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After the Clearances: Evander McIver and the ‘Highland Question’, 1835–73

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 March 2012

ERIC RICHARDS  and
ANNIE TINDLEY
ERIC RICHARDS
Affiliation:
Department of History, Faculty of Social Sciences, Flinders University, GPO Box 2100, Adelaide, Australia5001Eric.Richards@flinders.edu.au
ANNIE TINDLEY
Affiliation:
Department of History, Glasgow Caledonian University, Cowcaddens Road Glasgow, G4 0BA, Scotland, UKAnnemarie.Tindley@gcu.ac.uk
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Abstract

This article explores how estates in the Scottish Highlands were managed after the clearances. The land system had been radically redrawn, creating consequences that those who inherited the post-clearance world endeavoured to manage. At the centre of the post-clearance Highlands were the estate managers, or factors, who were effectively responsible for the economic and social conditions on their employers’ estates. They controlled the levers of Highland life and faced the realities of the post-clearance order. Prominent among this group was Evander McIver. This article examines McIver's career up to 1873, framed by a discussion of the ‘Highland Question’ of how estates reacted to the continuing poverty and occasional destitution of their small tenants, or crofters. McIver held adamant views on this question, and the origins and expression of these views through his career are delineated in this article.

Type
Research Article
Information
Rural History , Volume 23 , Issue 1 , April 2012 , pp. 41 - 57
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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References

Notes

1. For overviews of this process see Devine, T. M., Clanship to Crofters War: The Social Transformation of the Scottish Highlands (Manchester, 1994)Google Scholar; Richards, E., The Highland Clearances: People, Landlords and Rural Turmoil (Edinburgh, new edn. 2008)Google Scholar; Macinnes, A., Clanship, Commerce and the House of Stuart, 1603–1788 (East Linton, 1996)Google Scholar.

2. Richards, Highland Clearances; Richards, E., Debating the Highland Clearances (Edinburgh, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3. Hunter, J., The Making of the Crofting Community (Edinburgh, 1976), pp. 33, 42–3Google Scholar; Richards, E., The Leviathan of Wealth: The Sutherland Fortune in the Industrial Revolution (London, 1973), pp. 244, 247–8Google Scholar.

4. Orr, W., Deer Forests, Landlords and Crofters: The Western Highlands in Victorian and Edwardian Times (Edinburgh, 1982), pp. 3–4, 12–14Google Scholar.

5. Richards, Leviathan of Wealth, pp. 254–6; Hunter, Crofting Community, pp. 31–9.

6. Hunter, Crofting Community, pp. 50–1; Gray, M., The Highland Economy, 1750–1850 (London, 1953)Google Scholar.

7. Hunter, Crofting Community, pp. 110, 119–120; Tindley, A., The Sutherland Estate, 1850–1920: Aristocratic Decline, Estate Management and Land Reform (Edinburgh, 2010), pp. 59–60Google Scholar. The processes and changes on English estates were far less problematic in this period; see Mingay, G. E., Land and Society in England, 1750–1980 (London, 1994), pp. 195–6Google Scholar; Chambers, J. D. and Mingay, G. E., The Agricultural Revolution, 1750–1880 (London, 1966), pp. 170–95Google Scholar.

8. Tindley, The Sutherland Estate, p. 5.

9. PP 1884 XXXII-XXXVI Commission of Inquiry into the Condition of the Crofters and Cottars of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland [hereafter Napier Commission Evidence].

10. Similar difficulties in rural economics, poverty and discontent could be found on Irish estates; see Vaughan, W. E., Landlord and Tenant in mid-Victorian Ireland (Oxford, 1994), 104, 112CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Donnelly, J. S., The Land and the People of Nineteenth Century Cork: The Rural Economy and the Land Question (London, 1975), pp. 173–8, 184Google Scholar.

11. Principally the enquiries surrounding the Highland famine of the 1840s and in the later nineteenth century, the Napier Commission (1883) and the Deer Forest Commission (1892–5): Parliamentary Papers [PP] 1841, First Report from the Committee on Emigration, Scotland (1841) [hereafter Emigration Committee]; Parliamentary Papers [PP] 1884 XXXIII-XXXVI, Evidence and Report of the Commissioners of Inquiry into the Condition of the Crofters and Cottars in the Highlands and Island of Scotland; Parliamentary Papers [PP] 1895 XXXVIII-XXXIX, Royal Commission (Highlands and Islands, 1892), Report of Evidence, 1895 [hereafter Deer Forest Commission].

