The Silent Weaver (9 page)

We didn't understand it. We knew nothing about it. We knew nothing about illnesses of that kind, we weren't acquainted with illnesses of that type. Who was? Who was? Nobody here, nobody in this village. And in the village let me tell you, you found they weren't your best friends. They were frightened of Angus. Well he was so tall, and he was so big, and he was different to everybody else, you know . . . Because they were all just ordinary, like we're all ordinary. And he was different, you know.

I wouldn't say he was aggressive. I was thinking back, there was nothing . . . he never did any harm to himself or . . . I don't know how to put it . . . He didn't look after himself. He just didn't look after himself. That was the bit that he didn't . . . He seemed unable to cope. Couldn't cope.

‘Nobody seems to know what happened to him in the Faroes,' said Angus MacPhee's nephew Iain Campbell.

He just had some mental problem. He was perfectly ok when he went. So my mother Patricia brought him back from hospital to Iochdar. He must have been here a couple of years, because he was working the croft, but he just couldn't manage. He couldn't look after himself or the animals. I think most of the animals died while he was ill. His father would have been there, but he was quite old by this time. I think his horse died, actually.

And then he would do eccentric things, like pull the cart himself. He would take the cart up to the moor where we get
the peats, out at the other end of the township. He'd pull it back with the peats, and seem to have trouble getting it up the hill beside the school. The children would come out of school and hang onto the cart while he was pushing it . . .

‘Oh, we had the doctor in to see him and assess him,' said Peigi. Late in 1946 the local doctor suggested sending Angus for treatment at Inverness District Asylum. His report to the asylum said that Angus MacPhee was ‘reported to have displayed odd behaviour for some six months prior to admission. He sat up all night, was elated and excited, and went round on all fours at times, barking like a dog'.

‘They all thought that he would benefit by it [admission to the asylum], you know,' said Peigi, ‘it would be a benefit for him. He just didn't tell you what he felt. He was not a communicator, you know, he wouldn't tell you what he felt.

‘They took him in a car and put him on the boat and from the boat they put him on the train and from the train they took him to Inverness. It was a three-day journey I suppose, to get him there.

‘I didn't see him for years.'

The first patient to be admitted through the newly opened doors of Inverness District Lunatic Asylum in 1864 was a 42-year-old mariner referred to as Donald D. ‘His attack of illness,' wrote physician superintendent Martin Whittet 100 years later, ‘was stated to have been characterised by violence, destruction of furniture, and very dirty habits. It is said to have been precipitated by pecuniary difficulties and the loss of his vessel . . .

‘He had had a previous history of delirium tremens. Before the month was out, it was stated that he was exhibiting none of
these attacks of violence. On the contrary, he was found to be smiling, obedient and cheerful, and so far as he could manifest his feelings, grateful at every little service performed on his behalf, day and night, for he slept little. He was continually muttering or incessantly repeating and shouting at the top of his voice the word “pipe”. '

A year later the asylum contained 200 people. In 1946, when Angus MacPhee was housed there, he had 840 fellow residents of both sexes.

Highlanders had for centuries treated mental illness with a combination of shock therapy, care in the community, prayer and punishment. There were several Gaelic words for such an affliction, and even more diagnoses and prescriptions. Certain wells, charms, amulets and incantations were invested with healing power. The
caothach
might be treated in the Hebrides by towing a sufferer through the cold sea behind a rowing boat, or by resting his head on an anvil and swinging a blacksmith's hammer towards it in an awful controlled feint (‘he must do it so as to strike terror in the patient and this they say always has the desired effect'). In Roman Catholic South Uist, at least one incantation attributed to St Columba was recited to ‘wither the madness' along with a number of other ailments, and ‘an autumn Saturday moon' was reputed to be seven times more likely than any other to trigger insanity.

They had no other cures and few other diagnoses.

