A People's History of Scotland (14 page)

The strike began on 22 August but many of the city's mills and factories kept running, so the next day, a procession of strikers tried to march on the mills on Perth Road. A local magistrate and mill owner read the Riot Act and police dispersed the demonstrators. Nevertheless, 400 marched to Forfar to join their brothers and sisters there. After a march through the town they returned to Dundee. That town's magistrates then enrolled special constables to bolster the police and banned all assemblies, effectively breaking the strike. Several Chartist leaders were tried and jailed for their role in the affair.
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In the coalfields that August, 12,000 miners in the Monklands and Glasgow districts were out on strike, with a network of strike
committees. The strike spread into Ayrshire, Midlothian and East Lothian. The issue was wages and conditions, but there was considerable support for the Charter. In Monklands, Chartist branches were active in Coatbridge, Airdrie and Holytown, leading the sheriff there to believe he was facing a Chartist-led uprising.

For the first three days of the strike, across North Lanarkshire, miners patrolled the roads, picketing and holding marches and rallies. There was no strike fund, and with some 70,000 mouths to feed the miners took food from farms and gardens, seized it from carts and looted company stores. Large groups of women from Dundyvan attacked strikebreakers. Police and troops were drafted in from Glasgow and Edinburgh to face the unrest, and the local sheriff-led cavalry went on night-time patrols. Anyone caught taking food faced sixty days in jail.

In short order, a number of companies conceded and as the number of strikers fell the authorities cracked down hard on the remainder, with three Ayrshire miners sentenced to be transported for ten years, as were six Airdrie miners who had besieged the local prison, freeing miners held there. By October, the miners had returned to work, the majority having lost the fight.
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Nevertheless, the ‘moral force' of Chartism remains true. Scotland led the way in establishing formal Chartist churches – the first being set up in May 1839 in Hamilton, Paisley and Bridgeton. Two years later, a convention of Chartist churches boasted they existed from Ayr to Aberdeen.
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Temperance also marked Scottish Chartism, and this created a tradition where working-class meetings did not take place in pubs.

The authorities in London, fearing revolution, faced down Chartist attempts to force acceptance of their demands between 1839 and 1842. They were not hampered by any debate about whether to use moral or physical force, and were quick to unleash repression.

Hunger, not the Charter, was the root cause of rioting in 1846, as the potato crop failed across Scotland and Ireland, threatening starvation in the Highlands and causing deadly famine in Ireland. In Macduff, crowds barricaded the quay to stop food exports and looted shops. In Aberdeen, flour mills and carts were seized. The sheriff was forced to release rioters when the crowd intervened, and in Avoch,
when the sheriff read the Riot Act, the people replied that they might as well be shot as starved. Warships were moved into the Moray Firth and soldiers sent to Caithness before the government initiated a relief fund that ensured people were fed.
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Scotland marked 1848, a year of revolution across Europe, by economic downturn and unemployment. On 6 March a crowd of several hundred unemployed rallied on Glasgow Green to protest the City Council's failure to deliver on the promise of soup kitchens. All seemed to have passed peacefully, and police had returned to the Central Police Station when crowds began attacking food shops and a gun shop in the Trongate and London Road. During the Glasgow riots, Chartist slogans were shouted along with cries of ‘Vive la Republique', stoking fears among the upper classes.
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For two hours the crowd controlled the city centre until troops were brought in. The next day, rioting broke out in Bridgeton, where special constables opened fire, shooting six people.
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The
Sunday Post
complained that the police had left the city in the hands of rioters for two hours.

The wave of revolutions that swept Europe in 1848 encouraged a revival of the Chartists and a new sense of militancy. The economy was in recession with between 30,000 and 40,000 receiving relief (food handouts) in Paisley alone. The lack of genuine relief and the excitement caused by news of revolution in France, which had overthrown the monarchy, encouraged unrest.
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In both Paisley and Airdrie railway lines were torn up.

