Duncan was a powder monkey, one of a team of tunnel miners, employed to bring electricity to the Highlands, north and west of Dingwall, through an immense hydro-electric scheme of dams, tunnels, lochs and power stations. While working at Strathvaich Duncan had gone into a shed to fetch blasting gear when the box of detonators he was holding blew up in his hand and with it the whole shed.
Duncan Macrae
“That Saturday afternoon in June 1911, Oskar Johansson lost all his fair hair. His left eye was ripped out of its socket by the force of the blast. The right hand was severed at the wrist by a shard of rock.”
As I read Henning Mankell’s The Rock Blaster I was pulled up short at his description of an explosion and injuries to the book’s hero, Oskar Johansson, for they were near identical to those suffered by a relative of mine, Duncan Macrae, in the 1950s in an accident not dissimilar to the one suffered by the fictitious Johansson and it got me thinking that Duncan, Duncie, deserved to have his story told as well.
My problem was that Duncan is long dead, he died back in 1991. And that generation of the family has gone and with them first-hand knowledge of the tragedy that befell Duncan that day at Strathvaich. Memories and anecdotes survive about Duncie, his horrific injuries – his left hand was blown off, he lost his left eye, his right eye was damaged and shards of metal and pieces of wire were lodged in his thigh, face and eyelids. He was supplied with a metal hook in place of his missing hand. He was twenty-nine.
One of my earliest memories as a very young child is watching my aunt, a nurse, using tweezers to pluck bits of metal out of Duncan’s studded face. They stood before the farmhouse kitchen window to capture the best light, Duncan stoic throughout scarcely wincing though the pain must have been excruciating.
The Scottish Highlands mythologised and derided in equal measure; dramatic, romantic scenery or barren wilderness of no use to man or beast. But the Highlands aren’t called highlands for nothing. Mountain ranges that trap winter snow that melts into the burns, rivers, lochans and lochs. And rain that isn’t unknown especially towards the west. Water in large quantities described as a wasted resource that should be exploited to produce electric power – hydro power to provide light and heat to Highlanders dependent on Tilley lamps and open fires.
The Conon Valley hydro scheme was one of several planned during WWII and the baby of Tom Johnston, a Labour MP who became Secretary of State for Scotland under Churchill in 1941. Johnston was determined that electric power would be provided to people in the north of Scotland who had no access to the Grid which he regarded as unfair and a deterrent to the Highlands attracting industry and employment. Not everyone agreed.
Proposal after proposal to produce hydro-electricity there was blocked by the House of Lords. The greatest opposition to electrifying the region came from influential wealthy interests who were well-represented in the Lords – sporting estates and coal mine owners (the latter afraid of competition from hydro-electricity). Some objectors cited the loss of the area’s dramatic scenery since dam construction would involve ripping up glens to create new lochs and dams. Land that remained more or less the same for eons would be filled with concrete and bird and animal habitats lost forever. There was less concern for the few people still living in the glens being forced off land generations of their families had inhabited.
A Professor Gruffydd (MP) feared the Highlands would be turned into something akin to a –
“Dublin slum. That has already happened in the rural parts of Scotland and in the Lowlands.”
(27 May 1943, House of Commons)
A habitual critic was MP Sir Gerald Nabarro, a crashing bore with a constituency near Birmingham who took every opportunity to rant in the House of Commons about English taxes having to provide a few Highlanders with electricity. Speaking in July 1958 he had the Strathfarrar scheme in his sights –
“This is not a parochial Scottish issue. This is a matter of an expenditure of £14 million by a nationalised industry.”
One of the bees in his bonnet was his insistence that producing electricity by hydro in the Highlands was far costlier than it would be in England (theoretically) – as if England would agree to such monumental changes to its countryside and ecology and had the physical conditions for such schemes. His complaint that hydro was costlier than coal and nuclear were challenged on grounds that costs of coal and nuclear production kept rising while they fell for hydro power.
In 1958 Conservative and Unionist MP, David Robertson, must have still been wearing his London constituency hat when he switched to Caithness and Sutherland and described the Conon scheme as –
“the unwanted extravagance in the far north”
Supporters of the Conon hydro scheme worried the intended benefits for the Highlands would be diverted south to the central belt to boost industries, incomes and utilities there. This did eventually happen but not before the great hydro venture provided exclusively for the north of Scotland, to the Highlands and islands and the northeast cities of Aberdeen and Dundee.
Under Johnston’s plan the body set up to operate the Conon Hydro scheme, the North of Scotland Hydro-Electric Board (NSHEB), was given temporary ownership of sections of rivers running through the region’s three estates and at the completion of the works the majority of fishing rights were transferred to local angling clubs, but fishing rights on the rivers Conon and Blackwater were sold to private owners (though locals did not always bother going through official channels, including at least one serving police officer who was partial to a salmon from the Blackwater). Three landowners held much of the land between Contin and Ullapool: the Lovat estate, the Fairburn Stirlings and Spencer Nairns of Struy. They were concerned about intrusions onto their land and loss of revenue from fishing and shooting.
With little infrastructure beyond Contin about 160 publicly-funded new roads were constructed so lorries and materials could get into the glens and straths and on completion of the scheme there was a fair amount of anger when some roads were then handed over to the estates as their private property.
Tom Johnston was always aware that business interests outside the Highlands would be eyeing up the scheme’s potential money-making opportunities so he ensured the NSHEB was independent and had control over its own finances in order that Scottish people and businesses would benefit first and foremost and lucrative contracts would not be picked off by bigger English competitors. In 1943 a bill to bring light to the Highlands eventually made it through parliament. The whole scheme was phased in three parts; each requiring a parliamentary act.
And so crofts, houses, roads, tracks, bridges, burns, plants from trees to tiny flowering species and the insects, birds and animals they provided for were forever lost beneath concrete and water. Six dams at Glascarnoch, Vaich, Luichart, Meig, Torrachilty and Orrin and six power stations at Achanalt, Grudie Bridge, Mossford, Luichart, Orrin and Torrachilty along with new lochs at Fannich and Luichart were built in 350 square miles of Ross-shire. Rivers were diverted. Land was dug out. Land was raised. Millennia of rock blasted out of the earth. Part of the Dingwall to Kyle of Lochalsh railway line was submerged and rerouted.
Such a huge undertaking required labour. Lots and lots of men and a few women were hired. Many were local – lorries picked men up (including recently demobbed soldiers and former prisoners of war still in the area) from around Strathpeffer, Dingwall, the Black Isle and miles beyond very early in the day and transported them along winding single-track roads to the building sites and start of usually 12-hour shifts, sometimes longer depending on the job that day. Outside work, summer and winter. Labourers flocked in from around Scotland, Ireland and around Europe. The initial involvement of politicians and planners, men in velour-collared coats and Homburg hats, gave way to men in donkey jackets and tackety boots.
Workers who were not local lived in camps that might comprise ex-war Nissan huts or forestry commission cabins previously occupied by Canadian lumberjacks stationed in Scotland during WWII. Through once silent straths and glens save for the cry of eagles and trickle of burns burst the relentless din of industry – explosions, drilling, excavating and hammering.
Before the coming of the Conon Hydro scheme Duncan ran a mobile shop. His cousin, Don, remembers –
“He had a little Ford van, BGA 555, in which he used to sell fish, fruit and vegetables starting at Brahan P.OW. camp and going up the West Coast nearly up to Ullapool calling at all the crofts along the way. That wee van was an Aladdin’s cave for me. When we stopped to eat, I would have an Arbroath smokie with a choice of Irn Bru or American Creme Soda to wash it down.”
Don was much younger than Duncan and he recalled getting a hurl to Loch Luichart on the crossbar of Duncan’s bike to poach fish with an ‘otter’ (a sort of wooden kite with baited lines that floated across the water). A few miles beyond Loch Luichart lies Loch Vaich and it’s here Duncan was employed as a ‘powder monkey’ handling explosives to blast a tunnel through the rocky landscape so that water from a dam built at Vaich could flow into Loch Glascarnoch.
The ambitious project succeeded enabling hundreds of thousands of Scots easy access to electricity. Before the Conon complex only 1 out of 14 farms and 1 in 100 crofts had electricity. By the late-fifties the vast majority were linked up. Areas most difficult to connect such as the western isles were provided with calor gas in the interim.
New electricity lines at Elphin on the Ullapool-Inchnadamff road with Cul Beag, Cul Mor and Loch Veyatie behind. Mrs MacLean hay-making at her croft near Elphin with poles bringing electricity in the background.
One ambition for electrification was it would attract industries to the north but that never really materialised. However, having electricity at the flick of a switch was overwhelmingly welcomed by the majority of people in the north who could largely dispense with paraffin lamps and local industries such as farming and boat building benefitted greatly from the availability of electrical power for operating machinery.
A decade on from the transformation of the Highlands Tom Johnston’s early concerns remained valid. The nationalised and autonomous North of Scotland Hydro-Electric Board was always under threat but it wasn’t until Thatcher in 1989 that the real damage was done when the Board and its sister in the south of Scotland were privatised as Scottish Hydro Electric plc and Scottish Power plc, freeing these companies to sell their electricity anywhere in the UK – and charge the folk of the straths and glens and everywhere else in Scotland more for their home-produced electricity than consumers of it in the south of England. And so it has remained to this day.
For his devastating injuries; the loss of one eye, one hand, metal shards embedded into his body, his personal and working life devastated, Duncan received £12,000 not the £15,000 his solicitors sued the civil engineering company Reed and Mallik for. Still, it was a considerable sum in 1958 but for a young man with his whole live in front of him paltry compensation. Duncan was invariably upbeat and smiley, a kind and fun man but he must have suffered terrible torment over what his future could have been.
Duncan’s nephew, Rory, at Tarvie Croft which Duncan rented after his accident
I only managed to find one very brief mention of his pay-out, not the accident itself, in newspapers and couldn’t trace his damages case at Edinburgh’s Court of Session (Common law was altered in an 1958 Act to introduce discretionary powers that would allow courts to include interest on damages awards calculated from a date earlier than the decree). Then something odd happened – the name Macrae began to pop up on my computer screen alongside other compensation cases in Scottish courts – Macrae v Reed and Mallik Ltd 1961 SC 68, 74. Lots of claims for personal injury compensation referred to Duncan’s case, including Tommy Sheridan’s appeal for interest on damages he won from News Group Newspapers in 2018 on grounds the pursuer was being deprived of his money through no fault of his own. Duncan’s solicitors had appealed his compensation but in 1961 the court decided greater discretion should be available to the court over the 1958 judgement leaving pursuers of damages back at square one.
However, my attempt to obtain access to the court papers have been stymied and I’ve been told the record of Duncan’s case is closed under section 38 of the Freedom of Information Scotland Act. Closed until 2061! I may put in a Freedom of Information request but am not confident that will be any more successful.
Duncan’s future life was tragically blighted by the accident but he was not alone. Many men suffered life changing injuries and several died carrying out their work on the hydro dams to bring electricity into Scottish homes, farms and businesses. With none of the plant machinery available today, the Conon scheme was achieved through hard, exhausting labour, often in freezing weather conditions. Men were crushed, buried, drowned and blown up and most are long forgotten except by their families – these are the men in boiler suits and donkey jackets while those men involved who wore velour collar coats and Homburg hats have their names recorded for posterity.
Duncan
Duncan’s cousin recalled the man he’d loved –
“So you can see how much he meant to me and imagine how I felt about the accident and then how I admired his long battle to get back to normality. Who needs Superman when there is Duncan?”
He describes Duncan as “that fine fellow” who “brought a lot of happiness to a lot of people.” I remember Duncan. He was indeed a fine fellow with a constant smile and his good humour sure did bring happiness to old and young. This blog is for Duncan.
Duncan is buried along with his parents, Dunc and Anne, and brother, Roddy at Contin cemetery
Further reading – The Dam Builders, Power from the Glens by Jim Miller.
Halloween or All Hallows’ Eve is big business nowadays. Where I come from in the Scottish Highlands it was always one of the major occasions in a year we children looked forward to; each 31st of October we went out guising. Guising – or rather disguising – dressed in costumes and wearing a scary face mask we would wander about the village and be invited in from the dark and spooky night to neighbour’s cosy livingrooms to recite a poem, sing a song or tell a joke. Our adult neighbours would then attempt to identify us. One year one of the older boys had pulled on a white sheet with eye holes cut out which the rest of us thought was cheating as it was nearly impossible to identify him – and this ghostly creature was a terrifying sight back out in the dark . We were invited to dook for apples floating in a basin of water or catch them with our teeth as they dangled from strings. Our reward for entertaining our neighbours were gifts of apples, monkey nuts, a coin perhaps and maybe sweets or cake. I thought of these things as rewards but the Celtic roots of this festival had a more sinister meaning. Contact from a spectral being, albeit a child wearing a false face, had to involve a donation to the spirit to thwart their evil intentions.
