although not to Scotland: Professor Robert MacIver did not ever again return to his native island. 

(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.

Pakistan Log 2014

 

10/11 June 2014

The Glasgow Emirates 777 is uncrowded and I have three seats to myself. Dinner is fine. We overfly such famous places as Mosul and Kirkuk; and eventually Doha; and then into Dubai about midnight. 5 hours to wait: then off into a beautiful dawn to Lahore. We get battered down to the runway by strong thermals.

Yacoob is there with a car and I get to the guesthouse. It was 47°C yesterday and is heading that way today.

I get a TCS cellphone (as they call them in the USA and in Pakistan). [It proves invaluable.]

 

12 June

Read BBC News. England team and malaria:  the England World Cup squad are apparently all on Malarone- that will mess them up.

“Dawn” has a story about a Turkmenistan gas field: accidentally set on fire 40 years ago, and still burning.

Into work and it is hot; but not overwhelmingly so.

We make a hotel visit to inspect tomorrow’s training venue. Potentially OK, but no breakout rooms.

Meal fine in guest house: daal and rice and spiced chicken; and chilled coke.

Do an hour of work; and read today’s downloaded Guardian.  Also live UK radio. All due to Kindle Fire and great wifi.

 

13 June

Tea and then breakfast. Off at 7.30 a.m. to training room at Savoey Hotel. 29 participants arrive on time.

First bit is long self-reflective exercise: goes OK.

A Google book exercise of which I am wary: it goes well. [Only in Karachi ironically does it not go so well, basically because their wifi is not too functional. But soon it will be.]

 Good jokey plenary: sweets as prizes for feedback – e.g. “Change comes from within”. “Some learning involves unlearning”; “consult the wider community, especially parents”. I say in response to the first “So forget external consultants like me.”

Home to a good meal.

Rewrite Day 1 for Islamabad and Karachi: and I fine-tune Day 2: mostly the graphic design.

 

14 June (Saturday)

 There is no rush today, at least not until the mains supply and the hotel generator and the UPS (that powers the computer) all go down and we have an unwanted 30 minute break.

The afternoon in particular seems to go OK and there are lots of friendly goodbyes and thanks when we finish what has been a very interactive day.

 

 

 

Sunday 15^th

I call my main contact in Northern Region. We arrange to meet in the Islamabad guest house about 5 p.m. I download yesterday’s Guardian for the journey, and pack.

I look forward to the journey, which I have done before and much of which is interesting, i.e. through irrigated plains towards what are the first foothills of the Himalayas.

Yacoob and I leave the Lahore guesthouse about 10.45 a.m. We have a very comfortable Corolla. I have the TCS cellphone (which proves useful) and my Kindle Fire keeps me entertained. As we speed out to the start of the motorway, we see a side of Pakistan that is distinctly not third world – apart from an atrophied beggar at one crossroads. Yacoob explains that the reason we have seen so few beggars is because the Lahore police began a major drive against them some three weeks ago. We make our way out beside the Lahore Branch Canal (a British achievement) and join the M2 toll motorway. Buffaloes shelter from the heat as we head along the Punjab plain; there are irrigated orchards; some rice fields (I think); and kilns (almost certainly for making bricks from the alluvial clay). We stop for a break half-way and soon the road rises spectacularly into the hills. The 200 miles of motorway cost about 290 rupees (£2) and then we are on dual carriageway into Islamabad. 4 buffaloes saunter along one carriageway, just like the sheep and cattle on Scotland’s roads.

The guesthouse, after a 4-hour drive, is welcoming: a late lunch of chicken, rice, “lady finger” (okra) and delightful fresh chapattis. There is wifi for my Kindle; but the guesthouse computer is not much use.

Shireen, the Regional Director, arrives and we talk about the teaching of teachers: “We noted that when you were Dean, Iain, you went on teaching.” I feel smug and virtuous.

We go through the business for tomorrow: 29 trainees set up in groups of 4 or 5.

With a computer that will not access my USBs or the wifi, I write up my learning log in longhand.

At dinner at 8 p.m. (chicken and some rather exquisite daal) I have left my Kindle in the living room downloading today’s Guardian. The house servant brings it in to me “There is a Skype call for you, sir.” Truly a Jeeves of the 21^st century.

 

Monday 16^th

Yacoob drives me to the training centre at 8 a.m. - new but a bit overcrowded for 29 participants, 3 tutors and assorted others (notably Taj, a recent Strathclyde masters graduate, almost certainly the last from TCS). We start with an introduction by Shireen. I run the self-reflective bits (as I did in Lahore). Shireen runs an introduction to curriculum leadership. The room gets hotter and hotter: the  outside temperature is as in Lahore; the number of people is the same; but a) the room is smaller; b) the window blinds are translucent where in Lahore they were heavy black; c) people insist on putting fans on to back up the AC (in reality, they counteract the AC).