Under Scots law from the fourteenth century onwards, ‘fatuous' people were the responsibility of the nearest male relative on their father's side, and ‘furious' people were fettered by the Crown. Scots law might not always have reached into the distant islands and glens, but it touched such mainland Highland burghs as Inverness, where as late as the eighteenth
century ‘violent maniacs' were imprisoned beneath a grill on the pillar of the town's old stone bridge.

In 1843 a coalition of the great and the good in the Highlands established a committee with the aim of ‘promoting the erection of a lunatic asylum at Inverness for the Northern Counties'. While Lord Lovat, the MacLeod of MacLeod, the MacKintosh of MacKintosh and their friends were busily raising money, in 1855 a Royal Commission was appointed ‘to inquire into the condition of lunatic asylums in Scotland, and the existing state of the law of the country in reference to lunatics and lunatic asylums'.

The commission reported the story of a 68-year-old ‘male pauper lunatic' in the Wester Ross village of Achintee, who had been failed by Gaelic charms and incantations.

He had been insane for forty years. He lived in a turf house, the roof was leaking and the door, about four feet high, opened directly into the place where the patient was confined, and there was no window or any opening for one.

The turf walls were damp and the floor was of earth. There was no furniture of any description except the bed to which the patient was chained. No bedding except a quantity of loose straw was provided. The patient was wrapped in a piece of blanket, old and dirty, and two pieces of old bed-covering. Except for these bits of rags he was naked. He had been chained for thirty years. The chain was two-and-a-half feet in length, and its end was fastened round the patient's ankle. He never left his bed. His knees were now contracted and drawn up on his chest and completely rigid. He was stated to be occasionally ‘furious and excited'. He never washed, except twice in the course of the year.

The publicity given by the Royal Commission to such wretched cases caused outrage. Something clearly had to be
done. The Inverness Asylum Committee redoubled its efforts. It acquired an exposed and stony plot of land on the upper south side of Dunain Hill, two miles west of Inverness town centre. (Creag Dùn Eun, its Gaelic original, means rocky hill of the bird.) It was both a remote and, in the nineteenth century, tremendously scenic spot. It looked east over the River Ness flowing towards the Caledonian Canal, the silver Moray Firth and the North Sea. Beyond those waterways the high round hills of the central Highlands rolled into the distant south. Below the hills Inverness itself crouched like a toy town beneath a pall of smoke.

On that hilltop the committee built of red whinstone a grand Victorian sprawl of an institution, two to three storeys high, with decorative high turrets and two water towers. Inverness District Lunatic Asylum would contain more than 350 patients before it was considered, in 1879, to be overcrowded. In May 1864 Donald D., the mariner, was admitted. He was followed over a further 136 years by many, many thousands of others.

The word lunacy, with its origin in the phases of the moon, itself suggests that the Victorians were no nearer than their predecessors or their successors to reaching a reliable definition of insanity, let alone a cure. Inverness District Asylum slowly filled up with an assortment of drunks and depressives, unmarried teenage mothers and middle-aged indigents, sociopaths and socially innocuous individuals who considered themselves to be Mary Queen of Scots or a bumblebee. Their commonality was that they could not be reconciled to their homes and societies because they were a danger to themselves, because they were a danger to others, because they were a financial burden, because they were an embarrassment, or, most usually, for some synthesis of those four reasons.

Although there was a reasonable turnover of patients admitted to the asylum, there was also a good number of lifers. Over a third of those admitted were released within two years. But many of them were subsequently re-admitted; as the decades passed admissions continued to outstrip discharges by almost two to one and the number of patients who died on the premises – frequently from old age – steadily increased.

In 1931 it was noted with bafflement that there were twice as many registered ‘pauper lunatics' in the Highland counties as in the rest of Scotland. A pauper lunatic being by definition somebody who was both unbalanced and unable to subsidise himself (few wealthy lunatics were referred to Inverness District Asylum), Highland poverty was clearly part of the problem. The subsistence lifestyle common in much of the rural Highlands at that time did not drive an unusually large percentage of the population mad. But it did mean that families often could not afford to support their chronically sick; they could not without great difficulty carry for a lifetime the burden of an unproductive member. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in some remote islands and parishes in the north-west of Scotland the system of local poor relief occasionally collapsed because there were too many paupers and too few ratepayers.