Scots who migrated to America held onto many of their traditions. It has become law in the US that any celebration must be made into a money-making opportunity and so it was with guising. America’s trick or treat hit the shops here. A Scottish tradition that stretched back thousands of years that few south of the Borders had heard of was rebranded as trick or treat in the UK as well. Instead of apples and monkey nuts came commercial sweets, instead of a cardboard or plastic false face and an old sheet came shop-bought costumes and instead of the howked-out neep with a candle in the middle came pumpkins. But the essence remained. A gift to placate evil or have evil done in alive in trick or treat.
Guising took place on the night before the Celtic festival of fire of peace, Samhain (Samhuinn in Gaelic), on 1 November when fires were lit at dusk and musicians played as people danced and chatter was mostly about foretelling the future. Over time the two celebrations merged as Halloween, originally All Hallows’ Eve – the evening before All Hallows’ Day (All Saint’s Day) is the name that lingers but the festival pre-dates this Christian celebration of All Saint’s Day as Samhain was an important event in the pre-Christiancalendar.
Lots of similar festivities took place over a year which were participated in by people living through uncertain times with life and death at the whim of the elements, a poor harvest or series of poor harvests spelled illness and death to communities. Where people lack personal control over their lives and there is continuing uncertainty they look for ways to ensure good luck comes their way. In few places in the UK was life more fraught with threats to survival than in the Scottish Highlands. And so where people today might buy a lottery ticket in the hope of getting out of a financial fix, Highlanders in the past curried favour with the spirits they believed were all around and influenced life and death by making them little offerings.
Highlanders were very superstitious. They were also very vulnerable to all sorts of calamities from the natural world to unscrupulous lairds. Perhaps it is this that made Highlanders particularly humble people, not given to boasting and showing off because luck can change. Nothing was taken for granted. For folk who had next to nothing in material terms a loss of, say, their only cow would mean deeper poverty than they already endured and potentially death for the family. They lived life on the edge, at the mercy of evil spirits, gods – whatever. For anyone who dared push themselves forward, get above themselves, there was a price to be paid. An example of this rashness comes in a story concerning Mary Queen of Scots.
Queen Mary (Mary Queen of Scots) was visiting Ross-shire when a Mrs Monro introduced her to her 12 sons and 12 daughters – all strong and healthy young people which the mother pointed out to the queen, offering them as her devoted servants of squires and damsels. The queen quite taken aback that the poor woman had borne 24 children immediately rose out of her chair,
“Madam, ye sud tak this chaire, ye best ‘deserve it.’
The queen praised the large, handsome and healthy family. That was not done in Highland culture. To praise was fair enough but a compliment must be qualified with a nod to god such as “God bless the …” could be a bairn, 24 bairns, or the family’s single cow. The queen, not being a Highlander, did not understand this and the family’s fate was sealed, it is said they had ill-luck from then on.
Parents were particularly concerned over their newborn babies who were thought of as particularly vulnerable to the spirits and evil eyes. Some of those evil-doers were fairies. Fairies were wont to steal babies. To Highlanders fairies were not delightful little creatures but conniving spirits that would harm a person as quick as look at them. Babies were watched round the clock to prevent them being taken by these malevolent influences who would swap them for a changeling infant. And you didn’t want a changeling. Changelings weren’t human and sometimes not even children but elderly fairies disguised as infants to get affection and coddling from human mothers. They were evil beings, recognisable by their precociousness or unusual physical attributes. Only when a baby was christened was it thought to be safe. At the christening gifts were given to placate hostile spirits, simple things such as a piece of bread.
To help forestall any malicious fairy intending harm or a poor harvest or sickness in the family cow a tribute to the spirits might be left at a place associated with the spirit world, such as a well or loch. In the Black Isle, the Clootie Well near Munlochy has for long been one of these places where fragments of clothing, ribbons and even food such as bread or oatcakes were left and a wish made to protect someone. This tradition goes beyond Scotland. I’ve seen the same in Siberia where bushes and trees have offerings in the form of scraps of material designed to deter bad luck and instigate good fortune.
The Clootie Well
Birth was fraught with menaces and so, too, was death. I learnt from my mother that when a person died their souls rose up to heaven. We lived next door to the village church and graveyard and on several occasions the young me would stand watching and waiting, no doubt arms akimbo, to see the soul of a recently buried person rising into the sky, heavenward. After weeks, maybe months of this, I complained to my mother that I never saw any souls in the sky only to be told they were invisible. What a let down! She did not say, perhaps didn’t know though being from Highlanders whose ancestors stretched back into the proverbial mists of time she probably did know that when a loved one died a window in the house was opened to allow the soul to escape. That information could have saved me hours of standing about in our garden on soul watch. The dead were kept at home in our village; their corpses prepared for burial by the next of kin or someone appointed in lieu of them. Not sure the practice of placing a plate of salt on the body to prevent it from swelling and bursting the bands of the shroud was still on the go when I was young, probably not. Mort cloths were long pieces of plain woven linen that covered the body or coffin. I have one from my Black Isle family that was never used – my mother’s cousin cut up another into dish towels. The linen was grown on the family croft near Cromarty. As with babies, family watched over the newly dead until burial, to prevent evil spirits doing them harm. This was known as the lyke wake during which relatives old and young would dance, slowly, in the proximity of the body.
Evil was likely to escape through someone’s mouth as well as eye. To kiss a mouth could prevent fore-speaking – expressing the future (usually bleak) and anyone suffering misfortune was said to have the ‘uncanny eye’ or ‘uneasy eye’ and nobody wanted to catch that. Any afflicted with the uncanny or uneasy eye were offered small gifts, such as bread, oatcakes or pieces of clothing, to keep them on side and encourage them to cast their evil somewhere else.
Superstition was an everyday part of life for the Highlander as it was for most folk straddling that fine line between survival and death – think of fishermen, famously superstitious. A few superstitions live on in the 21st century. Halloween is a capitalist’s dream of a commercial bonanza but I’d like to see how they would handle another Highland tradition on All Hallows’ Eve in which young women were blindfolded and encouraged to select a cabbage to discover the size and physique of their future husbands. I think we can assume that is something that is definitely relegated to the past.
The UK is not a migrant friendly country. It says it is. It isn’t. The UK is hostile to migrants. Not all of the UK but certainly that bit that controls migration.
People have migrated. That’s it. People have migrated the whole of human existence. Migrated to find the essentials of living – basically what it takes for survival.
When humans migrated across continents they came from Africa. Oh, yes. Even you racists out there, pucker up because you are basically, African. Learn to love your genes. Of course none of those emigrants who landed on these shore about 1,000,000 years ago would be welcome today. Imagine the scene – boats loaded with terrified people attempting to make safe landing. But wait, back then there was no evil little Home Secretary shooing them away. There was nobody here at all. And so the British African arrived. And that was that. People forgot who they were. But we haven’t got all day – fast forward to – not Patel but a government not unlike today’s unscrupulous Tory gang of spivs and toffs.
James Gillray’s depiction of British MPs getting ready for the daily grind
The year is 1803. Britain was at war with France. Again. They didn’t want any queer democratic revolutionary happenings in Blighty. So war it was. Tories were in charge. Again. A guy called Henry Addington and a mad King. Just call him George.
The mad king has his sights on Boney
Like most Tories the bottom line is, well, the bottom line. Back in 1803 it was all the rage – on the take, doing a mate a favour, you scratch my back. We’re well acquainted with the idea. Well acquainted. Pub landlords getting squoodles of millions for making virus test tubes. Turns out they were – well not test tubes as science understands the term. But. Well, always a but. Didn’t have viruses back then. They did but didn’t know them as viruses.
Anyway.1803. War. Tories in power. Tories everywhere. Even those who didn’t call themselves Tories were Tories. Tory = look out for the bottom line. In Tory minds that meant squeezing the last sweat of profit out workers. One of the most horrible jobs back about 1803 was cutting, gathering, laying out to dry, burning and collecting the ash of kelp. Kelp is a type of seaweed that was essential to manufacturing soap and glass. Everyone needs glass and/or soap – except the Hudsons. In-joke involving cruel snorting schoolkids at sight of 19th century add for Hudson’s soap because of a local family of that name who weren’t too familiar with soap. Enough of this nonsense. Soap and glass back in 1803 delivered excellent bottom lines because so much of the hard graft going into them was done by kids. What do child workers mean? Profits. Kids and their folks were sick of this work. They’d been farmers until thrown out of their homes by their lairds. This is Scotland, in the Union, in 1803. Highland lairds (landowners) found a better bottom line by throwing impoverished natives off the lands of their ancestors and replacing them with sheep. People pay to eat sheep and wear wool and sheep don’t need much looking after. Bottom line, remember.
Where were we? Yes, people were sick of this kelp drudgery. They couldn’t return to their burnt out homes invaded by sheep so many chose to migrate to North America. Migration was quite a thing across the British Isles and families who claimed to own the Highlands were so bottom lining with sheep they’d persuaded lots and lots of people to pile into boats and take their chances in North America where they might eventually be able to farm. What I mean by persuaded is forced. Some had a choice. Some had no choice. People wept, said their last farewells to any too old or decrepit to migrate. They wouldn’t see them again. Or the land. Or the graves of their families. Choice wasn’t really a thing back then – for the poor. One way out was to risk everything, basically everything these folk had was their lives, and emigrate. No Union bonus for them.
Furious lairds did what they could to dissuade them from leaving – apart from paying them properly and improving their working conditions. When this didn’t work they lobbied their friends in government to make it all but impossible for these poor folk to leave the country and so leave proprietors without labour to do their dirty work for them.
The Tory government and the mad king were happy to play their part. The Passenger Vessel Act was quickly pushed through parliament in London. To add insult to injury it was tarted up as being in the interests of migrants – to protect them from being exploited by transportation organisations with less overcrowding and better treatment of passengers. Bunkum, of course. The motivation was entirely to prevent workers leaving the United Kingdom to settle in North America, for example, the fare to Canada tripled from £3 to at least £10 which in today’s money is a hike from £300, still a small fortune back in 1803, to an outrageous £1,000 per person; on a par with people smugglers skinning desperate immigrants nowadays. And we’re talking about the most impoverished folk with virtually no money to their name. It’s worth saying at this point that the Act was repealed in 1827 when prices for kelp plummeted and Highland lairds wanted rid of what had become unwanted workers – 20,000 once employed in the kelp industry. Westminster was only happy to oblige them once again by dropping the cost of migration onboard vessels to North America. Westminster politicians were as unscrupulous then as they are today. Alexander Macdonell, chaplain of the Glengarry Fencilbes, said the 1803 Act was passed on a
specious pretext of humanity & tender benevolence towards the emigrants.
Passengers were crowded onto vessels
The swiftness of the Act’s passage through parliament took some Hebrideans by surprise. They had already given up their tenancies and were abandoned by the government for a generation.
However – always a however – there were exceptions allowed. What are friends in high places for if not to pull strings. The Earl of Selkirk who had ambitions to resettle Scots in Prince Edward Island in Canada was indulged as was the Hudson’s Bay Company (echoes of PPE contracts). Selkirk set up travel agents at Portree and other Highland ports to collect prospective migrants’ deposits, some very large amounts.
Highlanders were being pushed from pillar to post. They were despised by most of the rest of the United Kingdom as uncivilised brutes and scum. But uncivilised brutes were exactly what UK military leaders, government, the mad king and the Duke of York (who was involved in sex scandals which seem to be an occupational hazard for Dukes of York) wanted as recruits to fight its wars. A regiment was formed in North America to absorb some of these hulking Highlanders who had proved so willing to spill their blood for king and country; the Canadian Fencible Regiment appeared then disappeared in 1804 when recruits grew disgruntled over their treatment and were condemned by the military authorities, parliament, the mad king and the debauched prince as strìopach (stroppy). The government, mad king and the grand ol’ Duke of York were feargach (angry) and raged at the men they’d soft-talked into signing up for becoming ‘troublesome’. Though not so troublesome they’d leave them be. Parliament and royalty – mad and bad – were desperate for cannon fodder, fit and brave young men they could sacrifice on the altar of Empire. The 1819 Military Register refers to Highlanders’
blood copiously shed in our service.
In 1810 Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register asks why government grants that were provided to the Highlands to keep the young from migrating was not available in Ireland. Perhaps it was something to do with the copious amount of blood shed by the youth of the Highlands and Islands.
So, sheep were moved onto land where once there were people; families and villages and the communities scattered hither and yon. Not untypical were the seven or eight families who lived on a farm in Argyleshire forcibly evicted and the farm let to “a gentleman because he can give more rent” and the 100,000 acres of lands of Glenshiel (then Glen Sheal), Morvich and Dornie on the west coast of Ross-shire once filled with communities of people was advertised in 1810 as pasture for sheep and black cattle, game, fishings, lead and other minerals.