The day seems to run OK

Nauman and I have a debriefing meeting

1.                          Tomorrow we shall provide more drinking water [They do]

2.                          Otherwise run to set plan

Shireen, Nauman and I go to a very good Italian-style restaurant.  I have a steak; and we share bread and butter pudding and cream. It may be almost 70 years since we exited from what was then Imperial India  but we Brits sure have left some legacies: irrigation canals; a (now decrepit) railway system; sweet tea; and bread and butter pudding.

Tuesday 17th June

This morning is cooler, but not for long. We wheel along to the I-11 campus, the space-rocket spires of the Faisal mosque gleaming in the distance.

We start at 8.30 with the obligatory class photograph. 10 minutes outside for this has sweat pouring off faces; and there are complaints about the damage to make-up. An inspiring slogan at the school door has lost an “L” and now reads “EARNING IS FUN”.  Indeed.

This morning, unlike yesterday, there is a good supply of chilled drinking water; and the leap in morale is perceptible.

My flight ticket for Karachi has arrived. So I ask staff to contact Karachi,   to get the name of the driver who is to meet me; and to ask him to carry ID at the airport. Karachi can at times be bandit country, including kidnappers of Westerners.

Nauman co-tutors with me: he is one of the best teacher tutors in TCS – that makes him very good indeed.

Day 2 ends. Probably the 2 days were OK. About 15 (out of 29) insist on being photographed with me: usually a good sign in Pakistan.

At 4.30 p.m. we take the 10-minute drive from the I-11 campus; and find our way to the Regional Office. For the first time since arrival I have the combination of free time, a computer outside the course that works properly (i.e. working keyboard, functional USB ports and internet access). So I download the pitiful learning log notes I have made to date on the (hopeless) keyboard in the Lahore guest house; and set to writing notes from today.

We skirt along the edge of Islamabad, the hills sharp in the early evening air – and donkey carts, goats and goatherds process less than 20 minutes away from the centre of this capital city.  

 

Wednesday 18^th June

Yacoob drives me out through an overcast but hot morning to Islamabad (Benazir Bhutto) Airport. A strange place: international airport of a capital city, yet small enough to have one departure lounge with only one departure gate. Security is light: the bogus “wand”- a conman, now in gaol, scooped several million pounds by selling these divining rods for explosives -has been in evidence outside; and I settle in the lounge with a (40p) cup of tea and my Kindle. The Shaheen flight to Karachi is good (A320) and only a little late. Karachi Airport is as quiet and calm as I have seen it (with no evidence of the carnage of 10 days ago that killed 36 people) and two uniformed guys await me (with plenty of ID). At 40 Centigrade and with a stiff breeze, it is notably cooler than Islamabad.

I do three hours of work with my co-tutors for tomorrow; and go to the guest house, spacious and well-appointed and well-staffed.  Good food and good service. And a functioning computer with wifi.

 

Thursday 19^th

Two fried eggs for breakfast and an 8 a.m. drive to the nearby training centre – in a newish A-level school. And very safe: in the Clifton area of Defence, where the Bhuttos were reared and where camels stroll along the beach.

There are technical (i.e. electrical and IT) problems in abundance; but we surmount them.

And there are moments of magic. Before we even start I spot a familiar face, one of perhaps 10 or more familiar faces out of 33 participants.

“We have met before.”

“Yes, I was on one of your AFL workshops two years ago in Karachi.”

“I hope you enjoyed it”

“It changed my life; and it changed the lives of my teachers.”

 

(Later she elaborates to the other 32: “I began to run workshops for my teachers; and the teachers began to do new things with the students. These once new things are now part of the everyday culture of the teachers – and of the students.”)

There are 33 participants; in a room with heavy front-facing desks- entirely unsuitable for group work. But we also have access to the school computer lab and the school library, each of which comfortably takes 10-12 people. So, unlike Lahore and Islamabad, we run all the major group work with teams of 10+ people i.e. 3 groups spread across three rooms.

In the evening Zeeba visits me from the small apartment she retains in this her ex-house. She kicked off this ongoing show back in April 1996: she and the famous John Proctor.

 

At 9 p.m. I am working at the computer in the hallway. Two of the Quetta delegates interrupt me: “Sir we should have waited until midnight but we thought you might want to sleep before then.” They have a bouquet of flowers for my birthday. Facebook strikes again.

 

20^th June

I am up early and the day looks benign. I open a birthday card from Joan; and see two on my e-mail system. One is from my long-term friend and co-tutor earlier this week in Islamabad:

 

“Birthday Wishes to the best teacher in the world!

