The Scottish Clearances: A History of the Dispossessed, 1600-1900

by T.M. Devine

Over the two decades from 1841 to 1861 many west Highland parishes experienced an unprecedented fall in population, primarily caused by large-scale emigration. Uig in Lewis lost almost a half of its total population, the island of Jura nearly a third, several parishes in Skye a quarter or more, and Barra a third. In the whole of the region covering the west coast north of Ardnamurchan and the Inner and Outer Hebrides, the total population decline averaged around 30 per cent.

We do know, however, that the exodus of this period was principally from the Hebrides, and especially from the islands which had suffered most during the potato famine, particularly Lewis, North Uist, South Uist, Barra, Tiree, Mull and Skye.

The exercise identified around 2,500 men, women and children designated for emigration. However,

tone of deference and even submissiveness runs through the petition but also articulated is the age-old claim of the people to the land because of past service to the ducal family and long residence on the township and the estate.

Tiree,

The root cause of the teeming numbers had been the reckless subdivision of land into crofts which were then fragmented again by the expansion of the cottar class, who by 1841

comprised over a third of all the inhabitants on the island.

The packing in of small tenants to provide labour for kelping was a principal factor. Another had been the long-term effect of soldier r...

Mass clearance in the Highlands had ended by the later 1850s, though some individual evictions continued.

Also, in early 1856, after a full decade of misery, conditions began to improve for the majority of the population.

An equally important expansion occurred in the purchase of tea, sugar, jam and tobacco.

but by the 1890s tea drinking had become universal in the crofting districts and a familiar part of the domestic way of life.

In the 1870s and 1880s the majority of the population of the western Highlands became less dependent on the produce of the land for survival and even more reliant on the two sources of income and employment, fishing and temporary migration, which

They entered more fully into the cash economy, selling their labour for cash wages and buying more of the necessities of life with their earnings rather than producing them themselves.

Manufactured clothes and shoes, ‘shop produce’ as they were known in the region, steadily replaced the home-made varieties in t...

Shopkeepers, merchants and fish curers supplied credit on which meal and clothes were bought until seasonal earnings from fishing and...

new structure depended ultimately on five factors: the recovery of the prices for Highland black cattle; a steep fall in world grain prices in the 1870s and 1880s; a revolutionary expansion in steam navigation in the western Highlands; the growth of the indigenous fishing industry; and a further increase in the scale of temporary migration and casual employment outside the Highlands.

In the early 1850s a single small steamer had plied the route between the Clyde and Portree in Skye once every fortnight. Three decades later two larger vessels sailed to Skye and Lewis every week and a further three ships visited Barra and North and South Uist. These developments in communications were both cause and effect of the changing way of life in the region and the basis of the closer involvement of the people in the money economy. Above all, they allowed the population of more areas to take full advantage of the sustained fall in world grain prices which took place after the opening up of the interior areas of North America by railroad and the new steamship connections established with the purchasing countries in Europe. In the early 1840s meal imported from the Clyde sold at an average of £2.2s. per boll in the Outer Hebrides; by the 1880s average prices were close to 16s. per boll.

Finally, the expansion in temporary migration which had begun during the famine was sustained after it. Virtually all sectors – agricultural work in the Lowlands, domestic service in the cities, the merchant marine, general labouring (such as in the gasworks of the larger towns) – produced more opportunities for Highland temporary migrants than before.

The seasonality of different work peaks made it possible to dovetail different tasks outside the Highlands and at the same time alternate labour in the crofting region with work opportunities elsewhere.

The classical example of the latter cycle was the interrelationship between the winter white fishery in the Minch, the spring herring fishery in the same waters and the east-coast herring fishery during the summer months.

income which percolated through the entire Inner and Outer Hebrides i...

consequence for the population of the western Highlands and Islands. It was estimated that 30,000 men and women came in a great annual migration to the fishing ports up and down the east coast from the Gaelic-speaking areas of the far west.

The emigration of some of the poorest classes of Highland society did allow a more rapid recovery from the trauma of the crisis of the 1840s than would otherwise have been the case.

Consumer goods were imported on a much larger scale.

Nevertheless, the majority of the people continued to endure an existence of poverty and insecurity after 1860. Life was still precarious and could easily degenerate into destitution if any of the fragile supports of the population temporarily crumbled.

It was successive bad seasons in 1881–2, affecting the whole of the western Highlands, which not only caused much suffering but also provided the initial economic impetus for the great crofters’ revolt of that decade. Over 24,000 people received relief in these years. Conditions deteriorated once more in 1888. In the Outer Hebrides ‘actual starvation’ was predicted and the inhabitants once more were supported by charitable organizations from the Lowland cities. The

At best, then, ‘recovery’ was modest and continued to be punctuated by years of distress.