Oh, why I left my hame by Thomas Faed
There was panic on both sides – months before the Act with warnings over the “destructive depopulation of our island” and calls for “immediate and vigorous interposition of our Legislature” to stop the removal of desperate Highlanders with no means of support by what amounted to ‘unwilling banishment’. Highlanders whose only language was the Gaelic were approached by human traffickers armed with travel documents in English. Some were inevitably duped by them.
Highlanders were the disposable property of landowners in the 18th and 19th centuries. After the ’45 uprising and the butchery and cruelty that followed there were Scots desperate to leave to find safety. The Highlands were treated as alien territory by the British army which built forts which it filled with loyal troops to remind Highlanders who was in charge and put down resistance to its hegemony. The incursion of sheep and sporting estates created other incentives to leave. The 1803 Act was another means of controlling Highlanders.And that was another bottom line for the Union.
In the days when the world map was daubed with British Empire pink signifying its dominions, colonies, protectorates and so on men and women from the home nations sought work and investments in each of them. One such territory was British East Africa; an area of about 639,209km2 /246,800sq ml in the vicinity of the African Great Lakes.
Towards the end of the 19th century Eton-educated Englishman, Lord Delamere, turned up in Kenya where he became the lucky recipient of a huge swathe of land, a gift from the British Crown. Delamere had recognised the potential of this area to create agricultural prospects for Britain – monocultures and exports became the modus operandi in British-controlled estates. Single crops – sugar and rubber for example – small local farms growing essential food were swept aside so that the land could be used to grow raw materials for UK industries leading to food shortages and starvation for people who then became dependent on wages to buy food.
Not only did colonies tend to have the sort of climates that made it ideal for the production of raw resources for the mother country they came with plentiful cheap or free labour to boot – all of which hiked up profit levels both for private and government businesses.
Apart from some basic manufacturing most complex industrial operations took place back in Britain, creating jobs for British workers on rock-bottom wages certainly but these were still far in excess of what was paid to native labour in the colonies.
Vast fortunes were made by some individuals. Little wonder successive British governments resisted demands for independence from its colonies for so long. Sustained exploitation of overseas territory became an established asset to the British economy its knee-jerk response to parts of the Empire daring to demand independence usually took the form of denigration – they were too ignorant and immature to succeed. Where humiliation failed there was recourse to violence. Terrible violence. The British establishment was/is always up for a fight. Times have not changed.
Britain was not alone in being quick to exploit the treasures of Africa. The Scramble for Africa was a late 19th century movement in which European governments disgracefully competed to divvy up the African continent. Portugal was involved in Mozambique in what was called Portuguese East Africa. The Sena Sugar Estates became one of the largest sugar plantations in the world and home to the largest sugar factory in Africa. One man who found work there as an overseer on the agricultural estate was a farmer, a young Scot from the Black Isle, Rod (Roddie) James Munro, and it’s correspondence on his life and death that inspired this blog and will follow.
The Sena Sugar Estates were set up by another British migrant, Peter (Pitt) Hornung. Hornung was the son of Transylvanian migrants to England where they established businesses in coal, iron and timber. Young Pitt moved to Portugal and from there to Portuguese East Africa where he tried to establish an opium farm but when that failed he turned to sugar cane. The result was the Sena Sugar Factory established in 1906 which became the Sena Sugar Estates; operating over 14,000 square miles. The family grew fabulously rich on the back of their African sugar venture. The little township of Beira where it was situated became an important port of entry for deep up country and was the focus of western commercial activities – a considerable change from 20 years earlier in the 1880s when it was a military post with one or two corrugated iron huts sitting on a sand spit at the mouth of the Pungwe river. Roderick James Munro was born at the end of 1882.
Less rich, well to be honest, not rich at all were many of the Europeans who went to work abroad, exploited in their own way though not nearly as exploited and misused as native labour living and working under the cosh of the Empire. For some the prospect of adventure was the lure to going abroad, some to see the world and for others a basic need to go anywhere to earn a living. For the majority of people living in Scotland in the 18th, 19th and into the 20th century as well life was hard and poverty never far from the door. As Dr David Livingstone put it in Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa – always at home “the anxious housewife striving to make both ends meet.” The 10-year-old David Livingstone was already working in a factory between six in the morning and eight at night to help his mother make both ends meet but like so many poor Scots he benefitted from the elementary parish schooling available to all – precisely the educational blocks that made so many Scots ideal candidates for jobs within the Empire. Levels of pauperism were high across Britain through the 19th and into the 20th century but in the Highlands where Rod Munro’s parents eked a living from the land poverty was extreme.
As a rule of thumb wages in Scotland were lower than in England and in Scotland the lowest incomes of all tended to be in rural Highland communities such as that Rod Munro came from. Most impoverished of all in any communities were its women and children. Widows, women who lost husbands to military service or death, struggled to cope with life for themselves and their children without a husband’s income. Essential to the success of the British Empire was its military – the stick of persuasion to yield to the British crown. From the end of the 18th century the British military predominantly comprised of Scots. Poverty, lack of employment and large families pushed lots of men into the military and both men and women but mainly men to seek work abroad as a means to escape destitution. One in five Scots aged 75 and above experienced extreme poverty. Let no-one tell you the union has been positive for Scotland and her population. That is a myth.
***
A Scot in Africa
1 9 1 2
Roderick-James Munro was born at 9.30 in the evening of second December, 1882, at Burnside, Rosemarkie in the County of Ross. His father was John Munro, a farmer and his mother, Margaret Munro nee Hossack whose occupation before her marriage I don’t know. They married on 10 December 1869 at Rosemarkie and Roderick was one of several children born to them.
Roderick James Munro’s birth certificate
Along with many of his Black Isle neighbours, Rod left Scotland for work abroad. He spent time in Demerara, a former Dutch colony in South America, now Guyana, that later became absorbed into the British Empire, as British Guiana. A century before tens of thousands of people enslaved and brought to the island rose up in revolt, led by plantation cooper, Jack Gladstone. The rebellion was put down and Jack sold and deported, like the disposable property he was. Others were executed. You might know the name Gladstone for this was future British prime minister William Ewart Gladstone’s family. These Whigs or Liberals raked in huge fortunes as estate owners and later in compensation when slavery was abolished in British colonies.
Men such as Rod Munro desperate for work turned to job adverts in the local press – jobs in cocoa, sugar, coffee and rubber plantations in exotic sounding locations. So a young Roderick James Munro set off into the world, leaving behind the poverty of farming in the Highlands, said goodbye to his parents, siblings and friends and looked one last time at the familiar communities around Rosemarkie, Fortrose and Avoch then headed off, first to South America and then to Africa. He worked some years in Demerara, on farms and there he suffered a serious attack of malaria.
By 1912 and at the age of twenty-nine Rod Munro was an employee of the Coia Estate at Villa Fontes at Chinde, Zambezia in Port East Africa, working for the Sena Sugar Factory. Chinde was developed as a port by the British for people and goods destined for and from the British Central Africa Protectorate.
Rod and his brother John, a farmer at Blairdhu, Killearnan in Ross-shire were in frequent correspondence. Spellings of places varied then and now.
John seated aged 16 with his brother Rod at his side. Rod is then 14yrs old
7 July 1912 letter to John from Rod c/o The Sena Sugar Factory Ltd, Coia Estate, Villa Fontes, Zambezia, Chinde, Port East Africa.
My dear John,
I am very glad that I have heard from you at last with your new address.
Of course I can quite understand your writing and not mentioning it, but it kept me from replying to you. Well I suppose you will be getting settled at Blairdhu by this time. I hope you have been lucky with your valuations at both places.
I am enclosing a bank draft for £150 which will help you a little. I want you to give me an I.O.U. for it, just to keep things square. I am also sending home four lion claw brooches, one for each of my sisters and sisters-in-law. I am sending them all to you so you might pass them along for me.
It is very cold here just now at nights and the mornings it makes one fairly shiver, and glad to sleep under blankets.
We are very busy here just now as this is our crop time, and we have a lot of other work on hand besides.
I am at present making a railway out to the new land we are taking in. We have to make it through about 3 ½ miles of forest before we come to where we want it and it will be going five or six miles after that. However that last part won’t be bad, it is the forest part that will take the work as we have some heavy cuttings and embankments besides the trees. We have only about half a mile of it done, and have struck stone in our second cutting, so there is going to be some sport before it is finished.
Now John, I don’t think I have any more news this time so I will close with love to all from
Your loving brother,
Rod J Munro
John and Bella Munro on their wedding day in December 1911
John Munro had recently married Bella Millar of Whitebog near Cromarty and the couple became tenant farmers at Blairdhu near Muir of Ord. John had been a tenant farmer at Feddonhill (Feddiehill) above Fortrose.
15 November 1912 letter to John from Rod.
My dear John,
I must really apologize for being so long in writing this time, but I have been very tired when I come in at nights, and a bit worried besides.
He had previously worked for another sugar plantation, the Beira Rubber & Sugar Estates at Inhanguvo near Beira, East Africa before moving to the Sena Sugar Estates and when he was approached by Beira to return to them as a head-overseer he thought he was free to do so and so accepted the offer.
Unfortunately, Sena’s general managers refused to let him go and there was a disagreement over whether Rod was free to leave. Beira then came back with an enhanced offer of £5 more than he was earning with Sena plus offering him responsibility for 2,500 acres. Sena then offered him more money to stay and when Rod insisted he wanted to leave his boss at Sena, a Mr Durward, lost his temper and refused point blank to allow it. Rod accepted the Beira job, insisting he would leave at the end of the month (November.) Still the General Manager, Schmidt, refused to let him go. During an argument Rod told Schmidt he could do what he liked but he was leaving, as arranged. Schmidt referred the matter to company’s Commandant who suggested Rod leave half-way through the month, taking into account when he had first told them he was leaving, though not officially on paper, but Schmidt refused to accept the arrangement. Rod worried he would be prevented from leaving quickly and that Beira might not hold the position for him – and if it didn’t he would have no job because Sena would not want to keep him.
As it happened a compromise was reached and soon Rod had taken up a position as Chief Overseer at Inhanguvo.
19 December 1912 letter to John from Rod.
My Dear John,
I am afraid I have been rather neglectful in writing of late but things were a bit topsy-turvy and I was always putting it off till they had settled down.
He found the company had changed since he had last worked for them and “not for the better” and suffered regrets at leaving his last position for he found the Inhanguvo estate poorly run. The weather had been extremely dry which did not help with the crop but commented that the rains had begun so he hoped that soon there might lead to improvements in output. The company projected making about 8000 tons of sugar the following year which in Rod’s opinion was wide of the mark for he calculated about 5000 tons or even 4000 being produced. That current year production stood at 4300 tons.
Leaving aside his employment concerns, Rod congratulated John and Bella on the birth of their first child, Christina (Chrissy.) Rod regretted missing another New Year back at home in Scotland. He would never make it home for one again.
The letter ends on a light note with him welcoming the laying out of a nine-hole golf course due to be opened on Christmas Day by one of the directors, a man called Rennie. Rod kidded John that when he got home he would be regarded as “one of the ‘bhoys’” and signed his letter in his usual way,
Your loving brother,
Rod J Munro.
1912 Christmas Card to John and family from Rod. His last one to his brother.
Inhanguvo Christmas Day 1912. Rod is 4th man from right marked by X.
Rod had just celebrated his 30th birthday.
1 9 1 3
10 February 1913 letter to John from Rod.
Rod scolds his older brother for being a worse letter-writer than he was.
My Dear John,
You are even more careless than myself in writing I think.
Rod complains about the food provided by the Estate,
“nothing fresh here, not even meat or vegetables. Fowls are very scarce and as a result we have been living almost entirely on tinned stuff for the last 2 months and I am beginning to get fed up with it as it is hardly the best thing for the liver of the stomach.”
He blames the poor quality of food in part for the amount of sickness among Estate employees.
The weather as “fearfully dry” as he begins the letter but he lays it down and when he next writes there has been a heavy fall of rain of about 7 inches. One extreme to the other.
He mentions an acquaintance of theirs, Sandy McDougall, an old man who died alone – presumably at home in Rosemarkie or Fortrose.
5 Mar 1913 letter from John to Rod.
The envelope has been re-addressed from Inhanguvo to c/o the British Consul.
Dear Rod,
We have no letter from you now since four weeks, I hope that there is nothing wrong with you.
I have been a little irregular in writing lately, but there is really very little to write about apart from the usual daily round.
I see in this week’s paper that McKenzie, Kildary has bought a house in Alness, and that he will live there after Whitsunday and also that he is sailing this week for Brazil to report on some land there. I expect that Fraser will have arrived in Africa again by this time. Alex Ferguson (a cousin) was up at Edinburgh lately getting an operation done on one of his eyes. They were all here for a weekend after coming back. I hope that he will now feel better, but we have had no word from them since a week.