12. McIver, E., Memoirs of a Highland Gentleman: Being the Reminiscences of Evander MacIver of Scourie, ed. by Henderson, Reverend G. (Edinburgh, 1905)Google Scholar.

13. Scotsman, 30th January 1905.

14. McIver, Memoirs of a Highland Gentleman, pp. 123–7.

15. This was a common training for estate management, before greater professionalisation in the early twentieth century: Adams, I. H., ‘The Agents of Agricultural Change’, in Parry, M. L. and Slater, T. R., eds, The Making of the Scottish Countryside (London, 1980), pp. 159–60, 165, 167–9Google Scholar; Adam, R. J., ed., John Home's Survey of Assynt, Scottish History Society, third series, vol. LII (Edinburgh, 1960), 36–40Google Scholar; Adams, I. H., ed., Papers of Peter May, Land Surveyor, 1749–1793, Scottish History Society (Edinburgh, 1979), pp. 15–17Google Scholar.

16. McIver, Memoirs of a Highland Gentleman, p. 106; Napier Commission Evidence, 1700; Macleod, J., None Dare Oppose: The Laird, the Beast and the People of Lewis (Edinburgh, 2010), pp. 58–60Google Scholar.

17. Grant, J. Shaw, A Shilling for your Scowl: The History of a Scottish Legal Mafia (Stornoway, 1992), pp. 44–5Google Scholar.

18. Grant, A Shilling for your Scowl, pp. 39–49; Macleod, None Dare Oppose, pp. 78–9, 88–91.

19. Hunter, Crofting Community, pp. 13–14.

20. Napier Commission, 1700: ‘I could speak Gaelic before I could speak English’.

21. McIver, Memoirs of a Highland Gentleman, p. 28; Napier Commission Evidence, 1700.

22. McIver, Memoirs of a Highland Gentleman, p. 32.

23. McIver, Memoirs of a Highland Gentleman, p. 31.

24. Tindley, The Sutherland Estate, p. 139; McIver, Memoirs of a Highland Gentleman, p. 32.

25. From Tulloch (bought in 1762 by his grandfather for £10,500), to Ardross, Morefield, Leckmelm, Brealangwell, Balone, Strath-anshalag and Fisherfield. In general see, The Historical Committee of the Clan Davidson Association, UK, The Davidsons: The Clan, its History and its People (Dingwall, 2004), pp. 53–5.

26. Historical Committee, The Davidsons, pp. 60–7; the story is also in McIver, Memoirs of a Highland Gentleman, pp. 33–6, 55–6.

27. McIver, Memoirs of a Highland Gentleman, p. 36.

28. McIver, Memoirs of a Highland Gentleman, p. 55.

29. McIver, Memoirs of a Highland Gentleman, pp. 53–5; Historical Committee, The Davidsons, pp. 72–3.

30. He later said, ‘I have had to do with crofters from my youngest days’, Napier Commission Evidence, 1700.

31. PP (1841), First Report from the Committee on Emigration, Scotland (1841) [hereafter Emigration Committee]; Grimble, I., The Trial of Patrick Sellar (Saltire Society, Edinburgh, 1993; first edition, 1962), p. 143Google Scholar.

32. Emigration Committee, p. 120.

33. Emigration Committee, p. 120.

34. Emigration Committee, p. 120; McIver, Memoirs of a Highland Gentleman, pp. 76–7.

35. Emigration Committee, p. 121; Devine, T. M., The Great Highland Famine: Hunger, Emigration and the Scottish Highlands in the Nineteenth Century (Edinburgh, 1980), p. 11Google Scholar.