April saw major demonstrations, with Ernest Jones, an English friend of Karl Marx, addressing a rally of 25,000–30,000 in Edinburgh and 30,000 in Paisley. In Glasgow the organisers claimed 100,000 were present, the
Scotsman
reported 25,000 and the
Glasgow Herald
40,000.
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In Aberdeen, 5,000 Chartists defied the police, and in Holytown in Lanarkshire the yeomanry reported a ‘slight brush' with miners. There were meetings in Dundee, Dunfermline and other towns across Scotland.
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There was further unrest in Edinburgh in July when a rally on Calton Hill was followed by a crowd demonstrating outside Calton Jail, which was prevented from proceeding to County Hall only by a specially mobilised police force.

The question of using physical force came to the fore once more. Could the workers succeed without their own force? From France came the example of the National Guard, based on the popular militia that emerged in revolutionary Paris. An Edinburgh Chartist told an audience in Dundee that it was absolutely necessary to overthrow the government, or in a short time they would all be starved. He asked the hall: ‘Was William Wallace a moral force man?'
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One Irish nationalist, John Daly, told a Glasgow Chartist rally: ‘Prayers and petitions are the weapons of cowards, arms are the weapons used by the free and the brave.' They could best help Ireland by keeping the army in Scotland.
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Just the discussion of physical force was enough to get the authorities nervous, leading to a number of prosecutions. Among those put on trial was an elderly shoemaker, James Cumming, charged, on the basis of an intercepted letter, with forming a National Guard. At his trial details of this National Guard and the clubs affiliated to it were made known:

[Thomas] ‘Muir Club,' 200 [members]; [John] ‘Mitchell [Irish nationalist leader] Club,' 56; [John and Andrew] ‘Baird and Hardie [executed in Stirling in 1820] Club,' 20; [Joseph] ‘Gerald [the London Corresponding Delegate to the 1793 People's Convention in Edinburgh, who was deported with Hardie] Club,' 26; [Robert] ‘Burns Club,' 25; [George] ‘Washington Club,' 25; [Feargus] ‘O'Connor [Irish Chartist leader] Club,' 12; Besides these there were 500 enrolled in the National Guard and an unascertained number in the [Robert] ‘Emmet [Irish nationalist executed after the 1803 rising] Club.' The National Guard had given an order for 40 muskets with bayonets, ‘but a great many have provided themselves with arms.
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Things came to a head later that year when, in the wake of the Chartists' disastrous attempt to deliver the last monster petition to Parliament, which was called off by the leaders, faced with the might of the state forces guarding London's Whitehall. After this failure the movement declined in Scotland, as elsewhere.

One legacy of Chartism was that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels's
Communist Manifesto
first appeared in English in the radical Chartist paper the
Red Republican
, translated by a Scotswoman, Helen McFarlane. Louise Yeoman of BBC Scotland took up McFarlane's story in November 2012. She was born in Crosshill near Barrhead in 1818 to a wealthy family prepared to bring in troops to break strikes. But her father went bankrupt and she had to become a governess. Finding work in Vienna, she experienced the tumults there in 1848 and was, in turn, won to revolution. Back in London, she threw herself into the left wing of the Chartist movement.

McFarlane was the first translator of the
Communist Manifesto
, using the male pen name Howard Morton. She was a feminist, fighting for a world without slaves. ‘A republic without poor; without classes … a society, such indeed as the world has never yet seen, not only of free men, but of free women', she wrote. No wonder Karl Marx called her a ‘rara avis', a rare bird, and praised her original ideas.
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McFarlane fell out with the editor of the
Red Republican
and married a French revolutionary exile, Francis Proust, but when the family attempted to emigrate to South Africa her husband became ill and had to be taken off the ship before it sailed. Subsequently her baby daughter died in South Africa. She returned to find her husband was dead. She then re-married a Church of England minister but died at the age of forty-one in 1860.