Flora’s bairns (Flora was their sister in Fortrose) were all laid up with measles. I saw Rory (Flora’s husband) in Dingwall today, and he told me that they are now on the recovery.
I am kept pretty busy just now with the cattle and sheep. The sheep are now getting cut turnips, which means a good bit extra work, but I am looking forward to a big price in a few weeks, which will make up for the extra trouble.
Both cattle and sheep are selling very well this season, but I expect the profits will be all required, as the expenses are very much more here than at Janefield. (the family worked here as tenants, at Rosemarkie.) Labour especially as we have to keep two men, and a boy, besides a girl in the house.
Bella and I were at Munlochy at the Scouts Dance a week ago. It was very good, as usual. The only dance or entertainment of any kind we have been at since coming here.
The Mason’s Dance comes off in Avoch on Friday. I don’t think we will go. It is rather a long drive, and the weather is very rough at present.
I have had no word from the Junors (cousins) since six months but sometimes hear that they are still alive from Tom McDonald. Jamie and they are still near each other, and I suppose they have horses of their own on some Government work. I suppose they will be so busy making their pile that they will have no time to write.
The baby is growing fast, and is doing her best to keep us lively.
Now, as I have really no news I must close, hoping to hear from you next mail.
With Love from all, I remain, Your loving brother John Munro
John’s concern at the start of the letter is prescient. His brother Rod was by then gravely ill at Inhanguvo.
18 March 1913 a typewritten letter to John from Rule H.B.M Vice Consul, Beira.
Sir,
I regret to have to inform you that your son (confusion here over which John as Rod’s and John’s father was also called John) Roderick James Munro died at Inhanguvo on the 16th inst. of heart failure following an attack of blackwater fever.
The sad news has just reached me from the General Manager of the Beira Rubber and Sugar Estates, where your son was employed, and I trust that the address furnished me will find you.
(The letter arrived at John’s farm of Blairdhu near Munlochy since he was the one in correspondence with Rod and his address would have been found among his belongings.)
The effects of the deceased will be disposed of in the usual way by the Portuguese authorities, and any balance that may remain after administration of the estate will be handed over to this office in due course for transmission to the next-of-kin.
With sincere sympathy in your sad loss.
I am, Sir, Your obedient Servant, F. Rule B. M. Vice Consul.
18 March letter to John from Don Mackenzie at Inhanguvo.
Dear Mr Munro
It is with the deepest regret that I take up my pen to inform you of your poor brothers death which occurred on the 16th instant.
I am very sorry to say that he had Black Water fever and his illness only lasted 15 days, he had all the attendance that he possibly could get there was a nurse and myself looking after the poor fellow but it was God’s will to take him away from us. I was looking after him when he died at 9pm he went unconscious and at twenty past he was dead.
He was a great favourite by all how new him and every body is very much cut up indeed. He was a very great friend of mine and I can’t express how I feel the loss of such a valuable friend. These will be sent straight home his Album Bible and Prayer book also a small toilet case which he got a present in 05 and his ring. All this will be sent direct home this mail.
Yours faithfully Don MacKenzie of MacKenzie Late Blackstand
20th March1913 letter to John (John senior, although the letter was sent to Blairdhu) from Beira’s General Manager, Mr. O. Walpole.
Dear Sir,
It is with very great regret that I have to advise you of the death of your son Roderick James Munro.
Rod had been taken ill on second of March and was said to have been successfully treated for the fever but complications affecting his liver and heart set in. He was attended by a doctor and a nurse who nursed him day and night along with help from Donald Mackenzie (who I think was his cousin and also employed by the Estate) and they were with him when he died.
Towards the end of his illness death came suddenly and unexpectedly, his heart failing at 9 o’clock in the evening of Sunday 2nd March.
He was buried in the cemetery at Luzitania the next evening.
Days later another letter arrived, this time from the Beira Rubber and Sugar Estates headquarters at Gresham House, London.
25 March 1913 letter to John from the Beira Rubber and Sugar Estates headquarters at Gresham House, London, England.
A typewritten letter acknowledging a telegram sent to them by John urgently inquiring about his brother’s death.
The letter contains a reference to a cablegram from a Mr Murdo Grant on the subject of Rod’s death. The letter writer explains the delay in responding to John’s telegram was because the London office was shut up for Easter.
The cablegram reads:
“Regret to inform you that Mr. R. Munro died March 16th heart failure after blackwater. Advise relations.”
To the point.
The letter from headquarters explains that Rod’s body had been buried and that his illness must have been short for there was no reference to him in the weekly medical reports. It also reports that the doctor attending Rod was a Dr Somershield. The secretary who signs the letter finishes by saying he had met Rod before he went out to Beira and “formed a very high opinion of him” and asks John to pass his deepest sympathy onto their parents.
East Africa under British Administration included the port of Beira in Portuguese territory where Rod worked. Beira was an important and bustling port and point of access deeper into the interior of the continent. Situated on the estuary of the Pungwe river, the harbour was capable of berthing very large ships while smaller lighters were used to load and discharge cargo from the great vessels. Harbour facilities were split between ones operated by a Mozambique Company and others under the authority of a British South African Company.
Even in this one small area within the Empire it is apparent the large scale of jobs available to British subjects. And they were attracted abroad in their tens of thousands. But while ordinary British people were employed in a host of positions on estates such as the Beira Sugar and Rubber Estates and Beira port the men who ran things and who whose bank balances benefitted as a result came mainly from the British establishment. Sir Ralph Denham Rayment Moor who was appointed to Beira Rubber and Sugar Estates was the 1st High Commissioner of the Southern Nigeria Protectorate amongst other positions. His death, suicide, was blamed in part for effects he had of Blackwater fever and malaria.
30th March 1913 letter to John from his brother Alec, a doctor in Kilmarnock.
Enclosed with the letter is another from the Beira Office in London and Alex requests its return once John has read it. He writes that he intends contacting Dr Somershield, the doctor attending Rod through his illness and asks John to forward any letters he receives from Beira.
Alec writes how depressed he is feeling and clearly concerned for their parents, enquires about their health, as well as that of John and his family.
2 April 1913 letter to John from Rule.
Typewritten letter from the British Vice Consul at Beira referring to the letter sent by him on 18th March to Rod’s father informing him of his son’s death but sent to his brother John instead. In contrast to the letter of the 18th this one is strictly business-like even arrogant, certainly insensitive. No apology for the confusion instead the Consul passes responsibility for the error onto someone else, anyone else except the man who sent the letter, the Consul himself. This is how the British government treated ‘their own’ people. We can only imagine the disdain they had for local people.
“Your letter of the 5th March which was opened by me is enclosed.”
15th April 1913 letter to John from Alex.
This letter in the form of a mourning note and envelope, black margined was sent along with two letters he had received from Beira in London (John returned those letters so they are not available.) Alec asks after their parents; their mother presently being looked after by their sister Flora, and their father.
“We had a letter from Flora today in which she says mother has been in bed but is up again. Is it a cold or what? I hope she is better. How is father?”
The rest of the letter continues in a similar vein, on family matters. The whole family must have been suffering the sudden loss of Rod with him so far away, knowing they can never attend a funeral for him or bury him at home.
Alec ends –
“There is nothing else to tell you or at least I can’t think of it just now. Everything is overshadowed by Roddie’s death. We shall be glad to hear from some of you soon. Hoping you are all well,
I am Your loving brother Alec.
On 14th May letter to John from Oliver Walpole, General Manager at Beira.
Typewritten letter from Walpole in response to one sent by John on 17 April enquiring about Roddie’s effects. The belongings of any worker who died in harness to the British Empire, though perhaps not at board level, were sold to pay for expenses incurred by them prior to their deaths, such as their board and lodgings. Walpole tells John that he went into Rod’s room and removed some little personal items before a local judge was placed in charge of Rod’s possessions ordered the effects be listed and removed to the judge’s office and Rod’s room sealed. Creditors were invited to send in their claims which would be met from the proceeds of an auction of his property and cash found in his possession. Any balance after debts had been met would be handed over to the British Consul who remitted any money remaining to the family – eventually.
“This in Munro’s case should be I think a fair sum, as he was a careful man, and had, I believe, a considerable balance at Beira.”
Walpole took one or two items away before Rod’s room was locked and other bits and pieces he bought at the auction – a very few items he thought the family would value having, watches which may have been family pieces, private letters, a bible and hymnal – those items presents from his mother, and the ring he was wearing at the time of his death. Walpole explains he did not see any need to purchase Rod’s clothing and travelling trunks. Those possessions retained would be sent on to John at Blairdhu.
The paltry number of Rod’s possessions at his death were split into three auction lots –
Clothing 4 watches Letters and papers 1 cash box 1 Bible 1 Hymnal 2 pocket books 1 hydrometer in case 1 ring 1 album 1 toilet case
A handwritten addendum reads:
“If I find the parcel will be too large for post I shall send it by first steamer.”
Pocket book with his initials belonging to Roderick James Munro
14 May 1913 letter to W. Murray Bemister at Beira HQ in London from Oliver Walpole at Inhanguvo.
This letter is in response to one sent him by Bemister and in it Walpole refers to the death of “poor Munro” and tells Bemister he has already written giving Rod’s father a brief account of his son’s death but was busy at the time so had not gone into detail about his funeral. In the meantime, a letter was received by Dr Somershield at Inhanguvo from Alec Munro – who the writer notes “is a medical man” asking details of the illness. Walpole says the doctor (Somershield) will get in touch personally with the family. Walpole is careful to emphasise the care and attention provided to Rod, possibly in light of the fact that Rod’s brother Alec is a doctor and so covering their own backs in a way they might not have generally done over the deaths of employees. The letter is a fulsome account of Rod’s last days presumably so Bemister will be forearmed for any future enquiries from the family.
He was taken ill on night of Sunday 2 March. On that afternoon he had been playing golf and was apparently well. He sickened later in the afternoon and went back to his quarters and to bed. His room is in the double story building near the office known as the Towers (not according to Rod, for the Scots there referred to their lodgings as the Crofter’s Arms.)
When Walpole saw Rod the next morning it was clear that the blackwater fever had set in. The doctor was called and by the following Thursday when a
“Mr Rennie saw him the Blackwater had disappeared although Munro was naturally in a very weak condition at this time we had no doubt about his ultimate recovery, and as I believe I mentioned in one of my letters it was arranged that he should proceed to England as soon as he was fit to travel.”
By the following Monday, 10th, he was ‘not so well.’ On the Wednesday his condition had worsened and a nurse, Walker, was put in charge of his case and Rod’s friend and compatriot, Donald Mackenzie, was then relieved of his duties looking after him full-time but he did continue to stay with Rod overnight while the nurse did the daytime shift.
“Every convenience and comfort was supplied.”
However the ice machine was ‘temporarily out of commission’ and Walpole explains he arranged for ice to be taken up daily from Beira to treat Rod’s fever for Rod was constantly asking for ice or cold soda to slake his thirst.
Dr Somershield visited Rod morning and evening and Walpole claims to have looked in several times. He was chatting with Rod about 5.30 that last Sunday evening when Rod appeared quite cheerful and was joking about the good time he would have on board the boat home. But by 9pm Don Mackenzie sent a message to Walpole. Rod’s condition had deteriorated. Walpole and Nurse Walker attended and found him unconscious and close to the end. Don Mackenzie said he had taken a drink of barley water at 8.30pm and grumbled that it was not “sufficiently salt.” He then fell asleep and passed away. The time of death was given as 9.20pm.
The majority of the Estate’s staff were said to have attended Rod James Munro’s funeral. His coffin (made on the Estate) was draped with the union jack and carried by his fellow overseers from his room to the landing stage on the Pungwe River, then referred to as the Biera River by the white immigrants there, placed in a boat and towed by motor launch with its flag flying at half-mast and on to Luzitania. There the coffin was taken ashore and carried the mile or so the cemetery. A trolley had been laid on but Rod’s fellow worker’s chose to carry him all the way on their shoulders. No church minister was available to read the service so Walpole did it. Fifty-four people of all nationalities were at the graveside as Rod’s body was lowered into the grave “as Munro having been here for some considerable time was well known to everybody in the District.”
31 May 1913 letter to John from Oliver Walpole .
Typewritten letter and receipt for the box containing Rod’s effects. Walpole lets John know how much he paid for those of Rod’s possession he bought for the family at the sale and the cost of postage for sending them to Scotland – 10/6 (ten shillings and six pence.)
June 3rd 1913 letter to Alex from Dr Somershield, Inhanguvo, Beira, Port East Africa.
John retained his own handwritten copy of the letter sent to his brother Alec in Kilmarnock. The letter goes into some detail of the care of Rod since Dr Somershield took over his case on 5th March.