Typhus remained common in some localities because of poor living conditions and poor sanitation.

Mass clearances were a thing of the past, but insecurity of tenure remained a fact of life:

Duncan Darroch, proprietor of the Torridon estate in Wester Ross, later admitted to the Napier Commission that the regulations which prevailed on his property meant that the young emigrated ‘and the elderly members generally go on the poor’s roll and, as they die out, the cottages are taken down’.

This degree of intervention in family life and the attack on the old traditions of inheritance ensured that crofting society remained far from settled in tranquillity in these decades.

However, the Battle of the Braes has come to be regarded as a historic event because it signalled a decisive change of direction from past episodes of protest. For one thing, it had been the people who first took the initiative to try to regain grazing rights which they had lost over seventeen years before. This disturbance was therefore proactive rather than reactive. For another, the rent strike, which had been employed with deadly effect on numerous Irish estates in earlier years, was a new tactic which proprietors found difficult to combat without contemplating mass eviction, a policy that was becoming politically unacceptable by the 1880s.

Skye and, to a lesser extent, Lewis. Direct action did occur in South Uist, Tiree and Harris but tended to be much more intermittent than elsewhere. In part the notion that the entire region was aflame and lawlessness everywhere rampant was the result of the extraordinary success of the publicity given to the disturbances in the Scottish and English

By the early 1880s a crofting lobby had grown up in the southern cities consisting of land reformers, Gaelic revivalists, second- and third-generation Highland migrants, and radical liberals.

Highland Land Law Reform Association (HLLRA), Comunn Gaidhealach Ath-Leasachadh an Fhearainn,

The Association took the motto ‘Is Treasa na Tighearna’, ‘The People are Stronger Than the Lord’.

When it appeared it was much criticized, not surprisingly by landlords, who saw ‘communism looming in the future’ as controls on their powers of private ownership had been recommended.16 It was also criticized by a majority of the people because they thought it fell far short of their aspirations. The recommendations ignored the problem of the cottars and were confined to those who possessed holdings rented at more than £6 and less than £30 per annum.

was a radical change from the kind of assumptions which had governed external intervention in the Highlands during the famine years of the 1840s and 1850s.

The subsequent legislation, enshrined in the Crofters Holdings (Scotland) Act, 1886, differed in some key respects from the Commission’s recommendations, but it too represented a decisive break with the past and began a new era of landlord–crofter relations in the Highlands. Security of tenure for crofters was guaranteed as long as rent was paid; fair rents would be fixed by a land court; compensation for improvements was allowed to a crofter who gave up his croft or was removed from it; crofts could not be sold but might be bequeathed to a relative and, with certain restrictions, the compulsory enlargement of holdings could be considered by the land court.

The Crofters Act made clearances of the old style impossible, breached the sacred rights of private property, controlled landlord–crofter relations through a government body and afforded the crofting population secure possession of their holdings.

In December 1884, Cameron of Lochiel noted that the current of political and public opinion was flowing fast against the landed interest. The following month about fifty Highland proprietors and their representatives met at Inverness to discuss the crofting agitation and agreed to provide crofters with leases, consider revision of rents and guarantee compensation for improvements in an attempt to draw the teeth of discontent.

No other class or group in late-nineteenth-century mainland Britain were given such protection as were the crofters of the Highlands in this way.

How and why they managed to achieve such privileges is the question which will be discussed in the final section of this chapter.

The period was also one of difficulty in sheep farming as the British market for wool and mutton was swamped by imports from the Antipodes.

Small-tenant income was also affected as, by this time, it was also usual for crofters to keep a few sheep.

All commentators stressed that it was young men and women who were the backbone of protest. They had been brought up in the better times of the 1860s and 1870s and had not known at first hand the anguish of the famine decades which had demoralized so many of the generation of their parents and grandparents.

A decisive factor prompting them to action was the example of the Irish.

Even more important, however, was the personal connection between Skye and Ireland. From about 1875 many Skye men became labourers in Campbeltown and Carradale fishing boats for the summer season in Irish waters, and there can be little doubt that these annual sojourns gave them experience of such Irish tactics as rent strikes. Indeed, the Irish connection goes a long way to explaining why, in its early years, the agitation concentrated mainly on Skye.

As one reporter who covered the events of the 1880s noted later: ‘Printed paper in the shape of newspapers proved the most deadly tool against the Highland landowners.’