Chartism failed in its immediate goal of securing the demands of the People's Charter, but in Scotland and elsewhere it laid the groundwork for the emergence of a strong trades union organisation and for the political representation of the labour movement in the British Parliament.

I
n 1750, a third of Scotland's population still lived north of the Highland Line; today it is just 5 percent. In 1811, there were 250,000 sheep there; by the 1840s there were almost a million. Within that period sheep replaced people driven from their homes by direct eviction or through hunger and destitution. After the sheep and overgrazing came deer and the creation of hunting grounds for the elite. By 1884, a tenth of Scotland's land was given over to deer forests, an area greater than the size of Wales, and taking up the great majority of the land in the crofting counties.
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These bald facts are the result of the darkest chapter in Scottish history – the Highland Clearances.

At the time of Culloden, townships existed across the Highlands and Islands, even in what are now remote glens. Their ruins can still be found among the bracken and the heather. These were made up of clachans, a collection of stone-and-turf houses and their outbuildings. Close to them lay the best land on which the people grew crops. Outside the settlements was a mix of arable, grazing and fallow land, and beyond that common grazing land. Cattle were sold or traded, alongside horses and butter. This was a feudal society and hunger was never far away. The land was allocated by the tacksman, who was the main leaseholder from the landowner, and rent was paid to him.

Culloden was not followed immediately by the Clearances, but it did bring fundamental changes. Already the Duke of Argyll leased his lands to those who'd pay best, rather than to his supposed Campbell kin. Mass evictions had already taken place. After the battle, the feudal rights of the Highland nobility were destroyed and the Highlanders disarmed, and the clan chiefs now sought to maximise revenues either to improve their estates or to pay for a lavish lifestyle far away in Edinburgh or London. ‘Improvement', another term for profitability, was carried out by landowners with no respect for the wishes of their tenants.

In Perthshire and Argyll, land was sold or leased to small or middlesized farmers who could make a living off it, but that was not the case farther north. Here, tenants were evicted from the good arable land and moved onto what was once regarded as common land, and here new townships were created.

These new townships were based on the assumption that crofting was not sufficient to support a family and therefore the workers would need to seek employment from the landlord in order to feed their families. There was little incentive to improve the land, because too often that would mean a rent increase. In coastal areas crofters were encouraged to work in fishing and in making kelp – the burning of seaweed to make soda ash, which was sold to the southern manufacturers of glass and soap. Both industries boomed during the Napoleonic Wars when imports were cut off by the French occupation of much of Europe. Wartime demand for fish and beef also ensured a degree of prosperity.

The communities of the south and east experienced modest population growth, but that of the western seaboard and islands was more pronounced, growing by 55 percent between 1801 and 1841.
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Ullapool was established in the 1780s by the British Fishing Society on land bought from the Cromartie Estate, in order to provide employment in the fishing fleets. But from 1815 the decline in demand for kelp and beef coincided with a sudden fall in the herring catch, and the return of young men from the armed forces pitched a fragile economy into crisis. The potato, which until now had never been central to Highland life, now
became the main form of sustenance for many and an easy crop to grow.

Meanwhile, the landlords continued to develop large sheep-grazing farms, with Cheviot and Blackface sheep – bigger sheep that needed more grazing land – that were imported from the Lowlands along with shepherds, factors and estate managers. These new sheep needed to be brought down from the hills, onto what had once been arable land, and they took over pasture where Highlanders had raised their cattle and their smaller breed of sheep.