He saw him on three occasions when Rod was suffering from malarial fever. On 8th March the Blackwater symptoms had disappeared and his temperature had returned to normal two days later. On 11th March Rod had a relapse of malarial fever but his temperature never got above 101 and only reached that on a few occasions. His relapse was complicated with congestion of the liver which had suffered from attacks of malaria and was enlarged, as was his spleen. In his final hours Rod was perfectly lucid and he spoke about looking forward to getting home to Scotland and the Black Isle when his heart suddenly gave out, explained Somershield, and he died from an accumulation of carbonic acid the blood in about twenty minutes; describing his death as peaceful under slowly increasing drowsiness.
Walpole mentions how well Rod was looked after by an excellent nurse and one of his friends,
“In this neighbourhood no patient had ever been so well looked after.”
“He was buried on the other side of the Biera River, at Nova Luzitania, and his funeral was the most imposing seen here.”
16 June letter to John from his brother Alec in Kilmarnock.
Alec writes to John enclosing a letter he has received from Bemister, of Beira HQ in London. He says he has not yet heard from Dr Somershield but will pass any letter he does get onto John. He tells John that what he does know as a doctor is that Blackwater fever is ‘very fatal’ and he thought a result of malaria – “probably Roddie got it in Demerara when he was so long ill there.”
Alec recognises Bemister’s kindness and asks John to let their sisters Flora and Mary read Bemister’s letter. He asks after their parents and tells John he sent a urinal to their father who was ill so that their mother would not have to rise so often in the night to help him to the lavatory. In closing he mentions his own wife, Annie, who he describes as very well and wondering if a bonnet she sent to their mother fitted and if not to send it back to be altered or exchanged.
Rod’s sister Mary (left) holding Bella’s (next to her) baby Chrissie. Rod’s mother extreme right and sister Flora behind her. The boys are Mary’s sons.
Sept 19th 1913 letter to John from Walpole at Inhanguvo.
In this typewritten letter Walpole acknowledges John’s receipt for the safe delivery of Rod’s things. It is clear that John asked him about money in Rod’s possession and Walpole tells him the British Consul is handling that and it should have been forwarded to the family.
1 9 1 4
31 Jan 1914 letter from John to F. Rule, British Vice Consul in Beira.
John replies to an earlier letter from Rule informing him the proceeds of his brother’s estate will be transmitted by Rule to H M Consul General at Lourenço Marques for distribution to the next of kin. Neither his father (staying at Blairdhu) nor John have heard anything about this.
“I understand that he had a balance at Beira, as you would no doubt have seen on going through his papers, as well as any money in his possession or due him by the estate where he was employed at the time of his death.
“Mr Walpole informs me that you have paid his expenses in connection with the things which he so kindly sent here, for which I sincerely thank you.
“My father and I would consider it a great favour if you would send us particulars regarding the administration of the estate, or communicate with H.M. Consul General at Lourenço Marques inquiring into the cause of the delay.”
He signs the letter –
“I am, Sir Yours very respectfully John Munro Jr.
3 Mar 1914 letter to John from H M Vice Consul, F. Rule.
Typewritten letter in reply to John’s letter of 31 January. Rule informs John that the balance of funds of his late brother’s estate have been forwarded to the Consul at Lourenço Marques for distribution.
He has copied the Consul General into this correspondence and expects he will contact John.
Date unknown letter from John to Walpole.
John is very apologetic about contacting Walpole once again but he says in an earlier correspondence Walpole had mentioned a movement among the overseers to erect a stone to Rod. He asks if this has been done. If it has not he says he would be pleased if it could be done and he would send the money required in connection with it.
“I would also consider it a great favour if I could get a photo of his grave, and the house where he died, or any other photos in connection with this work.
I was glad to see by your last letter that your expenses in connection with the things which you so kindly sent have been paid by the Consul.
I have not yet heard anything from the Consul regarding the administration of the estate but I am writing to him by this mail.
Again apologizing for troubling you, and thanking you for all the kindness and sympathy you have shown towards us in our bereavement.”
Finding the money to pay for a gravestone would not have been a simple affair for John. The Munro family were by no means wealthy and he was a recently married, small tenant farmer setting out on his own with a young family. The heartbreak he feels at Rod’s death is apparent in this letter. And the desperate need to place what has happened in some context that John can comprehend of a young brother dying in a place he cannot imagine and is so different from all that is familiar in the Scottish Highlands.
27 Mar 1914 letter to John from Walpole.
In it Walpole confirms receipt of John’s letter of Jan 31st 1914 in which he asked about plans to have a memorial stone erected on the grave. It’s clear he has heard no word on the subject from East Africa. Walpole admits nothing has been done to date, adding that many of Rod’s friends have left Inhanguvo – implying most who knew and cared for him enough to see the work through had moved on but he names an accountant, Mr Jess, as being most likely to ensure a stone is erected. Walpole, himself, has also left the company and Inhanguvo and will be returning to England shortly. He also mentions the firm has recently ‘disposed’ of property. So things have changed in several ways with Beira Sugar and Rubber. Ending, Walpole tells John he will forward his letter to Jess and ask him to take up the matter and provides John with his address in Derby if he can be of further assistance.
4 April 1914 letter to John from R. Jess at Inhanguvo.
Typewritten letter confirming Walpole has forwarded John’s letter to the writer, R. Jess, an accountant at Beira.
Jess explains the Estate has been recently taken over by a new syndicate and Walpole has left but that he, Jess, would make enquiries about the cost of getting a memorial stone from Durban and hopes to be in a position to let John know how much that involves in a few weeks.
“There are only six white men now on the Estate who knew your brother and most of them could only give a pittance towards the cost of erecting a stone, however, I shall let you know about this when next I write.”
Jess tells John he knew his brother, Rod, well – both living in the same quarters until Jess married. Both being Scottish they tended to spend a lot of time together. He describes Rod as a man who knew his own mind and that often the two argued politics over the dinner table in the evenings. Rod, he says, was always cheery “and appeared to me to be particularly solid and well.”
Referring to the days before his death, Jess describes visiting Rod almost daily throughout his illness and reiterates reports of the good care provided to him after his relapse.
“It was then the trained nurse was brought in – or perhaps a day or two after – when it was seen he was not making the usual recovery. I was in his room the day before the nurse took up the case and he was then for the first time depressed; complained of weakness, and having to lie in bed. Of course I tried to rally him, gave him the usual little attentions one does in a sick room and he appeared cheerier when I left him. That was the last time I saw him, as I went straight from his room to my bed with a serious attack of malaria. I only recovered in time to attend the funeral.”
Jess adds to what Walpole had to say about the funeral. Not only was Rod’s coffin carried by his companions to the cemetery but his friends and companions insisted on filling in the grave instead of leaving it to the gravediggers. Walpole who gave the readings and conducted the service according to the English Church broke down towards the end and it was Jess who took the book from him and finished the readings.
Jess informs John that he and his wife later visited Rod’s grave and tidied it up with his wife intending to plant flowers around it. Describing her as an amateurish photographer, Jess promises John he will try to send him photos that might interest the family and finishes by assuring John the quarters occupied by Rod were in the healthiest place on the Estate with the exception of the manager’s house.
3rd June 1914 letter to Jess from H. L. Davis, Manager at J. H. Wade & Son of West Street, Durban (funeral managers and monumental sculptors.)
This communication was to obtain suitable designs of memorial stones for Rod’s grave.
Wade provides a few examples varying in price from £15 to £45 for stone and base and kerbing. Stones were mainly offered in marble and there was a polished black granite cross. Inscription was extra at 7 shillings per dozen letters incised into marble and 9 shillings per dozen in the harder granite. Delivery to Beira was on top of this. All in all a great deal of money for the young tenant farmer.
9th June 1914 letter from R. Jess to John.
Typewritten letter with the heading The Beira Rubber and Sugar Estates scored through and over stamped Beira Illovo Sugar Estates.
Jess encloses the information he received from Wade & Son.
The prices, from an African point of view are very reasonable” Jess notes and if John selects a stone, he, Jess, will see it gets moved from Durban to Beira. He has also “approached the white men here and they have promised to assist in this way.
“Mr Harper, our new Manager, has kindly promised to have the Stone brought here from Beira and will also provide the labour and material necessary to erect it substantially.”
Jess reassures John he will make any arrangements that are needed to the memorial stone erected on Rod’s grave and while he still has no photograph of the grave he is enclosing photos of Inhanguvo so that John might see for himself where Rod lived and worked. He asks that John return the photos which presumably he did.
Unknown date letter from John to Mr R. Jess.
John acknowledges letters from Jess of 4th April and 9th June on the subject of Rod’s memorial stone. He thanks Jess for his involvement and thanks, too, to Mrs Jess for both had been tidying up Rod’s grave and sent photos to John, “which I prize very much.”
John apologises to Jess for his delay in writing back but his father died about the time Jess’ first letter arrived and he was busy with family matters. John also notes that since this, the family’s second recent bereavement, he was “not now in a position to spend so much on my brother’s memorial, as I formerly would have done.”
The family’s limited resources had to stretch to two gravestones – one for their father and one for Rod. John does, however, select one of the stone’s offered by Wade & Son in Durban – a Houlton Cross priced at £12. 12s. He advises Jess to have it erected without surrounding kerbing (to reduce the cost) and encloses a money order for £17, to cover stone and inscription.
The inscription to read:
In Loving Memory of Roderick James Munro Born 2nd December, 1882 At Rosemarkie, Rossshire Scotland Died at Inhanguvo 16th March 1913 Peace, Perfect Peace
John asks to be informed if the £17 does not cover all the costs incurred.
“Please convey my warmest thanks to Mr Harper, and others out there who have assisted with the arrangements.”
He ends apologising for the trouble he’s putting Jess to and asks him about Donald MacKenzie and if he is still at Inhanguvo, commenting that he only knew him slightly but knows his father well. The MacKenzies lived about 20 miles from John, at Fortrose, and may have been related to the Munros.
7th September 1914 letter from Wade & Son.
Confirmation of order for memorial stone for Rod’s grave.
24th September 1914 letter to John from John T. Rennie Son & Co, Aberdeen Direct Line of Steamers London Natal and East African Ports.
Business letter requesting receipt for parcels “duly endorsed for the box ex s.s. “Inkosi””and enquiring if it should be locked for the key to be sent to them (to check contents) after which they will forward the item to John, according to his instruction.
29 September 1914 letter to Wade & Son from Jess at Inhanguvo.
Typewritten letter refers to their communication of 3rd June, and confirming Jess has now heard back from the late RJ Munro’s relatives who have commissioned him to order the Houlton cross and bases – and provides Wade with the inscription written by John.
1st October 1914 letter to John from Jess at Beira Illovo Sugar Estates, Inhanguvo, near Beira, East Africa.
Typewritten letter acknowledging the safe receipt of John’s money order for £17 and confirmation he has ordered the memorial requested and arranged with the Durban agents for the work to be carried out properly. He also promises to let John know when that work is completed.
And sadly,
“You mention Donald McKenzie in your letter, but you will probably have since learned that the poor fellow died on the 29th of July last of Blackwater. We laid him side by side of your brother.”
11th November 1914 letter to John from Jess at Inhanguvo.
Typewritten letter in which Jess lets John know the cross and base have arrived at the Estate but not been unpacked. He assures him the stone will be erected as soon as a man is made available for the task. Jess paid the stonemasons at Durban £16-6-8; £12-12/- for the stone plus £3-14-8 for the inscription. He also had to pay £1-6-3 for transporting the lot from Durban bringing the total up to more than the £17 provided by John but says he is not asking him for the 12 shillings and 11 pence difference, as this cost will be carried locally (by company or men it is not specified.) Jess adds that he (and his wife it appears) visited the cemetery the previous Sunday and tidied the graves of Rod and his friend Donald MacKenzie and photographed them. He ends by informing John they were leaving Inhanguvo at the end of the year, with him going on active service in German S. W Africa but he would try to get a photo of the raised cross taken before leaving.
18th December 1914 letter to John from Jess.
Typewritten letter from Jess informing John that the stone has now been erected and inscribed, as requested, and promises photos of it. He mentions that they have been suffering “very trying weather” there and yet another employee was buried last week – “Blackwater as usual. I shall be glad to get away from the place.” Jess ends by providing John with his new address in Johannesburg.
27th December 1914 letter from John at Buckden, Huntingdon, England to Jess.
John has a different address, in England, a reminder the year is 1914 and John is undergoing military training hundreds of miles from home, as a member of the Lovat Scouts.
John as a Lovat Scout in 1915
He refers to Jess’ letters of 1st October and 11th November, welcoming the delivery at Inhanguvo of the memorial stone from Durban and reacts to the tragic news of Rod’s friend and colleague Donald MacKenzie.
“I was very grieved indeed to hear of Donald McKenzie’s death of which I heard some time before receiving your letters.
