The Silent Weaver (5 page)

In 1891 Neil MacPhee was employed as an agricultural labourer and living in lodgings on Oban's High Street. His landlord and landlady were Donald and Jessie Currie, an Iochdar couple of his generation who had also emigrated from their ‘exhausted and unproductive ground' to live and work on the mainland.

At that juncture Neil was 30 years old, single and spoke only Gaelic. His schooling in South Uist had clearly been perfunctory and had equally clearly not fully educated him in English, which was in 1891 already the default language of most of the Oban conurbation. He would have got by. More than half of the population of the town spoke Gaelic as well as English, and in the surrounding countryside – where he would have laboured – the proportion of Gaelic speakers was much higher. But if Neil MacPhee was to travel any further south and east, he would need to acquire an English vocabulary. It is likely that he was helped with this in the house on the High Street. Donald and Jessie Currie and their young sons, all three of whom had been born in Oban, spoke both Gaelic and English.

For the next three decades Neil MacPhee had the life of an itinerant farm labourer on the Scottish mainland. His life was itinerant by definition rather than choice. Farmhands were hired at town fairs at Whitsuntide, seven weeks after Easter, and at Michaelmas in late September. The terms of hire were usually for six months or a year. Deals were struck verbally, and cemented by employers handing over a small downpayment called airles money. Once they had accepted airles money, labourers were legally bound to honour the agreement.

‘A skilled, unmarried farmworker's wages,' wrote John
Lorne Campbell, ‘were then [in the 1890s] about fourteen to eighteen pounds [roughly £840 to £1,080 in the early twenty-first century] for the half-year, plus lodgings in a bothy, that is, an outside building near the farm, where the accommodation might consist of a bedroom and a kitchen, with no water laid on, and, of course, no indoor sanitation. Oatmeal, milk, potatoes and coal were provided by the employer, and the workers were expected to do their own cooking . . . pay in the old days was in real gold sovereigns that would keep their value, and tobacco cost only threepence-halfpence [90 pence] an ounce and whisky three and sixpence [£10.50] a bottle . . .'

Agricultural hiring fairs were an almost undiluted legacy of the Middle Ages. But although the employers obviously had the whiphand, and some drove a harsher bargain than others, and the system was often brutal to elderly and infirm labourers, hiring fairs were not exactly slave auctions. In the small world of Scottish regional agriculture, farmers and labourers often knew and even liked and respected each other. Healthy, strong and experienced workers also learned to play the market without sentiment, and to set employers against one another.

Many Western Isles men of Neil MacPhee's generation crossed the Minch to Scotland for similar work. One of them, Angus MacLellan of Loch Eynort in South Uist, left an account of a hiring fair at Aberfeldy in western Perthshire which probably took place at Michaelmas 1894.

MacLellan had left South Uist, where ‘there was no work to be had', in 1889, at around the same time as Neil MacPhee. After working a two-year term on the farm at Tirinie, near Blair Atholl, he told his master Robert Menzies that he would not re-engage as he was going home to Uist. Menzies approved of the islander's domestic instincts and wished him well. The
25-year-old Angus MacLellan walked away from Tirinie and instead of returning to the Hebrides promptly travelled 12 miles south to Aberfeldy fair.

‘There was a lad from Uist out there,' he remembered almost 70 years later, ‘and he met me in the town, and asked me if I had been hired.'

‘I've not,' I said, ‘I haven't been hired yet.'

‘Do you want a place?' he asked.

‘I do,' I said.

‘Well,' he said, ‘a man was speaking to me down there just now, to see if I could get a secondman [a ploughman's assistant] for him.'

‘Where's he at?' I asked.

‘Beside Loch Tummel.'

‘Is it a good place?'

‘It is indeed,' he said. ‘I spent three years working for him.'

Well, you could only get a year's engagement [at Aberfeldy that Michaelmas], engagements of six months weren't going at all.

‘Oh well, if you spent three years there,' I said, ‘I think I might spend one. Is he a good master?'

‘Oh yes, indeed. Come along, then, I've only just left the boss here.'

We went along; the farmer met us just at the square.

‘Here's a lad for you,' said the Uistman, ‘who hasn't found a place yet.'

‘Oh, very good,' said the farmer – Thomas MacDonald was his name – ‘very good. Are you working here already?'

‘I am,' I said. ‘I'm working at Tirinie.'

