The Silent Weaver (6 page)

On 22 October 1914 Private Angus Bowie of Iochdar in South Uist died at the first Battle of Ypres. Twenty days later his older brother, Sergeant Archibald Bowie, was also killed in combat. Both men's names would later be carved in stone on the Menin Gate.

The childless Anna MacPhee had lost a son. The childless Francis MacPhee had lost his able young assistant and the heir presumptive to his croft. Without every one of those three premature deaths, of his sister Ann, of her son Angus, and of his own wife Ellen, Neil MacPhee may never have taken his children back to Balgarva. Angus and his three sisters could have grown up as motherless, English-speaking, Lanarkshire farm urchins, drifting in their teens to the hiring fairs and the coal mines of Lanarkshire or the industries and domestic services of the city of Glasgow. They would never have known the machair, the marram grass, the horses and the hills of Uist.

In 1920 Francis MacPhee was well into his seventies (like his father's, Francis's exact age varied from certificate to certificate, but in his case only slightly – Francis was born within a year or two of 1843). Anna was still just 66 (give or take a birthday) and perfectly capable of running the household. But Francis
was by then too infirm for croft work. He suffered from palsy, which suggests he may have had a stroke that left him partly paralysed and with involuntary tremors.

Francis died at home in April 1923. The croft at 52 Balgarva in the district of Iochdar was subsequently assigned to his youngest brother. In his 64th year, Neil MacPhee had a piece of land to plough in South Uist.

His children, Mary Ellen, Angus, Patricia and Peigi, experienced in reverse their father's cultural and linguistic challenge of three decades before. They travelled from an English-speaking household in the Anglophone Lowlands to a place where nothing but Gaelic was heard from one dawn to the next – and where many people, including their Aunt Anna, spoke little else. But they were young, between four and ten years old, and they quickly learned. ‘When they arrived they had no Gaelic,' Patricia's daughter Eilidh would say. ‘Within a year or two they had nothing but Gaelic.'

Neil built and thatched a new cottage for himself and his children, a few yards away from the larger old family home. Even by the standards of early-twentieth-century Uist crofthouses, it was small, so small that his youngest daughter Peigi would refer to it as ‘a renovated bird cage'. The three sisters and their brother were frequently left in the care of their Aunt Anna, who was in receipt of a nominal military pension following the death at Ypres of young Angus Bowie. When Neil MacPhee was not working the croft, he often travelled south to raise cash by labouring on Lowland farms.

The children were sustained after the loss of their mother by the kindness of strangers and friends, and by their faith. Like most of the rest of the people of South Uist and Benbecula, the MacPhees were devout Roman Catholics. ‘Religion featured
prominently in our family,' Eilidh would say, ‘and my mother said it was the mainstay in her life when her mother died and left them bereft.'

They had also a whole new world to explore. The place-names, which before long they understood, are instructive. An t-Iochdar in Gaelic means a low-lying stretch of land, and Baile Gharbhaidh means a human settlement on rough ground. Iochdar is at the northern edge of South Uist, and Balgarva is on the northern shore of Iochdar. (Those Gaelic placenames, corrupted, are echoed elsewhere in Scotland. Yoker is an industrial town on the flat northern bank of the River Clyde, and Garve is a village north-west of Inverness.)

In the 1920s there were few more isolated places in Britain, even in the lonely Highlands and Islands of Scotland. The western Highlands were a daunting journey from the towns and cities of the south and east of the country, along slow, winding, precipitous, rutted, narrow roads. The Western Islands were a long way even from the western Highlands. For that reason and others, they had not been well treated by mainstream Scottish scholars and writers. W.C. MacKenzie, a Gaelic-speaking Lewisman who published a first thorough history of the Western Isles in 1903, lamented

The early historians of Scotland obviously knew very little about the Outer Hebrides, and their information is consequently the reverse of illuminating.

John of Fordun (circa 1380) merely mentions Lewis by name. Uist, he tells us, is thirty miles long, and is an island where ‘whales and other sea-monsters' abound. He mentions the castle of ‘Benwewyl' (Benbecula), and says that ‘Hirth' (St. Kilda) was the best stronghold of all the islands.