Nauman”

Thanks, Nauman: that will do nicely.

Water is off this morning: a planned “outage”, for the house servant warned me about it last night and put a very large bucket of water in the bathroom. “Outages” of electricity, judging by yesterday, are less common than in Lahore or Islamabad. Just as well: our main computer yesterday was a PC – hence no battery back-up and it had no UPS. Today we had it replaced with a laptop.

Overnight, the training room windows have been covered with black paper; and this does indeed reduce the inside temperature and raise spirits.

We have a lot of fun analysing the strengths (and weaknesses) of some past TCS courses (The booby prize must go to the past external trainer who had a group of headteachers (HMs) crawling around the floor and role-playing little puppies.)

And I am reminded how long some people’s memories can be: “I was on the PGCC course. I was afraid of the tutor. One day I had not slept the night before because of domestic difficulties. There was a 30-minute reading exercise. But every time I tried to read, I began to fall asleep. The tutor told me to go outside, to wash my face and to relax. I have never forgotten that tutor: his name was Mr. Macdonald.” I tell her that I will pass on that story to Mr. Macdonald. For I can place the story: Karachi in July 2000. [Two days later Mr. Macdonald is thrilled by the story].

At lunchtime, the little group from Quetta, brokered by the great Afzal, want a private session with me. They have been working on “sharing learning objectives with students”. So, in their isolated mountain fastness, they are well ahead of most teachers in the world.

By 3.45, we are finished; and I have people quietly writing up their learning reviews. Nudrat, the ever-exuberant and effervescent Regional Director, glides in. Two birthday cakes; and bags of presents. We have fun for minutes. I sign autographs, about 10 or more: that is a first for me.

Off to Regional Office: I hand in my cell-phone and print off my boarding passes for Emirates. I confirm that I have a passport.

Back at the guesthouse (still with my driver and security man), the hot water is now on. I pack presents I have received: three new kurtas, one new shirt, two tablecloths, two new handbags (for Gillian and Joan); I shower; and I eat some plov, that most universal of Central Asian dishes. Then off to the airport.

The airport is quiet and civilized. Security guards have smiles. The bookshop includes works by Chomsky, Hawking, Blair, Brown and William Dalrymple. Much better than Heathrow.

Into Dubai around midnight.

21^st June

(TCS paid for my days to date. I personally paid for today, with a cheap upgrade to business class.)

The lounge in Dubai is very large.  I while my time away with a shower and shave; some smoked salmon and scrambled eggs at 5 a.m. Boarding at 8 a.m. I turn left. A simple breakfast, three hours sleep on a flat bed, a great lunch and we make Glasgow around midday. It has been good.

Iain

Glasgow

Postscript

Two days later, TCS asks me for a short story for their website. I write:-

“The Diploma in the Leadership of Learning (DLL) is a course designed mainly for school heads and senior staff. Its eight days of tutor-led input ran for the first time this June in Lahore, in Islamabad, in Karachi and in Hyderabad, with over 100 HMs and SMs [depute heads] taking part. They now move into several months of school-based implementation of some of the course ideas.

“I had the pleasure of taking part in the first two days of the course at three of the venues.  As the name suggests, the course is centrally about two ideas: in the most effective schools headteachers and senior staff a) focus on student learning and b) lead their teachers to concentrate on classroom learning. The Department of Professional Development-designed course adds new material to some of the best elements of past courses and programmes and uses some of the most skilled and experienced of TCS co-tutors.

“It was Dr Farzana who twenty years ago had the (then revolutionary) idea that TCS staff needed rather more professional development than the occasional one-day workshop. DLL is but the latest result of that vision: an extended opportunity to learn what is world-leading in classroom methods and how best to induct classroom teachers into these methods.

“The Diploma course is tutor-led but not tutor dominated. There were many opportunities for activity and participants prepared presentations addressed to their colleagues.  They practised training and coaching skills; and they reflected on “state-of-the-art” classroom techniques: mastery learning, target setting, learning reviews, formative feedback and so on.

“In a Pakistan June at up to 45°C, it was hot for me and my co-tutors and the participants. But we had great fun; and we taught each other a lot. I was sad to leave.

“Iain Smith was formerly the Dean of Education in the University of Strathclyde in Scotland. He has been visiting The City School as a trainer and consultant for some 18 years now.”

 

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 4

The Two Cousins

Episode 4: Robert as a scholar

Iain Smith

We saw in Episode 2 Robert MacIver leaving school and heading to university.

Robert’s narrative about being a student in Edinburgh in 1898 is interesting.

