The Silent Weaver (13 page)

He made obvious references to the Uist
muranach
origins of himself and his work. He made horses' harnesses and halters and reins. He made peat creels and sowing seed pouches. Some
of them looked like primitive art, some of them looked like three-dimensional drafts of a still life by Van Gogh, almost all of them could under another name be shown at the Tate Modern. They were the echoes of calls from a homeland. Unable to return to
Tir a' mhurain
, he brought as much as he could of
Tir a' mhurain
to a hillside near Inverness.

His silence was selective and illuminating. Never a talkative man, in Craig Dunain Hospital he was almost always dumb. He drifted through the institution like a wraith in search of its former life.

‘I never heard him speak,' said Robert Polson. ‘Not a word. Ninety-nine per cent of the patients, you could speak to them, like in any other conversation. Sometimes straight away, sometimes it took a bit longer, up to a year, before they started to communicate with us. But Angus would never say a word or speak at all. I never heard his voice. He was almost like a ghost, Angus. He would float past you. He wouldn't look at you. He would just look straight in front of him.'

That reserve was interpreted by many as elective mutism. It would be more accurately described as selective mutism. There was nothing wrong with his vocal cords, but most of the time Angus MacPhee determined not to deploy them, perhaps in silent protest at his removal from South Uist and subsequent confinement, perhaps as another function of his illness or his medication.

Year after year his nurses and consulting psychiatrists made concerted efforts to engage in conversation this man who did not wish to talk to them. ‘Angus is a natural Gaelic speaker,' reported one. ‘He does not speak voluntarily and only answers questions in monosyllables, although he appears to understand what is said to him.'

‘With prompting,' noted another, ‘Angus will become involved in short conversations, although he never initiates them.'

‘[Angus MacPhee] gives the impression of being contented,' said a typical psychiatric report. ‘He was not too keen to talk during his interview. He refused to answer questions about current affairs or the Prime Minister. Nurses say he sometimes chooses not to reply to people. He looks after his own needs. He is very clean and tidy. He reads newspapers.'

When he did speak, it was often to other
Uibhistich
. Those conversations – one-sided conversations, with his visitor doing most of the talking and Angus responding chiefly in mono-syllables – were usually conducted in Gaelic. But that was coincidental. It was because relationships between Uist people were almost always conducted in Gaelic, wherever they met, and there was no obvious reason to change that convention. Angus MacPhee was not making a stand on linguistic principle, nor had his mental disorder eliminated the English language from his brain and left only Gaelic. His first language had been English; he was unlikely to have spoken much Gaelic until he moved to South Uist as a schoolboy. Then the overwhelming ubiquity of Gaelic in Iochdar in the 1920s and 1930s quickly made it his preferred, natural, default language. But he remained bilingual.

There was plenty of Gaelic in Craig Dunain Hospital. It could not have been otherwise. When the Inverness District Asylum first opened in 1864, its internal church services were conducted only in English. At that time more than 200,000 of the 350,000 people in the Highlands and Islands were Gaelic speakers, and within two years the visiting minister was ‘preaching alternately in English and Gaelic . . . There can be
no doubt that the change is advantageous, and the conduct of the patients indicates their appreciation of it.'

There were fewer Gaelic speakers in the Highlands when Angus MacPhee entered Craig Dunain 80 years later, and a much higher percentage of Gaels who, like him, also spoke English. But there were still almost 100,000 Scottish people who were fluent in Gaelic, and most of them were everyday users of the language in Highland communities. Unavoidably, during Angus MacPhee's time at Craig Dunain he was in the company of Gaelic-speaking nurses, doctors, psychiatrists, cleaners, cooks and other patients.

But he did not often speak a word to them, in Gaelic or in English. He spoke to
Uibhistich
. He spoke to Jimmy ‘Apples' MacDonald, a nurse manager at Craig Dunain who became a Highland councillor. Jimmy MacDonald had moved as a teenager from Baleshare in North Uist to Inverness. As well as building a new life and career, he hoped there to jettison the embarrassing childhood nickname which had been given him in Uist because of his plump red cheeks. All was going well until, walking one day through Craig Dunain, he crossed the path of a patient from North Uist who innocently called out ‘Hello, Apples!' It stuck for the rest of his busy time in Inverness and earned the impertinent patient, Jimmy Apples would joke, an especially painful injection.

‘I've known him for 30 years,' Jimmy said of Angus MacPhee in 1997, ‘since I started to work in Craig Dunain.'

He would wear a long coat, with a rope that he'd made himself tied around the waist.

If it rained Angus would go into the shelter of trees and collect grass and bring it to a sheltered spot – there was a lot of grass around the hospital to harvest. He made hats, shoes, coats, ropes, horse collars, mufflers, knitted handkerchiefs . . .

People realise now how sad it is that they didn't keep those things and save them for the years to come. I don't think people understood how good he was with his hands and how well he made things, and how apt he was at living out in the woods. If one day there was suddenly no hospital, if Craig Dunain had completely disappeared, Angus would have survived on his own out there.

I'm sure that the publicity he got would have appealed to him. It would have lifted his spirits – knitting grass was his world. That was what kept him alive and gave him the hope to carry on.

When I became a councillor I'd be on the radio. I'd go in and see Angus, and he'd tell me he'd heard me, in Gaelic of course. It was nonsense to say he never spoke to anybody. He didn't say much, but he spoke. Truth is, I'm not sure he should ever have been in there.