He states that the Highlanders and Hebrideans were a savage and untamed nation, rude and independent, given to
rapine, ease-loving, of a docile and warm disposition, comely in person but unsightly in dress, hostile to the English people and language (and, owing to diversity of speech, even to their own nation), and exceeding cruel.

Andrew Wyntoun (1426) merely makes a passing reference to ‘the owt ylys in the se'.

John Major (1521) has nothing to say about the Long Island, except that Lewis has a length of thirty leagues. One half of Scotland, he tells us, spoke Irish (Gaelic) in his day, and all these, as well as the Islanders, were reckoned to belong to the ‘wild Scots'. He makes a distinction between those of them who followed agricultural and pastoral pursuits, and those who were addicted to the chase and war, whom he criticises severely for their indolence.

War, he asserts, was their normal condition. Their weapons were bows and arrows, broadswords, and a small halbert, with a small dagger in their belts. Their ordinary dress consisted of a plaid and a saffron-dyed shirt; and in war, coats of mail made of iron rings were worn by all save the common people, who wore a linen garment sewed together in patchwork, well daubed with wax or pitch, with an over-garment of deerskin. The musical instrument of the ‘wild Scots' was the harp, the strings of which were of brass. Major confirms the statement of Fordun as to their hatred of Lowland Scots and English alike . . .

The principal islands of the Outer Hebrides are not described by Dean Monro (1549) so fully as could be desired . . . North and South Uist, the former with two, and the latter with five, parish kirks, receive scant notice. South Uist is called a fertile country, with high hills and forests on the east or south-east, and well-stocked land on the northwest.

Just over 100 years before John of Fordun wrote his description of ‘a savage and untamed nation' whose inhabitants hated the mainland Scots and English without distinction, the Western
Isles had been a Viking province, a part of the Kingdom of Norway. The same lingering suspicion of the Hebrides as a foreign and untrustworthy region informed the other chroniclers cited by W.C. MacKenzie. It would continue to inform their successors. Despite MacKenzie's efforts, some of those islands remained more isolated than others from southern Scottish society, language and culture.

In the early twentieth century the only public transport to South Uist was its ferry service, and the ferry to Lochboisdale carried only goods, mail, foot-passengers and livestock. It was infrequent and often took a day or a night to cross an expanse of notoriously stormy water. Lochboisdale pier was closed for repairs for most of 1924 and 1925, cutting off the island almost completely from the mainland. The hiatus caused local irritation and questions in the House of Commons, but little else. The Uists were accustomed to being isolated. In South Uist itself there were hardly any motorised vehicles and just one main road, which had been reluctantly adopted and then half-forgotten by the seat of local government in Inverness, 150 miles away on the other side of Scotland.

Thirty years earlier the 1896
Gazetteer of Scotland
said that Iochdar, ‘measuring about 14 square miles . . . forms practically a separate island . . .'

Little had changed. In the 1920s Iochdar in general and Balgarva in particular were as far from the ferry port, shops, and savings bank of Lochboisdale as it was possible to go and still be in South Uist. Very occasionally, Balgarva itself actually did become an island. The highest of spring tides – the same tides which washed the earth floors of some Balgarva houses – crept in through salt marshes through the lowest croftland, until the whole small township was surrounded for a few hours by a semi-circle of brackish sea.

Cut off by the tide or not, Balgarva was much closer to the island of Benbecula than to most of the rest of South Uist. The MacPhee family croft looked at Benbecula over two miles of white dunes, beaches and rolling sea. Within 40 years bridges and causeways would connect South Uist to Benbecula and Benbecula to North Uist. But in the 1920s the three islands were still separated by broad and perilous tidal strands. A child could look from Balgarva at the shimmering sands of Benbecula, but never be allowed to walk there, not even when the emergence of a certain reef from the sea in front of his house indicated that the tide had fallen far enough to make the strand fordable on foot.

‘It was a very sad, black place when they arrived in the early 1920s,' a relative would say. The Great War had taken a heavy toll from the Uists. Before the war some 9,000 people lived in the chain of smaller and larger islands that ran from Berneray through North Uist to Grimsay, Benbecula, Fladda, South Uist and Eriskay. Between 1914 and 1918 they lost 372 men on the battlefields of Loos and Ypres and in the ships of the merchant marine. It was a disproportionate sacrifice. On average, 2.2 per cent of the population of the whole of the United Kingdom was killed in the First World War. But 4.1 per cent of the people of Uist died. That figure represented over 8 per cent of the male population of the islands, and by further extrapolation meant that perhaps one-sixth of the young and early middle-aged men of Uist were lost.

