Highland Resistance by Iain Fraser & Grigor

Author:Iain Fraser & Grigor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Scotland, crofters, landlords, popular struggle, England, colonialism, national identity, Scottish Parliament
ISBN: 9781849890441
Publisher: Andrews UK Limited 2011
Published: 2011-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The Mail’s news-desk and reporters diligently followed the commission throughout November. The reporters’ despatches never failed to underline, inter alia, the extent to which so many witnesses simply refused to give evidence except through the medium of the commission’s Gaelic-language interpreters.

By the beginning of November the commissioners had moved to consider applications from tenants of various proprietors in Sutherland, despite attempts to thwart its work by the landlords. At Gruids, for instance, on land owned by Lady Matheson of Lewis, an attempt was made to persuade the crofters to spurn the protection of the Crofters’ Act, and thus of the commission. This persuasion, however, they ignored: and their evidence was given by the local Land League leader William Black, who had also given evidence before Lord Napier.

According to one report, Black had been the subject of an eviction attempt. But his neighbours from Lairg, Rosehall, Bonar Bridge ‘and many other districts’, assembled ‘to his aid and made such a determined resistance that the officers of the law were forced to decamp without effecting their purpose’. Once again, the evidence heard sustained that collective sense of injustice, that collective vision of redress, that had in the previous decade been heard with increasing volume across the Highlands. Its central theme was the old one: the land for the people.

However, by that Christmas the commission, acutely aware of the continuing agitation in Skye and elsewhere, was drawing favourable comment from pro-crofter sources: not least because of its decision to thwart landlord attempts to circumvent the spirit of the Act by getting their crofters to sign leases. The commission ruled in this respect that only leases of more than one year (precisely the sort of crofting lease that a landlord would avoid) would render the Act inapplicable.

The perceived pro-crofter rulings of the commission had a dual effect across the Highlands. Early adjudications tended to serve as an incitement to crofters everywhere to have high expectations of the commission when it reached their area, thereby serving also as an encouragement to sustained agitation until such time as it did.

So once again there was trouble on Skye - at Elishader in Kilmuir - with the by now usual disturbances when sheriff-officers attempted to force payment of rent arrears. And just weeks later, further trouble erupted on Lord MacDonald’s lands in south Skye, at Sconser. In March, with the Crofters’ Commission on the island and taking evidence, the Sconser people readily admitted that on more than one occasion ‘they had driven deer found among their corn into the sea, where the animals were caught by fishing boat, the spoil being equally divided’.

By now, in the spring of 1887, having won security of tenure in law and being in the process of winning rent-reductions, the land movement was in the course of moving towards the demand of the return of the land increasingly under deer-forests. Towards the end of the year, this would re-appear in spectacular form. But meanwhile, the Act of the previous summer was amended, again

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