There had already been opposition to this. More than two decades before Waterloo, in 1792, Bliadhna nan Caorach (Year of the Sheep), there was a virtual uprising in Ross against the new sheep walks, it being reported: ‘… a Mob of about four hundred strong are now actually employed in collecting the sheep over all this and the neighbouring county of Sutherland.' By early August some 6,000 sheep were being driven south. When troops intervened, the men simply melted away. A few were captured, some banished from Scotland and one transported to Botany Bay. The commander of the troops wrote to London, however, that ‘… no disloyalty or spirit of rebellion, or dislike to His Majesty's Person or His Majesty's Government is in the least degree concerned in these tumults.'
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The collapse of the Highland economy after the end of the Napoleonic Wars meant landlords now looked to turn over all their lands to sheep grazing, removing the crofters all together. The most infamous Clearances were on the huge estate of the Countess of Sutherland. Her husband, Lord Stafford, removed between 6,000 and 10,000 tenants between 1807 and 1821. The Strath of Kildonan was cleared of its people between 1813 and 1819, with such savagery that it provoked a reaction.

In December 1812, an agent for Lowland sheep farmers visited the Strath, asking questions of the tenants, who proceeded to run him off their land. He immediately claimed he had been threatened with his life, and the Marquess of Stafford grabbed at his claims to mobilise his male estate workers as special constables and to summon a detachment of soldiers. Faced with this resistance, the locals desisted and the Upper Strath was cleared within three months. The crofters
were offered re-settlement in the town of Helmsdale or emigration. Many of the young chose to leave for Canada.
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However, Stafford's agent, a Lowland Scot named Patrick Sellar, believed this response had been too soft. And so worse was to follow in the parishes of Farr and Kildonan. Later in the century the Highland historian Alexander Mackenzie wrote a
History of the Highland Clearances
, published in 1883, which described Sellar's ill-treatment:

As the lands were now in the hands of the factor himself, and were to be occupied as sheep farms, and as the people made no resistance, they expected, at least, some indulgence in the way of permission to occupy their houses and other buildings till they could gradually remove, and meanwhile look after their growing crops. Their consternation was therefore greater, when immediately after the May term day, a commencement was made to pull down and set fire to the houses over their heads. The old people, women and others, then began to preserve the timber which was their own but the devastators proceeded with the greatest celerity, demolishing all before them, and when they had overthrown all the houses in a large tract of country they set fire to the wreck. Timber, furniture, and every other article that could not be instantly removed was consumed by fire or otherwise utterly destroyed. The proceedings were carried on with the greatest rapidity and the most reckless cruelty. The cries of the victims, the confusion, the despair and horror painted on the countenances of the one party, and the exulting ferocity of the other, beggar all description. At these scenes Mr. Sellar was present, and apparently, as sworn by several witnesses at his subsequent trial, ordering and directing the whole. Many deaths ensued from alarm, from fatigue, and cold, the people having been instantly deprived of shelter, and left to the mercies of the elements. Some old men took to the woods and to the rocks, wandering about in a state approaching to, or of absolute, insanity and several of them in this situation lived only a few days. Pregnant women were taken in premature labour, and several children did not long survive their sufferings.
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In total, 2,000 people were removed from Kildonan. When Sellar was charged with murder, for burning down an old woman's house, a hand-picked jury of landowners found him not guilty, but he had brought bad publicity to the Sutherland Estate and lost his job.

James Loch was an Edinburgh lawyer who, from 1812, for forty years was commissioner for the Marquess of Stafford. He would write an apology for his employers but his loathing for their tenants was never far from the surface, with him complaining: ‘… [their] habits and ideas, quite incompatible with the customs of regular society, and civilised life, adding greatly to those defects which characterise persons living in a loose and unformed state of society.'
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His concern was to provide wool for the ‘staple manufactory of England' and to convert the people to ‘the habits of regular and continued industry'.