Eleven of the Uist dead had been serving with the Lovat Scouts. It was of equal relevance to the MacPhee family that, as well as Angus and Archibald Bowie, no fewer than 30 of the fallen were from the district of Iochdar. Almost all of the Iochdar boys had, like Angus and Archibald, died as
infantrymen on the Western Front. Most of them, unlike Angus and Archibald, lost their lives at the Battle of Loos in the autumn of 1915. ‘Their colonel in the Cameron Highlanders,' said Father Michael MacDonald of Bornish in South Uist, ‘was the mainland landowner Cameron of Locheil, whom they blamed for the slaughter. After the end of the war, in the 1920s, the same Cameron of Locheil (Domnhall Dubh) was invited to unveil the war memorials at North Uist and Benbecula, but the people of South Uist refused to have him perform the unveiling ceremony at their own memorial on Carishival above Bornish. Instead, they asked a local woman, Bean Thormaid Bhain from Kilaulay in Iochdar, to carry out the task as she had lost two sons in the war.'

There was a further cost, which many at that time and later preferred to ignore. More than one in every hundred members of the British Armed Forces in the First World War, 75,000 men, ‘were pensioned for mental and nervous diseases'. As late as 1922, 10,000 of those servicemen were still in asylums or hospitals. The effect was discernible even in the remotest parts of the kingdom, like a slight surge of the tide from a distant tsunami. During the war years of 1914 to 1918 the number of people admitted to the single lunatic asylum in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland jumped by 6 per cent, before falling again in the 1920s.

Not a crofthouse was untouched by injury or death. The loss of so many young men had a debilitating effect beyond their individual tragedies. It meant that almost 400 Uist women were either widowed or were robbed of a prospective husband. It was neither unusual nor coincidental that in the first half of the twentieth century two of Angus MacPhee's three sisters left the islands to marry and settle far away in
England. The Great War stole hundreds of families from the islands. Their population, which was already in long-term decline, fell by 1,000 people in the ten years between 1911 and 1921. The number of children under the age of 14 in North Uist, Benbecula and South Uist dropped by a precipitous 17 per cent, from 1,750 to 1,452, between 1921 and 1931. The men who did not return in 1919 would be forever revered in Uist memory as the islands' greatest generation: the best, the bravest, the biggest, the strongest, the wittiest, the wisest – and the heroic embodiments of a lost future.

For all its bereavements, its epidemics and its emigrations, South Uist always had grace and joy. The MacPhee family returned to an island easily recognisable to an exile from 30, 50 or even 100 years before. The Gaelic language had retreated hardly at all since the nineteenth century. Its associated oral culture – the songs and fabled stories of the Hebrides – was still heard in every village. Its subsistence crofting and fishing lifestyle dominated the self-sufficient local economy. Government grants enabled many people to move out of the old blackhouses, which they had shared with livestock, into better dwellings. But the technological developments of the twentieth century evaded most people in the Uists. On the west coast machair and beside the rocky east-coast inlets they had no electricity, no telephones (there were not even, until 1939, public telephone kiosks anywhere in the islands), often no running water and certainly no motor cars. They had their land, their language and each other.

A young woman from Pennsylvania in the United States stayed in South Uist for six years between 1929 and 1935. Margaret Fay Shaw lived in a remote southern corner of the island, over 20 miles from Iochdar. She found there the kind
of life which Angus MacPhee was living in Balgarva. It was a seasonal round of outdoor duties which had been honed over centuries. The ground was furrowed by hand-ploughs or by horses; potatoes were planted and raised and stored; grains sown and harvested; cattle and sheep walked to market; the cottage thatch mended or replaced. Much of the work was done communally. The annual fuel supply, in the form of peat, was cut from the ground at the same time every year. It took, estimated Margaret Fay Shaw, six men two days to cut a year's peat for one home. People worked together at ‘the lamb marking, the sheep clipping, when the men used to shear and the women fold the fleeces, and the dipping to control sheep scab, which was required in Uist by law four times a year'.