“I am afraid I am putting you to a great deal of trouble, but I know that you are doing it willingly, and I feel that I can never repay either yourself or Mrs Jess for all you have done and I daresay you will note that I have changed my address but it is only temporary, as I have been on Service with the Lovat Scouts since the 5th of Aug, and we are shifted about a good deal. I am pleased to note that you are also going to don the Khaki. We expected to have been sent abroad before now, but I understand that mounted troops are not so urgently required as this seems to be a war of artillery and trenches but we expect to be sent out early in the spring.
“I shall be pleased to hear again from you at any time, and any letters addressed as formerly to Blairdhu, Killearnan, Rossshire will be forwarded to me if I am away from home.”
He thanks Jess for all his kindnesses and wishes he and his wife “all happiness in the New Year.
“I remain
Yours very sincerely
John Munro
1 9 1 5
30th August 1915 letter to John from Commercial Bank of Scotland in Muir of Ord.
This typewritten letter came in response to one John sent to the bank on 25 August in which a cheque was enclosed drawing on his account the sum of £150 in favour of Dr Alexander Munro, as Executor of Roderick James Munro, for a loan of that amount paid to the Farm. This must have been money lent to John by Rod when John took up tenancy at Blairdhu farm, to help him with initial expenses and was now being paid back into Rod’s estate. Bank charges on the cheque came to 1/11d which the bank requested John pay in the form of postage stamps.
John’s and Bella’s wedding in Inverness. John and Bella seated centre, front row. Alec is seated to the left of John. Their father, with beard, is seated on front row 4th from right. Rod does not appear to be in the group.
Blackwater Fever
Blackwater fever continues to be a dangerous disease in tropical areas of the world with a death. Haemoglobinuric fever caused more deaths and chronic illness than all other diseases among Europeans and Chinese labourers in West Africa and East Africa in the 19th century.
The eminent German microbiologist, Dr Robert Koch, described it as a disease creating the greatest havoc amongst Europeans in German East Africa which he attributed to quinine poisoning following treatment for malaria. The ‘father of tropical medicine’, the parasitologist from Old Meldrum in Aberdeenshire, Dr Patrick Manson, was first to bring Blackwater fever to the attention of western medicinal authorities and it was his work which led to its inclusion in English language medical textbooks late in the 19th century. But it was Dr John Farrell Easmon, an illustrious Creole doctor and Chief Medical Officer at Cape Coast in Ghana who was from Sierra Leon who, in the latter 19th century, wrote a treatise on The Nature and Treatment of Blackwater Fever in 1884 which first linked Blackwater with malaria and who gave this horrible disease its name, Blackwater fever.
Dr John Easmon, seated
Blackwater fever was characterised by haemoglobinuria, jaundice and vomiting. Its name comes from the darkness of urine passed by those affected; coloured by the presence of haemoglobin or methaemoglobin.
Blackwater fever was not confined to Africa but reported in a host of places including China, Italy, Sicily, New Guinea and Java. It was promulgated that its suspected increasing prevalence in Africa was in part due to disturbing soil and opening up waterways that accompanied the drive of colonists to increase farming areas and build ports, factories, houses, stores etc.. Bad outbreaks coincided with long very hot dry spells which included lagoons and ponds drying up then being heavily disturbed by eventual heavy rains.
Given Rod Munro’s complaints about lack of fresh food it is interesting that doctors suspected Blackwater was a greater threat during shortages of fresh meat and vegetables.
The Blackwater victim experiences fever often to over 103F with the patient fitting on the second or third day of the fever but it was noticed in many fatal cases the temperature had often returned to normal. As mentioned above the urine turns dark – but varies in colour between light red to very dark. In addition to fever and darkened urine patients often experience nausea or vomiting and diarrhoea which tend to cause most distress because of their persistence and mean that victims find it difficult to retain medicines and nourishment. Vomit is often bright or olive-green colour. Headaches tend to be severe and there is pain felt in loins and limbs with numbness in hands and feet. Both liver and spleen are enlarged, causing further discomfort. Of those affected by this horrible illness it proves fatal to about twenty percent.
When chloroquine replaced quinine as the medicine administered to tackle the disease its incidence declined, from the 1950s but more recently resistance to chloroquine has seen a rise in cases.
Nova Luzitania, now Búzi, where Rod James Munro was laid to rest was devastated by cyclone Idai in 2019 killing 534 people so even if his granite cross survived a century of upheaval in Mozambique it is unlikely anything of it remains today.
It takes a certain type of personality icily detached from common humanity to be at ease with plucking people from all that they hold dear and is familiar to them and transplant them like so many cabbage plants into an area of foreign soil with nothing to sustain them.
Scottish settlers in Canada
Lady Emily Eliza Steele Gordon Cathcart was one such woman. Famous and notorious in equal measure she wielded power like so many demi-gods of the 18th and 19th centuries in turning people off their hereditary lands; populations with more claim to the land than her. Her tyranny was one of the last of its kind in Scotland. She died in 1932 and not a moment too soon.
Cathcart came to own chunks of the Hebrides through her marriage to Captain John Gordon of the Cluny estate in Aberdeenshire (a long way from the Western Isles.) He had inherited parts of the Hebrides from his father who bought up islands from the Chief of Clanranald in 1838. The Gordons were fabulously wealthy chiefly from the several slave estates they owned in the West Indies.
Up to their necks in the slave trade the Gordons were represented in parliament, for Weymouth and Melcombe Regis by John senior, a Tory. This John, unsurprisingly opted to see something of the world, and get paid for it so he joined the military. In Egypt he admired many of its ancient monuments and with characteristic humility carved his name on several of them – the Dendara temple was graffitied by him in 1804. He did the same at the temple of Edfu, and at Esna, and at Gebel el-Silsila and in Thebes at the temple at Karnak and at the pylon of the Luxor temple, and the great temple of Medinet Habu and in the mortuary temple of Ramesses II, and on several tombs in the Valley of the Kings, and at Kom Ombo at the Isis temple at Philae, and at the Tomb of Paheri – on both its east and west walls. In fact he was the first to vandalise the tomb.
The vandal John Gordon
Fast forward to his inheritance of both Cluny Castle and estates and riches from his uncle’s six properties in Tobago. Slavery was abolished in the UK in 1833 and slave owners were very well compensated. Gordon’s 1400 slaves proved to be a good money earner when the UK government paid him nearly £25,000 which would work out around £100,000,000 today in compensation for the loss of their human chattels. He didn’t require much of that to buy up North and South Uist, Benbecula and Barra plus estates closer to home (not Weymouth but Aberdeenshire) of Midmar, Kebbaty and Shiels, Banffshire, Inverness-shire, Midlothian and Nairnshire.
Like so many of today’s British super-wealthy this Gordon senior invested substantial part of his fortune overseas for he was notoriously greedy as well as being a disreputable rogue who evicted 3,000 tenants with centuries-long ties to the land. Those who resisted were handcuffed and forced aboard Atlantic-bound ships. Some thought they might run off and hide in caves but were hunted down by men and dogs. When homes were pulled to pieces islanders propped up blankets on sticks for shelter but these were taken from them. Some concealed themselves under fishing boats but they, too, were exposed and their boats destroyed. The choice to stay or go was not offered to the Gordon tenants. They were regarded as vermin, and not dissimilar to the Tobago slaves, property to be dispensed with however the laird liked.
Benbecula
All sorts of promises were made to cajole people to leave the Highlands and Islands. Promises of a grand life awaiting emigrants but as with most promises they turned out to be nothing but lies. There was not work, nor land for them all. Ripped away from everything they had known Scottish Islanders were reduced to begging. Scottish child migrants were badly undernourished in this land of plenty. The Reverend Norman MacLeod reported seeing them with shrivelled legs, hollow eyes and swollen bellies. For the privilege of slowly starving to death Gordon’s islanders were forced to pay for their imposed migration by this the wealthiest ‘commoner’ in Scotland.
John Gordon far from doing anything positive with his vast fortune proved to be an utter scoundrel. He attracted the reputation as one of the most hated men in Scottish history but his name has faded from our collective memory so I thought it time to revive his notoriety.
Motivated by greed and vanity he earned himself a reputation at the time for his brutal treatment of the islanders of the Hebrides. He wanted them out and so they were sent packing – lock, stock and barrel the populations of the islands were given no choice – no generous compensation from a sympathetic government for them – if only they had been slave owners -but instead they were booted out of their homes, their crofts, and onto ships that took them to Canada to survive or fail in the strange environment where a different language was spoken for these were entirely Gaelic speaking people. Those who survived the long weeks at sea had to get by or sink.
John Gordon senior died without any legitimate heirs and several dead illegitimate ones bar one, John, husband of Lady Emily. He was as vicious as his father in his treatment of the islanders and he, too, left no legitimate heir and so his wife inherited everything. She shared his malicious temperament and she persecuted the poorest in these lands with the same vigour as her obnoxious husband. Their contribution of clearing and re-settling people was, at the time, seen as both an outrage and an impressive contribution to empire building.
Lady Emily Gordon fairly quickly remarried and she added Cathcart to her list of names, taken from her new husband Sir Reginald Cathcart of Sunninghill, Berkshire in England.
The banished populations of the Hebrides disembarked on the northeast coast of Canada and straightaway had to erect shelters, initially of turf, as well as try to find a means of providing food and income for their families. Food prices were extortionately high in the area – eggs sold for one dollar per dozen, flour was six dollars for one hundred pounds, sugar cost a dollar for four pounds and salt ten cents a pound. Mostly farmers several Scots tried to re-establish croft life digging land to create smallholdings around Moosomin in Saskatchewan. Land that was sold to them for $2.50 an acre by the Canadian Pacific Railway company who lay claim to it. And who just happened to own shares in the Canadian Pacific? None other than Lady Gordon Cathcart who also held stock in Canada’s Hudson’s Bay Company. As an investor in the potential of Canada Lady Emily Gordon Cathcart had strong reasons for sending enforced labour to this part of the empire. Bad doesn’t get close to describing parasites such as the Lady Gordon Cathcart aka Lady Bountiful.
They made do, these hardy souls, torn from their lands while the Gordons clung onto their vast estates and Castle Cluny itself. At Moosomin the Scots deposited there were said to have taken the Scotchman’s Trail to the place that would become their new home. They had virtually nothing to get established with and turned old herring barrels into sleighs so they could move around in the deep snows that fell in this inhospitable land. The woollen clothing that kept them warm in Scotland was no use in this harsh climate and they took to wearing animal skins in winter for protection.
And what of the natives of this dumping ground? They were Chipewyan, Cree, Saulteaux, Assiniboine, Atsina and Sioux. Their hold on the lands they had lived on for generations was no more secure than that of the Scottish Highlanders and like them they were banished and confined to designated areas. Part of the territory Lady Cathcart targeted for her cleared people was known as Assiniboia, the name taken from the First Nation peoples whose land it once was before being purloined by the government and in turn sold off to settlers.
Assiniboine Woman c 1900
Those recent settlers from the Hebrides hewed the untamed soil to establish their farms. To retain their newly acquired property they had to reside on it for at least six months annually over the first three years. Winters were brutal, far worse than anything known to them in Scotland and they were forced to move into towns during the worst months when snows made remaining on their farms impossible, sometimes taking their basic shacks with them. Winter started around the end of November and lasted until around April. Out of necessity Scottish islanders learned to skate, toboggan, to get around on snow shoes and by sleigh, originally as we’ve seen converted herring barrels.
Everything froze. Solid blocks of milk were broken up by hammer and chisel and sold by the pound. Live stock had to be shut up for the whole of winter and fed from hay gathered from the prairie. Traditional Scottish woollen clothing was fairly useless at keeping out the cold and so the Scots took to wearing animal skins and furs.
Frostbite was rife. One man, a Jewish rabbi, (not from the islands) undertook a journey of two miles in a blizzard with only cotton socks and moccasins on his feet. Sixteen hours later he was found close to death and his legs had to be amputated.
There were regulations imposed. Alcohol was regulated and mostly confined to the sick, although I imagine it was available to wealthier people in the area. A government permit was required if the need was desperate, ie illness, and the permit allowed the recipient to get liquor for up to six months. Inevitably this policy led to an upsurge in sick claims, especially from young men. When that failed several decided their only recourse was to produce their own booze through illicit distillation – of which there is a good strong tradition in Scotland.
Newcomers found the communities welcoming and traditional British class distinctions tended to fall away. People became less subservient. There is a nice account of a young girl from Benbecula who discovered being a servant didn’t suit her and so after three days she told her mistress she wouldn’t wait on her any longer and off she went. Her attitude chimed in with members of First Nation tribes who resisted being constrained by European master/servant relationships and the trappings of European dress.