A young journalist sent by the
Scotsman
to the Highlands exhibited the same antipathy, writing in 1847 that the Highlanders were ‘an inferior race to the Lowland Saxon'.
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Robert Knox, the Edinburgh surgeon who bought the bodies stolen by the grave snatchers Burke and Hare, believed in the superiority of the ‘Anglo-Saxon race' and wrote that the Highlanders ‘must be forced from the soil'.
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Sellar would have concurred with this because he regarded the Highlanders as racial degenerates. In his view they were ‘the aborigines of Britain shut out from any general stream of knowledge …'
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In the preface to his
History of the Highland Clearances
, Mackenzie raised this question, and answered it: ‘Some people ask “Why rake up all this inquiry just now?” We answer that the same laws which permitted the cruelties, the inhuman atrocities described in this book, are still the laws of this land.'
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It might be argued that the Clearances on the Sutherland Estate were the most excessive, and most people were removed with less savagery and on a smaller scale, but they were coerced off their land. At the height of the Clearances there was resistance but it was never organised or effective. Obedience to the clan chief still counted, even when it was he who was ordering you onto the emigrant boat, while ministers stressed obedience to the law, even when they sympathised with their flock.

In 1846, matters became desperate as the potato blight brought the likelihood of famine to the Highlands. In response, Charles Trevelyan, Under-Secretary at the Treasury, wrote: ‘The people cannot, under any circumstances, be allowed to starve.' Two years later he did the opposite in Ireland, letting hundreds of thousands die, arguing that the famine there was ‘a mechanism for reducing surplus population'.
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As the Highlands tottered on the verge of famine, the Clearances continued, but resistance was growing. In 1852, the Cromartie Estate attempted to remove tenants from Badenscallie in Coigach (Wester Ross) to Badentarbat, about three miles to the west, in order to create a new sheep farm. Eighteen tenants ordered to quit refused to co-operate despite police accompanying the estate's agent and sheriff officer to serve judicial papers on them. Men and women had lain in wait all night, and in the morning ambushed the party, burning the eviction papers. A second attempt to enforce the evictions ended with the police being driven off, and a further attempt ended with the summonses being seized and burned, and the boat that had brought them dragged onto the shore. When the sheriff officer tried again the following year, his legal papers were seized and he was stripped naked. Reports noted that women were at the forefront of the resistance, despite official claims that they were men dressed as women. The evictions were never carried out.
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There were further instances of resistance in the 1870s after Sir James Matheson purchased the Isle of Lewis and a smaller island adjoining it, Bernera. He appointed a solicitor, Donald Munro, to be his factor, and Munro began clearing the estate in the usual heavy-handed way. In 1874, he sent a sheriff officer to Bernera to serve fifty-eight eviction notices, but when the bailiffs arrived at Tobson they were pelted with a shower of clods of earth. The sheriff officer had his coat torn and he issued a threat that ‘if he had a gun … Bernera mothers would be mourning the loss of their sons'.
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Three crofters were arrested but hundreds of people marched on Matheson's home, Lews Castle in Stornoway. Matheson claimed Munro was acting without his instruction, and dismissed him the following year. Meanwhile, in a celebrated court case the three arrested men were acquitted.

By the 1880s the battle for the land in Ireland helped inspire resistance in the Highlands and Islands, and soon links were being established. In 1881, Michael Davitt, of the radical Irish Land League, spoke in Glasgow in favour of nationalisation of the land and a taxation of land values. Davitt was leading the fight against absentee landlordism in Ireland, the ‘Land War'.
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The leader of the Irish Home Rule Party, Charles Stewart Parnell, entered the fray too, speaking at a meeting organised by Highland societies in Glasgow's City Halls in 1881. At that time there were evictions taking place in Skye, and the Irish Land League sent £1,000 to help fund the fight to stop them.
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A Land League was formed in the Highlands, and its leader in Lochcarron, John MacRae, wrote:

The Braes on Skye was home to a crofting community that eked out a living along the Sound of Raasay. In the summer months the men followed the herring shoals, leaving the women to tend the croft: ‘… a few acres of land, with a few sheep, perhaps a cow or a pig or a horse, and a potato patch'.
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In early 1882 the landlord revoked the longstanding right of these crofters to graze their sheep on Ben Lee. After offering to rent the pasture and being refused, the crofters simply turned their sheep out onto the hillside.