‘Oh aye. Is it there you are?'

‘It is,' I said.

‘How long is it since you came there?'

‘It's more than two years,' I said.

‘Oh indeed then, it's likely you'll be fit enough for me. It's a secondman I'm needing. What wages do you want?'

‘I'll need to get sixteen pounds or fifteen pounds [for six months] anyway,' I said.

‘Ah, well,' he said, ‘wages are down this year. No one's getting more than fifteen pounds. But I'll give you thirteen.'

‘Oh, that won't do,' I said.

‘Oh, well there isn't so much work to do for me as there is at Tirinie at all. I know Tirinie very well.'

‘Well, I'm sure it isn't to be taking my ease that you want me for. How many acres have you in every break?'

‘About twenty.'

‘And you've only two pairs of horses?'

‘Yes.'

‘Well, I'm sure there'll be plenty of work there itself . . .'

‘Well,' said Thomas, ‘you'll get fourteen pounds, then, and your lodging free above that.'

‘Oh, very good,' I said.

He went and put his hand in his pocket then and gave me a crown as airles money. Then he went to see Robert Menzies, my boss.

‘I've just engaged one of your lads,' he said to him.

‘Oh, have you?' said Robert. ‘Which one of them have you got?'

‘Angus MacLellan.'

‘Aye? I didn't think that fellow was going to engage today at all . . .'

The next day Robert Menzies came where I was working.

‘So,' he said, ‘did you engage at the fair?'

‘Well, I did, but I didn't expect to at all when I left the house.'

‘Well, then,' he said, ‘it's best for you to stay where you are, and I'll send him – what did he give you as airles money?'

‘He gave me a crown.'

‘I'll send it to him myself, then, if you'll stay where you are.'

‘Do you want to send me to prison?' I asked.

‘He won't do anything to you if you stay where you are,' he said. ‘But if you engaged elsewhere, he could go for you.'

‘How would you like it yourself ?' I said. ‘Indeed, however bad he is, I'll spend a year there anyway.'

‘I'm sure you will. Ah well, then, see you don't engage at Pitlochry fair next year until I've seen you there.'

‘Indeed I won't.'

After numerous such Byzantine negotiations at hiring fairs, by the age of 40 Neil MacPhee was bilingual. He had to be. In 1901 he was living in Ruchazie to the east of Glasgow. At the beginning of the twentieth century Ruchazie was a discrete rural village. The dormitory suburbs of the city of Glasgow were quickly advancing, but Ruchazie and its neighbours, Hoggansfield and Millerston, were in 1901 still bucolic settlements within the north Lanarkshire parish of Barony. Neil lodged with a Ruchazie farmer and his family and worked as a ploughman. At home and on the farm, he was of course surrounded by English speakers.

Steam ploughing by heavy traction engines had been known in Britain for half a century. But in 1901 (which was also the year of the first recorded use of the word ‘tractor'), and for another 50 years, most farmers and almost all small farmers still used horses. In the dale of the Clyde, farmers used Clydesdales. Nobody in Scotland, possibly nobody in Britain, was in 1901 better qualified in the use and care of draught horses than a man from the western machair of the Uists. Breaking open the ground for sowing crops was largely winter work, so it is possible that Neil MacPhee was able to get back from Lanarkshire to South Uist to help with the Hebridean summer chores. But his income was earned in the Forth–Clyde valley, and there at last Neil found a wife.

At the end of January 1912 Neil MacPhee married Ellen McHendry in St Joseph's Roman Catholic Chapel at Sheddens,
five miles south of Glasgow city centre. He was 51 years old and she was a tall, pretty 33-year-old spinster and orphan.

Like Neil MacPhee, Ellen McHendry was an economic migrant. She had travelled to Scotland from County Antrim in the north of Ireland. She found a job as a housekeeper on the Castle Farm at Newton Mearns in Renfrewshire, two miles from St Joseph's Chapel. Neil met her while he was working a term at the Castle Farm.

Ellen MacPhee gave her husband four children before, when she was still in middle age, she went back to Ireland to die. During her short married life, during Ellen's ten years as a wife and mother, her new family followed Neil's employment from one hiring fair to the next, through the farming terms of rural Lanarkshire. Mary Ellen was born in 1913 in the parish of Eastwood. When Angus Joseph was born on 16 January 1915, almost exactly three years after their wedding, they were living in the hamlet of Nettlehole on the outskirts of the municipal burgh of Airdrie. The First World War had broken out six months earlier, but at the age of 54 Neil MacPhee was too old for military service.