It has to be said that scraping a living in the Hebrides was no easy task but then neither was it in the wild uncultivated part of Canada many found themselves. When some neighbouring islanders took to boats and landed on the empty acres of Vatersay they took cattle, sheep and ponies with them to set up farms there, earning themselves the nickname of Vatersay Raiders and were duly thrown into prison for daring to defy Britain’s property rights and squatting on Gordon Cathcart’s land. They could have chosen to cross the Atlantic to Canada or America but they wanted to stay in Scotland. The press, fawning towards the wealthy and powerful as ever, demonised the squatters on land Lady Bountiful herself had described as barren and inhospitable with no good water supply and where even potatoes would not grow. Still, she liked the place enough to hold onto it and fought those who tried to make a go of farming it. She demanded the Trespass Act be employed to defend her property from the audacious pirates who had taken ‘violent possession of it.’
The Vatersay Raiders
The matter was raised in the Commons where her supporters and detractors stood up to defend or attack her for her behaviour towards tenants. She was described as a harsh and inconsiderate landlord but jumping to her defence was Lord Tweedmouth, First Lord of the Admiralty, who claimed she had done great work for encouraging work in Scotland and
“It was a monstrous proposal from men not even in the status of crofters to cross the sea to Vatersay, which was not included under the operation of the Crofters Act, and which was in occupation of a tenant, to take possession, and put their cattle upon it.”
In 1908 she took the squatters to court to reinstate her empty land – and to punish them, of course. A number were tried in Edinburgh and jailed. There were references to Scotland’s ‘semi-Celtic populace’ who, given half a chance, would spread the contagion of lawlessness if not controlled. She was accused of being an unprincipled owner intent on getting the government to purchase her property.
The disgraceful antics of Lady Gordon Cathcart attracted so much public attention the government did indeed buy the island in 1909 and divided it up into 60 working crofts.
Again in 1914 questions were asked in the House of Commons over compensation for her losses – the goose and duck shoots, value of coastal products (seaware and tangle – seaweed kelp was a valuable resource for making into iodine and soda for the manufacture of soap and glass) to the tune of £13000.
The Union with England of 1707 afforded opportunities for lairds to transform their estates from places where people lived and reciprocated services to land that could be exploited for new-found commerce – game shoots, grazing for cattle to provide meat for the English market, sheep to provide wool for clothing for the domestic market but more importantly to provide uniforms for the military in the never-ending wars Britain was involved in. Mutton, too, from sheep and not forgetting kelp. The barren Highlands turned out to be an area rich for development, like any other colony and while the native people were not slaves as the West Indians were they were helpless, nonetheless, when it came to deciding their futures. And, er, she had a golf course built at Askernish on South Uist – make of that what you will.
Lady Emily Gordon Cathcart’s character was rarely far from public scrutiny. Still she had many of her class ready to come to her defence. Unionist MP Sir George Younger, member for Ayr, rejected accusations that she had forcibly cleared crofters off their lands (and there are still unionist revisionist historians that will applaud Younger’s view that the Hebridean crofters voluntarily left their homes and boarded ships for Canada. Some would have but the majority did not.) Younger claimed Lady Cathcart’s tenants had their passages paid by her which was not true. Yes some received a loan but it had to be repaid. Younger told the House of Commons the former crofters were prospering in their Canadian homes and were grateful to Cathcart for the opportunity of moving there. Not everyone in the House was convinced. One asked if she had offered to transport the geese to Canada, or indeed Sir George Younger himself.
Lady Cathcart had written to newspapers the year before attempting to salvage her reputation for being a nasty piece of work, insisting that in 1883 she ‘assisted a number of crofter families from the Islands of Benbecula and South Uist to emigrate to Canada, where their well-being and prosperity are assured, and they have repaid all the advances which I made to them to settle them on their homesteads.’ She produced a letter written by one of the settlers as part of her defence. It was well-known that Lady Gordon Cathcart was vehemently anti-Catholic and as most of her islanders were Catholic I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions how that might have affected her behaviour aside from her business interests in the northwest territories of Canada, around Regina and Wapella,
The notorious clearer of people from their homelands Lady Gordon Cathcart of Cluny died at Westgate-on-Sea that well-known Scottish part of Kent at the age of 88yrs. In her will she left £5000 to Princess Helena Victoria “if she will accept it.”
‘A mistake has been made in some quarters (says the “Daily Mail”) as to the attitude of the War Office authorities concerning the funeral. It was said they had directed the British military attache in Paris to make arrangements for the interment of the remains in France. The War Office we understand, has no “locus standi” for making such arrangements, and all they did was to request the British Embassy in Paris, out of consideration for the relatives, to hold itself prepared to make arrangements for local burial in the even of the friends desiring it, and further desiring that the arrangements should rest with the Government.’ (Edinburgh Evening News 31 March 1903)
How many of Britain’s war heroes have been dispatched in such a peremptory fashion? Who was this man who had fallen so far from grace to be shuffled off with no pomp nor the usual dignities of burial?
‘FROM STABLE BOY TO GENERAL
The late Sir Hector Archibald Macdonald was one of the best-known soldiers of his generation, and his marvellous career had made his name a household word throughout Scotland …No Scottish soldier of recent times had such a rapid rise to fame. He was a “ranker” at 20, and a brigadier-general in one of the most sanguinary battles of modern times at 46. The deceased soldier was the son of a Ross-shire crofter, and was born in 1852 at Dingwall. His education was interrupted by periods of cattle-herding, and later, in his early “teens,” he became a stableboy to a hotelkeeper in his native town. At the age of 17 he went to Inverness, where he was apprenticed in one of the warehouses. Finding the occupation distasteful, and becoming enamoured of the colours, he took the Queen’s shilling in 1870, joining the Gordon Highlanders (then the 92nd). Private Macdonald son became corporal, and it was not long before he was sergeant-instructor and pay-sergeant.’ (Edinburgh Evening News)
Such was the life and military career of one of the most famous and successful Scottish (and British ) soldiers. However you might not have heard of him.
Archie Macdonald, known to the world as Fighting Mac, once revered throughout the United Kingdom for his bravery and success as a battleground strategist, shot himself in a hotel room in Paris on the 25 March 1903.
Newspaper readers at the time were scarcely protected from the gory details of incidents. The Edinburgh Evening News described how Macdonald’s corpse was found dressed in ‘civilian clothes’ including a ‘full white wide-fronted shirt’, lying beside his bed in his hotel room. He was found severely wounded in the head, the bullet still lodged in his skull, ‘almost projecting from the back of his head.’ Two documents were found in a pocket of his coat. A folded copy of the New York Tribune lay nearby.
That morning Sir Hector Macdonald rose, went out for a walk after breakfast then returned to his hotel where he picked up five letters which arrived from Britain; two stamped On His Majesty’s Service. He read them in the public area of the hotel then used one of the writing desks to write several letters, bought stamps from the porter and posted them in the hotel’s letter box. Then he went into the reading room where he was observed reading several newspapers before going upstairs to his room, a small one, which he was told on arrival the previous evening was the only one available to him.
No trace of the letters he received that morning were later found.
Perhaps one or more of those letters had been written to his brothers. The brother at home in Rootfield received one in which Macdonald referred to the ‘lying slanders which embittered his last hours.’
As we have seen Hector Macdonald was from a humble background: born at the croft of Rootfield near Muir of Ord, son of a crofter/stone mason. His rapid rise through the ranks of the military soon brought him to the attention of millions.
Macdonald was sent to many battlegrounds including Afghanistan, South Africa, India and Egypt-Sudan. His successes as a leader of men and his acts of bravery led to swift promotion. You might imagine he would fit in well into that world of derring-do, been welcomed into the military establishment but you would be wrong.
It was not that he was Scottish that marked him out, though some argue that was a factor. It was what he was – a boy out of a croft – a man who was not born into the social circles in which he was forced to move and one who had little time for the haughty snobberies which he encountered. He was an outsider.
I think at this stage I should get to the point before we veer off in completely the wrong direction.
Sir Hector Macdonald did not commit suicide because he was being ostracised by the aristocrats with whom he lived and now mixed, although he was, but because of what was being said and written about him. Remember the New York Tribune in his room?
In 1902 he was sent to Ceylon as Commander in Chief of British troops and soon after the rumour mill began turning. Whispers over indecent acts he allegedly carried out with ‘young English boys’ quickly spread. The accusations grew and talk of prosecution and possible court martial.
His suicide was taken by his detractors as proof of his guilt.
The 17 year old travelled from Dingwall to Aberdeen to drill with the 92nd – the Gordon Highlanders. He was sent to India to join the 92nd. Educated and ambitious, Macdonald read and read – on military strategy and to learn languages so that he might communicate where he was stationed. In all he spoke Hindustani, perhaps Urdu and Pushtu, Arabic, French, English and his native Gaelic. By 20 years old he was a sergeant. The young ranker was on his way.
‘In battle he was ever to the fore; that is where his gallantry shone out like a star,’ said his fellow officer Sir Ian Hamilton.
At 24 yrs he had made the grade of colour sergeant and was attracting attention for his bravery within military circles and among the public. In Macdonald was mentioned in several dispatches throughout his illustrious military career. Soon he had been promoted from non-commissioned ranks to sub-lieutenant, subaltern. He was among the men who made the 310 mile march from Kabul to Kandahar which ended the Afghan campaign.
In 1881 he was in South Africa during the first Boer War when he was made a full lieutenant.
The Battle of Majuba Hill – The First Boer War 1881
At the Battle of Majuba Hill the British troops were led by Major-General Sir George Pomeroy Colley who left them in a vulnerable position on the hill then retired to his tent where he could not see nor hear the growing panic among his men. With grim inevitability the British line collapsed resulting in many deaths. Men deserted their positions and tried to escape off the hill. Colley, hopelessly incompetent to the end was shot dead by a Boer rifleman. Another casualty among the officers was a Captain Cornwallis Maude, the son of the 1st Earl de Montalt.
Titled men such as these epitomised the usual sort who gained commissions in the British Army. A good title could more or less guarantee you high rank irrespective of how incompetent you were.
At this battle Macdonald, a junior officer, was given charge of 20 Highlanders. They perished along with 73 of their comrades. 113 others were wounded and nearly 60 taken prisoner. The Boers lost 1 man and 5 were injured.
Macdonald fought on; when his sword was taken he used his fists and feet. The Boers took him prisoner but did not shoot him and in fact a reward of £5 was offered for the return of Macdonald’s sword which it duly was but the Boer who had it refused the bounty for as he explained he was just happy to see it returned to the ‘brave officer’. Macdonald was later released by the Boers.
His sword was one presented to him – a sword of honour- in recognition of his service to the Britain at Sudan following his actions which prevented serious disaster to the British forces. Its hilt was made from 18ct gold, its scabbard embossed standard silver and paid for from the £500 raised in a single day from contributions by his fellow servicemen.
Macdonald’s conduct during the Boer Wars added to his reputation. His service during the Nile Expedition to try to save General Gordon at Khartoum 1884-5 earned him the General Service Medal.
In 1888 he was promoted to captain.
At Egypt Omdurman- Cecil Rhodes said of Macdonald, ‘the finest episode in the whole day’s fighting was the admirable way in which Macdonald handled his brigade throughout these attacks.’
And Churchill, ‘All depended upon Macdonald, and that officer, who by valour and conduct in war had won his way from the rank of private soldier to the common of a brigade, and will doubtless obtain still higher employment was equal to the emergency.’
He had gone to Egypt as a Captain, was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal and made a Major. By the mid-nineties he was Lieutenant-Colonel at the time Kitchener – that is Field Marshal Horatio Herbert Kitchener, 1st Earl Kitchener, KG,KP,GCB,OM,GCI,GCMG,GCIE,ADC,PC, was about to embark on the Sudan campaign.
At the Battle of Omdurman he gained a CB and was appointed as an ADC (personal Aides-de-Camp) to Queen Victoria and promoted to Colonel. Within three years he was Brigadier-General and took over command of the Highland Brigade during the second Boer War. At this point he was a Major-General and soon to be knighted.
The Battle of Omdurman in 1898 was when Sudanese Dervishes were slaughtered by a British army using modern weaponry. The battle was in response to the killing of General Gordon in 1885 and allow Britain keep open the Suez Canal as access to India.
Kitchener was criticised for his callous treatment of the Dervishes whom he left to die where they lay wounded, forbidding them help, and for his men’s looting and murder in Khartoum. It was reported he ordered the Mahdi’s (Muslim forces leader) remains be dug up and thrown into the Nile and his skull made into a drinking cup.
11000 Dervishes were slaughtered to secure Britain and her and ally Egypt control of the Nile.
Macdonald was made a Colonel and received thanks in the Houses of Commons and Lords in 1898. Despite being recognised for his role in the campaign, it was noted that his rewards were ‘scant’ compared with some who got far more for far less.
In Scotland it was felt his nationality and his humble background were the reasons for the difference.
He did not, for example, receive the £50 000 awarded to Kitchener for his part.
The Battle of Paardeberg – Second Boer War 1900
The arrival of Macdonald at the Modder to take over command was met with cheers from his men. They knew he understood them, he had after all come through the ranks and it was said in many respects he remained an ordinary Highland soldier.
