The Soap Man by Roger Hutchinson

Author:Roger Hutchinson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Birlinn
Published: 2011-06-12T16:00:00+00:00

6

WITH ME OR AGAINST ME

Lord Leverhulme’s charm offensive on the island did not stop at Gress bridge and the school at Back. Within hours of his arrival in Stornoway in March 1919 the Board of Agriculture’s Colin Macdonald was warned by his old friend Duncan MacKenzie of the Royal Hotel that he would ‘be at a dinner at the Castle within a week’.

And he was. Leverhulme intended to enjoy himself in Lewis, and the nature of enjoyment – he had been assured – required more of him than endless meetings and planning and bookwork. He must also go through the motions of relaxation and conviviality. This would not come naturally. His niece, Emily Paul, recalled:

He never took a holiday in the ordinary sense of the word, and kept to a routine of work even in the island, but the fresh air and numerous drives to inspect new roads, bridges, houses etc must have been of great benefit to him.

He lived very simply wherever he was, and never smoked. He had a tremendous amount of energy and was up at 4.30 every morning, getting a considerable amount of work done before his breakfast, which was served at 7.30 or 8 o’clock.

When in the island he used to take a walk after tea with one or more of his relatives or friends whenever he could spare the time and if the weather was favourable, and on Sunday he went with them to the United Free Presbyterian Church. Should we be dancing on any of the other evenings in the week, he would often join us in the ballroom, entering into both the Highland and the modern dances with zeal and enjoyment. When bed-time came he would run up the stairs two at a time to show us all how young and vigorous he felt.35

He threw house parties, where humble functionaries of the local authorities would mingle freely with his glittering guests from the outside world. They could be thirsty affairs. In the first couple of years the teetotal Leverhulme often had to be reminded to pass round the whisky bottle. In 1921 the island of Lewis voted for the prohibition of retail alcohol. This local by-law was agreed upon two years after Andrew Volstead’s National Prohibition Act had been enforced across all of the United States. It was not an unusual measure, at the time or later, in the Protestant Celtic fringes of the United Kingdom, and its reverberations would be felt in some of the draconian decisions of the Western Isles licensing authorities throughout the rest of the century. Unlike the Volstead Act, prohibition in Lewis was necessarily an isolated affair. Not only did it take place within a country – within, indeed, a county – where the purchase and consumption of retailed alcohol was in other districts still legal, but its strictures in practice applied almost exclusively to Stornoway, as there were no public bars elsewhere in the island. Only smaller units of strong drink were banned. It remained legal to buy wholesale quantities, such as cases of whisky and casks of beer.

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