“I lived in a cheap but quite decently kept rooming house for students. All meals were included, simple but respectable meals – and the whole cost ran to about fourteen shillings a week. Occasionally I would indulge in the luxury of [dinner in] a small hotel near the Old University, and that never cost me more than a shilling.”

So, in a 30-week student year, he was spending £21 a year on board and lodgings. He also described how the university provided lectures, but regarded itself has having no pastoral or guidance function for students. For 19^th century Scottish universities, this was typical; and somewhat different to 19^th century Oxbridge. The days of halls of residence, of advisors of study, of university health services and so on lay somewhere far ahead. Of the Professor of Greek, he says: “Although I stood very high in the class, I do not recall ever having an interview with him.”

He played golf (pennies a round), saw Ellen Terry and Henry Irvine in The Merchant of Venice and watched a D’Oyly Carte production of The Mikado.

Interestingly, MacIver did not work during his summer holiday at home. He played golf with his father at the course in Melbost (now Stornoway Airport) and he studied in preparation for the second year at university. So clearly his bursary (and being in the family home during the long summer vacation) was sufficient to sustain him financially.

MacIver’s memoir remind us that university lecture halls in the 19^th century could be rowdy places, a tradition which extended (in abated form) at least into the 1960s; but is I believe now dead. And he also observed the rowdiness that could attend rectorial elections, a tradition that has survived.

After an uninspired second year, MacIver in his third year ends up joint first in the logic class. He records the fate of the student who shared the prize: “He was killed very early in the hideous folly of the First World War, and of its uncounted victims no one could have been more grievously miscast for soldiering than that gentle scholar.”

MacIver won a further scholarship which he used to take an extra year to ensure a 1^st Class Honours; and he duly succeeded in that ambition. Meanwhile he argues with classmates on the significance of the recently deceased Queen Victoria: “some of my pals …shared the general veneration of the queen as a great and wise ruler. I held she was a great symbol….but not great in her own wisdom as a policy-maker.”  MacIver’s formal studies at the time may have been classics; but one can see the promise of an ability that would make him a world-renowned social and political analyst. “I was developing a stronger interest in social movements and issues. Much as I felt that I had benefitted from my classical studies, I began to wish that I could enter the unexplored and still academically slighted social sciences.

Robert acquired the coveted first class honours in classics and proceeded to Oriel College Oxford with “a good-sized scholarship masquerading as a Bible clerkship…[and] the obligation of reciting a Latin grace several days a week after the gong had sounded for dinner in the college hall.” What his highly religious presbyterian father back in Stornoway thought of this is not recorded.

MacIver’s description of Oxford is of a tranquil life, to which he adapted with some ease. Of the upper class “commoners” (as opposed to those like such as he holding scholarships) he says “In spite of their greater savoir-faire I thought of them as more big-boyish, less adult, than our own youth.” His Provost dispensed tea from two teapots, one to provide water to warm the cups (that water then being discarded) and the other for the tea itself.  But, he says, “The more we studied the social and political life of ancient times, the more eager I was to learn about the doings and the troubles of our own tangled society.”

After his Oxford success, Robert MacIver was appointed a lecturer in the University of Aberdeen.

 

Today the University of Aberdeen website celebrates that appointment at length and with some pride:-

Robert MacIver

Despite its ancient origins, the University of Aberdeen was one of the first institutions in the UK and further afield to introduce the subject of sociology. In 1907 Robert MacIver (1882-1970), a young lecturer of local birth, was appointed as an assistant in Moral Philosophy but delivered lectures in the new subject. We believe that among his students at that time was the future father-in-law of the Chinese Communist leader, Chairman Mao. Whatever influence Aberdonian sociology had on the subsequent development of Maoism is unrecorded.

MacIver initially lectured in political science (“traditionally little more than an account of the doctrines of the well-known figures from Machiavelli to Hegel”). He planned however to write his first book on “the complicated relationships of men and groups and of the institutions that had grown up to facilitate control of these relations”.

Most significantly, he became in 1911 a lecturer in political science and sociology, the first person to be so designated in a Scottish university.

Robert went home for a holiday, probably about 1913. His father had bought a Model T Ford from the 1911-founded Ford factory in Trafford Park Manchester; and they both experimented with driving it on the Melbost golf course. Father MacIver diversified from his Harris Tweed company into car-hiring; and this was the origin of MacIver’s Garage, a well-known Stornoway company for many decades. (At some point about 1970, I heard for the first time about Robert M MacIver. I asked my mother whether she knew of him. “Yes.” she said. “Of course he came from MacIver’s Garage.” I understood then, and still understand today, that a rough translation of this was: “If one wants to be a world class sociologist, coming from the family of MacIver’s Garage naturally gives one a distinct head start.”)

(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 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.