Doctors, officials and other experts scrabbled around for the rest of the equation. It was suggested that certain wily but sane Hebrideans had themselves certified as pauper lunatics to win a small allowance from the state. It was stated that emigration ‘has drained the Highlands and Islands of much good stock, leaving behind weaker and older people who are unable to stand up to the strain of daily life on the sea coast or among the hills'.

Part of the reason for the boom in Highland lunacy lay in the all-embracing, ambiguous definitions of the term. One in every five admissions to Inverness District Asylum would be for intemperance. Those patients were most frequently discharged after a few weeks, once they had sobered up and dried out – and just as frequently re-admitted. Some men and women were registered as pauper lunatics because they had venereal diseases.

In 1902, exactly one-third of the 157 new admissions that year were ‘considered hereditary'. Four years later the strange case of two young sisters was thought to illustrate that hereditary principle. In 1906 a girl from the island of Skye was referred to the asylum with ‘acute mania'. Her sister went to visit and found the occasion so distressing that before she could return home, she also ‘developed an attack of acute mania and had to be admitted'.

There were orphans in there, and old people who could no longer fend for themselves, and young women who had been willed out of their ‘hugger-mugger' communities for the shame of having an illegitimate child, who for the rest of their lives had nowhere else to go.

In 1927 the asylum physician decided that of his 99 patients previously diagnosed as suffering from melancholia or mania, 22 were actually afflicted by dementia praecox. Dementia praecox, premature dementia, or precocious madness, was a disorder characterised by rapid cognitive disintegration, which was usually first observed in the patient's early adulthood. Dementia praecox would itself within a few years be absorbed in the medical lexicography by another delusionary, dysfunction al condition widely popularised as schizophrenia. But when dementia praecox were the words in use, Dr J.C. MacKenzie of the Inverness District Asylum noted that, by
early-twentieth-century Highland standards, its sufferers ‘tend to lead protected lives, and live long'.

Despite and possibly because of all that, a sense of shame attached itself to the big house on Dunain Hill. ‘The dread of the Asylum and the feeling of prejudice against it,' wrote medical superintendent Dr John Keay in 1897, ‘once so strong, is happily dying out.' Dr Keay was too optimistic. Sixty-seven years later, in 1964, one of his successors reported that ‘a letter arrived from a doctor seeking admission for a patient, saying that she was now willing to come into [the asylum]. Her previous reluctance to do so was because of the stigma attached to such a move.'

That mark of disgrace was not unique to Inverness among British asylums. But it was stronger in self-consciously moral societies, and more pervasive in tightly knit, interconnected communities such as those scattered across the Highlands and Islands. It sprang from pride and dread of public failure. It was of course self-defeating, in that if residency in Inverness District Asylum was considered to bestow the mark of Cain, there was little point in a patient bothering to recover. He or she would only carry the mark back home with them, and once there be somehow tainted for life. For many, their only course after entering the asylum lay either in leaving the Highlands and Islands altogether (which was even in the twentieth century too big a step for a lot of Scottish Gaels to contemplate), or spending the rest of their lives being fed and protected in the increasingly familiar surroundings on Dunain Hill.

In that sense of humiliation may lie another part of the reason why the Highlands had so high a proportion of registered pauper lunatics, and why Inverness District Asylum had so many lifelong patients and so many deaths in residence.
Once inside, fragile Highlanders could barely imagine leaving again. They had no other future. They became, in a twentieth-century word, institutionalised.

Angus MacPhee entered Inverness District Asylum on 31 December 1946. He was one of 137 new admissions to the asylum of 842 patients that year. It was recorded that among the admissions in the previous year, ‘44 were cases of melancholia, 17 of Mania, 13 of Schizophrenia, 25 of senile states, 12 of mental deficiency, 7 of acute confusion, 2 of epilepsy and 1 of delirium tremens'.