While Angus MacPhee was working the home farm at Craig Dunain Hospital and quietly plaiting, weaving and knitting his extraordinary creations, far away the islands of Uist slowly changed. His sisters married. Two of them, Mary Ellen and Peigi, went with their soldier husbands to England. Patricia married a man called Donald John Campbell from two crofts away in Balgarva and stayed at home to raise her family.

Their father, Neil MacPhee, was bedridden for the last years of his life. In 1947, the year after his only son and natural assignee of his croft was admitted to Inverness Asylum, Neil applied for ‘leave to assign his holding at No. 52 Balgarva to his daughter, Mrs Patricia Campbell'. It was an unusual application. Women had hitherto been disregarded in croft assignations. But it was allowed by the Scottish Land Court, and Ellen McHendry's middle daughter became the first registered female crofter in South Uist. Her father Neil died in
Balgarva of natural causes in 1951 at the age of 90 years. Angus could not attend his funeral.

By then a low bridge spanned the South Ford between Iochdar and Creagorry, linking South Uist and Benbecula by road. It was known locally as
Drochaid O'Reagan
, O'Reagan's Bridge, after the parish priest at Benbecula who had campaigned for many years for a safe crossing between his island and South Uist. A causeway across the North Ford between Benbecula and North Uist would be opened in 1960, connecting all three islands for the first time since the last Ice Age and enabling routine social and professional contact between all the
Uibhistich
.

Car ferries began to sail from the mainland to Lochboisdale and motorised transport became ever more common. The ancient horse culture of the island withered away. Foodstuffs such as sliced white bread and bottled milk were increasingly imported, and the days of griddled breads, oatmeal cakes, and a milking cow on every croft slipped into history. Commercial civilian flights disturbed the skies over Iochdar as they arrived and departed from an airstrip built during the Second World War at Balivanich in Benbecula.

A famous American collector of folksongs visited the Uists in 1951 to record on tape what he could of this culture while it survived. ‘I have never met a set of people I liked as well anywhere,' Alan Lomax wrote to a friend after returning to mainland Britain, ‘and the astonishing number of beautiful tunes that came pouring into the microphone just completely astounded me. If all the rest of the tunes of the world were to be suddenly wiped out by an evil magician, the Hebrides could fill up the gap without half trying.'

A famous American photographer was persuaded by Alan
Lomax to visit the Uists in 1954. Paul Strand recorded the place and its people on black-and-white film. He titled his subsequent collection of island images ‘Tir a' Mhurain'. ‘In Gaelic, the language of the Hebrides,' explained Basil Davidson in his commentary on Strand's photographs, ‘South Uist is known traditionally as Tir a' Mhurain, the Land of Bent Grass, of the marram grass that spreads along its sandy western shore in a myriad of green needles which bend and ripple with the never-ceasing wind.'

A tweed-weaving factory was established in Iochdar in the 1950s. It rose and fell in a few short years, and the men returned to their crofts and their boats. In 1958 a military rocket-testing range was built at Gerinish in the south of the district of Iochdar. In response to the sudden influx of soldiers and their weapons of mass destruction, the local priest Father John Morrison persuaded each village in Iochdar to erect a wayside shrine. Father Morrison also commissioned the sculptor Huw Lorimer to carve ‘Our Lady of the Isles', the largest outdoor religious statue in Britain, which was placed on the slopes of a hill overlooking the new rocket range and all the townships of Iochdar.

Electricity arrived in the islands, and telephones and television. New houses were built with roof tiles, and the skills of making marram grass and heather thatch were lost within a few generations. Old Uist was resilient. Its crofting lifestyle and its Gaelic language and culture remained strong in the second half of the twentieth century. But the wholly insular, self-contained pre-war world familiar to Angus MacPhee, the world which had stood almost still for centuries, would never be reclaimed. By the 1960s, few people in Uist plaited marram grass into rope, let alone baskets, and none of them made boots
or hats. That tradition was sustained and given the power of flight by a silent, solitary, middle-aged man in the grounds of an Inverness hospital.

But for a happy occurrence, his work too would all have been lost. In 1977, when Angus MacPhee was 62 years old and had been in Craig Dunain Hospital for half of his life, a visitor who would safeguard his unique and strangely brilliant legacy arrived in Inverness.

‘I was disappointed. We'd heard there was a man made things out of grass, and nobody knows anything about it.'

Despite being born a few years and even fewer miles apart, Tom McGrath and Angus MacPhee lived in different worlds. Different worlds very occasionally collide.

Tom McGrath, who died in 2009, is categorised as a playwright and jazz pianist. The description is inadequate. McGrath was a prominent mover and shaker in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s libertarian, metropolitan, beat and hip, art, publishing and music culture.

A Lanarkshire Glaswegian (he was born in 1940 in Rutherglen, 25 years after Angus MacPhee was born ten miles away in Nettlehole), McGrath moved to London in the 1960s. There he performed at the seminal International Poetry Olympics at the Royal Albert Hall and worked on the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament's publication
Peace News
before helping to found the first British counter-cultural ‘underground' magazine,
International Times
.

He returned to Glasgow in the late 1960s, threw off a heroin habit, collaborated with the young musician and comedian Billy Connolly, persuaded Miles Davis, Duke Ellington and the Mahavishnu Orchestra to perform in his home city, and wrote a popular play called
Laurel and Hardy
.