He was very different from the majority of officers who seldom, if ever, mixed with other ranks preferring their own company in the officers’ mess. Macdonald went out of his way to get to know the men who served under him. He took personal interest in how they were treated, possibly remembering his own experiences as an ordinary soldier. He checked their food was up to scratch, that they were well equipped and had recreational facilities.
Kitchener was not like that. He took over command of the British forces from Field Marshal Frederick Sleigh Roberts, 1st Earl Roberts VC, KG, GCB, OM, GCSI, KStJ, VD, PC Lord Roberts.
Kitchener ordered Macdonald to take his brigade and remove the Boers from an area which offered no cover for them. Macdonald knew this was a mad scheme but he followed orders.
The inevitable happened. The Scots soldiers were easy targets for the Boer riflemen and were quickly cut down. Those not killed or badly injured returned fire while exposed to enemy fire. Macdonald was wounded and his horse killed but he stayed with his men until nightfall when Roberts arrived and ordered the Highlanders withdrawal.
Kitchener’s incompetence cost the lives of over a thousand men in this one instance. He didn’t learn from his mistakes. Next day he was keen to send yet more men in to die uselessly.
Fighting in South Africa continued with the injured Macdonald leaving hospital to lead his men and his gallantry and bravery during the war was recognised by Roberts. It should be noted that Kitchener had asked for Macdonald’s removal at this time.
It was widely believed Kitchener was jealous of Macdonald and his record.
At the time Hector Macdonald’s name and image could be found throughout the British Empire. He was a great hero and companies used his face to sell products.
Camp Coffee
For those who remember the old bottles of Scotland’s own Camp Coffee will remember the moustachioed dark headed officer sitting as a Sikh holds out a tray of coffee.
Kitchener’s reputation had been tainted by his failures on the battlefield and his running of the infamous concentration camps established by the British in South Africa in which over 27 000 mainly Boer women and children died.
Here was a man familiar with grouse moors. He counted dead South Africans by the number of bag killed or captured or wounded. And he carried out a scorched earth policy in South Africa, burning crops, slaughtering livestock, poisoning wells and salting fields so that nothing would grow in them.
Arthur Conan Doyle called him stupid and arrogant.
This stupid and arrogant monster became the face of recruitment for the Great War, that war of lions led by donkeys. He was sent to Gallipoli where 1/4 million allied troops perished.
Kitchener’s ignorance of modern warfare led to the deaths of tens of thousands.
Kitchener never attracted the public acclamation that Macdonald had during his lifetime. He became an embarrassment. In a famous incident in June 1916 he was sailing through the Pentland Firth by the Orkney Islands on his way to Russia when the ship was apparently sunk by a German mine.
Years ago in Orkney I was told about how islanders would naturally do what they could to save shipwrecked sailors but on this occasion they were ordered not to launch boats to rescue anyone from the ship and indeed it was said that survivors of the wreck swimming into shore were pushed back into the sea while islanders were instructed to stay away from the area. It should be remembered that Orkney was full of military at this time being an important naval base. Of the 662 on the ship only 12 survived. Kitchener did not.
After his drowning the Manchester Guardian remarked, ‘he could not have done better than to have gone down, as he was a great impediment lately.’
With Kitchener gone let’s get back to Macdonald.
It is said he was despised by much of the establishment. They despised his common roots, his Highland accent and his down-to-earth manner and his habit of eschewing the company of commanders with double-barrelled names and the kind of pedigree that matters in the world of leg-ups and back-scratching.
At his death it was discovered Macdonald was married with a child. He had married Leith schoolteacher, Christina MacLouchan Duncan and carried a photograph of his son wherever he went. Why the secret? It was difficult in his time to get permission from commanding officers to marry without having a private income and so Macdonald never informed the army of the marriage.
The shock of his sudden death was such that people imagined all kinds of things; that he was not dead and that his coffin was filled with stones or that the body belonged to someone else. Sightings of him were reported from around the world.
At the same time the newspapers were filled with angry defenders of Macdonald condemning the treatment he received from the British establishment.
Colonel Stuart-Wortley wrote on the subject to the New York Tribune criticism that newspaper’s salacious treatment of Macdonald’s death, certified in Paris as suicide and mental troubles. He described the great loss to the British Army of one of its ‘most distinguished officers’.
If the British establishment hoped to bury Macdonald quietly in Paris they were to be disappointed.
Drawn into the maelstrom that followed Macdonald’s suicide was Scottish author Neil Munro, a native of Macdonald’s part of Scotland.
He eulogised the dead man and told the War Office that Scotland would not rest until Macdonald was brought home and buried.
The uproar in Scotland when it looked like Macdonald would be quietly shoved into the ground in France forced the authorities to reassess their actions.
Macdonald’s coffin, such as it was, was sealed and sent to London on the boat-train.
Rumours had circulated that Hector Macdonald’s remains had been mistreated while in Paris but this was denied.
In a letter to the family the French clergyman who supervised Macdonald’s remain transfer to Britain wrote, ‘ I venture to say, with all due respect to the nobility, that had he been the son of a duke, an easier way of escape would have been made for him.’
Major General Sir Hector Macdonald was sent home in a rough board coffin. No family member met the coffin off the boat and the undertaker carted away the body, not in the usual hearse, but a ‘common delivery wagon covered with pictorial advertisements’ to the railway station for the onward journey to Edinburgh.
Despite pleadings from his brothers, Macdonald was to be buried with little ceremony in Dean Cemetery. It appears the War Office had pressurised the family on the need for discretion. There were no military honours.
The train arrived at Waverly Station at 6am. Crowds waited in the Station. Thousands of others lined the streets of Edinburgh.
A lone bagpiper played The Floors o’ the Forest.
A small brass plate on the coffin was inscribed – Major General Sir Hector Macdonald, KCB. Born March 4, 1853, Died March 25, 1903.
For months ordinary people from around Scotland and farther afield travelled to Edinburgh, to Dean Cemetery, to pay their respects. On the first Sunday after his burial 30 000 visited his grave. People queued for 3 hours to walk past. The cemetery superintendent turned away people with flowers eventually when the area couldn’t take any more. Years later his grave still attracted considerable numbers of visitors.
One wreath from a foreign person read, ‘From strangers, to one so ill-treated by his own.’
There was public resentment over the low-key disposal of him. Macdonald’s widow, Lady Macdonald sued a man called Thom from Glasgow who wrote a vituperative verse about her. The case was heard by one Lord Stormont Darling. She won.
The War Office had been determined to prevent Macdonald finding ‘another way out’ of his ‘crimes’ on the ‘grave charges.’ He was told he would have to return to Ceylon to face a general court martial.
The Governor of Ceylon, Sir Joseph Ridgeway, commented he hoped that when Macdonald left the country he would be replaced by someone with more acceptable ‘antecedents’.
One Ceylonese newspaper reported, ‘Scotsmen are prone, like all humanity, at times, to accept the unwelcome as untrue, and in this case they were slow to discover that the feet of their idol were of clay.’
There was of course a substantial Scottish community in Ceylon which defended the reputation of Macdonald. They were referred to by Ridgeway in a letter of 1903 to the Colonial Office in which he mentioned that the editors of ‘English newspapers, were ‘ex-convicts employed by Scottish Association and others’ who wanted Macdonald’s case reopened. He was going to prosecute these men for what they said about him, Ridgeway – and hoped for their lengthy imprisonment. He was advised not to proceed and so reopen the scandal.
Macdonald had enraged and humiliated Governor Ridgeway on an occasion he had ordered him off the parade ground. As we know Macdonald had little time for the fraternising with the moneyed class which ran Ceylon preferring the company of local Ceylonese. It didn’t take long for rumours to spread that he was involved in sexual activities with boys. There was gossip that he had been surprised in a railway carriage with some youths. Soon stories multiplied and witnesses were found to substantiate the allegations against Macdonald – 70 in number which seems an awful lot of witnesses but there you go.
Macdonald’s position in Ceylon was untenable and Ridgeway told him he should go back to Britain. In Britain homosexual activity of any kind was illegal but his alleged offences were not illegal in Ceylon. He could of course be court martialled and Roberts advised him this was what he would face.
It is difficult to know the truth of what was going on especially when Macdonald’s case file disappeared, presumably destroyed following his suicide. Macdonald strenuously denied that allegations but then he would, wouldn’t he.
Observers who sympathised with Macdonald but accepted his guilt suggested his mental state of mind at the time as extenuating circumstances. A common enough reaction then to acts of homosexuality.
‘In reference to the grave charges made against the late Sir Hector MacDonald, we, the appointed and undersigned Commissioners, individually and collectively declare on oath that, after the most careful, minute, and exhaustive inquiry and investigation of the whole circumstances and facts connected with the sudden and unexpected death of the late Sir Hector MacDonald, unanimously and unmistakably find absolutely no reason or crime whatsoever which would create feelings such as would determine suicide, in preference to conviction of any crime affecting the moral and irreproachable character of so brave, so fearless, so glorious and unparalleled a hero: and we firmly believe the cause which gave rise to the inhuman and cruel suggestions of crime were prompted through vulgar feelings of spite and jealousy in his rising to such a high rank of distinction in the British Army: and, while we have taken the most reliable and trustworthy evidence from every accessible and conceivable source, have without hesitation come to the conclusion that there is not visible the slightest particle of truth in foundation of any crime, and we find the late Sir Hector MacDonald has been cruelly assassinated by vile and slandering tongues. While honourably acquitting the late Sir Hector MacDonald of any charge whatsoever, we cannot but deplore the sad circumstances of the case that have fallen so disastrously on one whom we have found innocent of any crime attributed to him.’
It was widely accepted after his death that Macdonald had never been comfortable in that world, elitist and conceited, that he found himself. He was perpetually short of money and in debt but remember he had a family in Scotland and did not receive married allowances as he had never disclosed his marriage. And throughout the years of his meteoric rise through the ranks he had made enemies among the most powerful, not least of them Kitchener, upstaged by Macdonald so publicly at Omdurman – Kitchener who demanded Macdonald’s removal from the South African campaign which resulted in Macdonald being sent to India.
Driven to suicide, the honourable way out, personally by the king it has been alleged, Macdonald had then demonstrably broken the law – English law. I don’t know where that would place him. Is the British military covered by English law? Expect it is. Suicide has never been a criminal act in Scotland.
Macdonald’s alleged offences came eight years after Oscar Wilde had been sentenced to 2 years hard labour for practising homosexuality. If what Macdonald was accused of was interfering with young teenagers, by exposing himself, then he had committed a heinous act.
So, why would his records have been destroyed? To spare his family? To preserve his reputation? Surely not for his suicide was interpreted as confirmation of his guilt. Could it have been the file on his case was fiction from start to finish and implicated Ceylon’s high ranking families, many British, in a plot to blacken the man’s character and destroy the stellar career of an individual who spurned their narrow-minded pompous grandiosity of the trappings of Empire?
The New York Tribune had mentioned in its report of the Macdonald affair on its front page on 25 March 1903 that Lord Roberts, Commander in Chief of the British Army, had at a regimental dinner on the 21st paid tribute to Highland officers but did not mention Macdonald. At the same dinner, a speaker who had not heard of the brewing scandal did single Macdonald out as a great hero and his words were received in ‘cold silence.’
The morning after Macdonald’s suicide the New York Tribune’s headline read:
‘Scotsmen Unite in Movement to Prove False the Charges Against Late British General Who Shot Himself.’
Was Macdonald the victim of a class-ridden conspiracy?
Were the charges against him true or trumped up?
What exactly was the role played by Britain’s Governor of Ceylon, Ridgeway?
What was being said about Macdonald within military circles by the likes of Kitchener?
We do not know if Macdonald was guilty of the alleged offences or if they were a pack of lies designed to destroy him and his reputation.
He may have indeed been guilty and so not entirely deserving of our sympathy.
If he was homosexual then that was a crime then though not in Ceylon where the alleged offences took place.
In the aftermath of the imprisonment of Oscar Wilde what would the British peoples’ reaction be to another high profile case involving homosexuality?
If Kitchener’s alleged homosexuality was conveniently covered up why not do the same for Macdonald?
How significant was Macdonald’s background instrumental in his being ostracised by the circle he was expected to socialise with?
There is spite, jealousy, vindictiveness and secrecy at every turn of this case. I began looking into it following a visit to Dingwall museum which features Macdonald’s story. I started with a bland acceptance of his ‘guilt’ but now I am certain what happened to him had nothing at all to do with any alleged sexual activity.
The hero and survivor of so many battles to preserve the British Empire finally came up against an enemy he could not defeat – the British Establishment which closed ranks against this upstart Scot from the croft and dispatched him for good.
The huge memorial to Macdonald which towers over Dingwall stands 100 feet high. Not too far away stands a cottage called Ceylon.
lenathehyena
Lenathehyena's Blog 