Two more sisters followed Angus Joseph MacPhee. In 1917 Patricia was born in Palacerigg, just outside the busy old town of Cumbernauld in the rolling countryside five miles north of Nettlehole. And in August 1919, Ellen gave birth to Margaret – Peigi – MacPhee in Turnlaw Farm Cottages just south of Cambuslang. All of those places, all of those farms, were within half a day's walk of each other, and were very little further from Glasgow city centre.

When baby Peigi was born in 1919, Neil MacPhee was 58 years old. Ellen was 18 years younger, but a sick woman. For a number of reasons, Neil nursed the ambition to take his young
family to South Uist. Ellen visited the Hebrides just once. The MacPhee cottage in Balgarva was too small for her whole family, so she lodged with friends elsewhere in Iochdar. She never returned there. In piecemeal fashion, for at first Mary Ellen stayed with her mother, Neil took their four children back to South Uist. They would never see their mother again. Ellen MacPhee, née McHendry, died and was buried in Northern Ireland at the age of 43 in 1922.

Neil was then able to return to Iochdar because his brother Francis was by the early 1920s an elderly man, still single and still childless. Since before the death of their father Angus at a grand if indeterminate old age – he was somewhere between 83 and 93 – in 1898, Francis and his younger sister Anna had been working the croft together. As a girl Anna Bheag had worked as a fish-gutter in several west-coast ports before returning to keep house for her father and brother in Iochdar. She was also unmarried and also childless. Between them the two siblings had kept in Balgarva a typically open and generous household.

One of Anna Bheag's older sisters, who was not unusually also called Ann and due to her seniority was known as Anna Mhor, had married a Uist man named John Bowie and settled on a nearby croft at Carnan.

In 1882 and 1884 John and Ann Bowie had a boy named Archibald and a girl named Mary. In September 1885 Ann died in childbirth of puerperal peritonitis in her Carnan crofthouse, in the presence of her husband John. She was 35 years old. Her baby, who would be christened Angus, survived.

The grieving John Bowie kept Archibald and Mary, his two older children, hiring a local woman to keep house and care for them. The newborn, motherless infant Angus was sent two miles down the coast to Balgarva, to be raised there by his dead mother's younger sister Anna and her older brother Francis.

Angus Bowie became the son that Anna MacPhee never had, and probably also Francis MacPhee's surrogate heir. They raised him into a healthy young man. They saw him through school. He became the first member of their family in Uist to speak English as well as Gaelic. As Francis reached his late sixties and Anna her late fifties, Angus passed his age of majority at home in Balgarva, caring for the croft and the animals and the seasonal round of rural responsibilities.

The houses in Balgarva stood on the very lip of the shore, so close to the high-water mark that occasionally a spring tide would send a ripple of salt water under their doors and across their floors. Low tides revealed a marine estate which stretched for acres before the thatched cottages: a wet desert of white sand, seaweed and rock. Boulders of ancient gneiss nudged from the soil out to the sea across this no-man's-land of tidal strand. Only their summits were visible, like iceberg tips, and the smooth carapace of those immoveable outcrops had for millennia been polished by the water and the sand.

One day young Angus Bowie went down to a boulder on the foreshore of 52 Balgarva and painstakingly etched his initials in the hard surface. It cannot have been a casual task. Outer Hebridean Lewisian gneiss is among the oldest and most resistant surface stones in the world. It would have been as easy to carve marble. But with a firm instrument and a lot of resolve Angus Bowie left his mark, in the shape of the letters ‘A. B.', for a further century or two on the rocks in the sea and the sand by the croft that he knew as home. Each letter was two inches high, each had a carefully tutored full-stop, each was deeply incised where the retreating Atlantic tide would reveal it for hours to the sun and the rain, before the incoming sea claimed and covered it again.

On 3 August 1914, some time after that inscription was made and shortly before Angus Bowie's 29th birthday, Britain declared war on Germany for the first time in the twentieth century. Both Angus and his older brother Archibald immediately joined the 1st Cameron Highlanders. They were sent to the Western Front, where they promptly engaged in the first Battle of Ypres in Belgium. The battle was ultimately successful. The Allies regained Ypres, but at enormous cost to British regular and Territorial Army infantry.