36. Emigration Committee, p. 121; that is, a landlord policy was at least partly to blame.

37. Emigration Committee, pp. 122, 124.

38. Emigration Committee, p. 124.

39. Emigration Committee, pp. 124–5; Devine, Great Highland Famine, pp. 21–4.

40. Emigration Committee, p. 126; Devine, Great Highland Famine, pp. 8–9.

41. Emigration Committee, p. 126; Richards, E., ‘Malthus and the Uses of British Emigration’, in Thompson, A. S. and Fedorowich, K., eds, Empire, Identity and Migration in the British World (Manchester, 2012)Google Scholar; Richards, E., ‘Highland Emigration in the Age of Malthus: Scourie, 1841–55’, Northern Scotland, 2 (2011), 60–2, 70CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

42. Staffordshire County Record Office [hereafter SCRO], Sutherland estates papers, D593, K/1/3/38 James Loch to the Duke, 6th April 1851.

43. SCRO, D593/P/22/1/22, McIver to Duke of Sutherland, 1st December 1848.

44. By the early twentieth century this process had reversed and Assynt saw a 44.2% decrease in population between 1891 and 1911; Census of Scotland, 1911 (Edinburgh, 1912), 2233; R. N. Hildebrandt, ‘Migration and Economic Change in the Northern Highlands in the Nineteenth Century, with Particular Reference to 1851–1891’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Glasgow, 1980), pp. 336–7.

45. McIver, Memoirs of a Highland Gentleman, pp. 65–6; Richards, Leviathan of Wealth, p. 236.

46. Bangor-Jones, M., The Assynt Clearances (Dundee, 2001), pp. 1, 14–16, 22–5Google Scholar.

47. Richards, E., Patrick Sellar and the Highland Clearances: Homicide, Eviction and the Price of Progress (Edinburgh, 1999)Google Scholar.

48. For example, during the clearances (c.1800–1820), the famine periods and the great land reclamation schemes of the 1870s and 1880s: see Tindley, A., ‘The Iron Duke: Land Reclamation and Public Relations in Sutherland, 1868–95’, Historical Research, 82 (2009), 305–6Google Scholar; Loch, J., An Account of the Improvement on the Estates of the Marquis of Stafford in the counties of Stafford and Salop and on the estate of Sutherland (London, 1820), pp. 60, 168Google Scholar.

49. Loch, An Account, p. 60.

50. Tindley, The Sutherland Estate, pp. 3–4.

51. Bangor-Jones, Assynt Clearances, pp. 45–6.

52. Hunter, Crofting Community, pp. 119–20.

53. Devine, Great Highland Famine, pp. xxx, 2.

54. Tindley, The Sutherland Estate, p.139; this was never meant as a compliment.

55. McIver, Memoirs of a Highland Gentleman, p. 332.

56. McIver, Memoirs of a Highland Gentleman, p. 332.

57. McIver, Memoirs of a Highland Gentleman, p. 330.

58. McIver, Memoirs of a Highland Gentleman, p. 40.

59. McIver, Memoirs of a Highland Gentleman, p. 328; National Library of Scotland [hereafter NLS], Sutherland estates papers, Acc 10225, Factor's Correspondence, 813, McIver to Peacock, 10th March 1885.

60. McIver, Memoirs of a Highland Gentleman, p. 66; Orr, Deer Forests, Landlords and Crofters, pp. 12–15.

61. SCRO D593, K/1/3/37, J. Loch to the Duke of Argyll, 16th September 1849.

62. Loch, An Account, p. xxx.

63. Bangor-Jones, Assynt Clearances, pp. 17, 31.

64. McIver, Memoirs of a Highland Gentleman, p. 68.

65. Richards, Leviathan of Wealth, pp. 266–8.

66. SCRO, D593, P/22/1/22, McIver to Duke of Sutherland, 17th March 1848.

67. SCRO, D593, K/1/3/38, McIver to Loch, 5th May 1850.

68. NLS, Dep. 313, 1181, McIver to Loch, 3rd January 1851.

69. NLS, Dep. 313, 1181, McIver to Loch, 3rd January 1851.

70. SCRO, D593, K/1/3/39, McIver to Loch, 3rd January 1851.

71. SCRO, D593, K/1/3/39, McIver to Loch, 4th February 1851.

72. SCRO, D593, K/1/3/39, McIver to Loch, 11th February 1851. A similar conflict between McIver and truculent crofters occurred in October 1845, very early in McIver's factory; the episode is documented by M. Bangor-Jones, ‘History File’, Am Bratach (March 2011), 13.

73. NLS, Dep. 313, 1516, McIver to Loch, 28th March 1851 and 25th April 1851.

74. Tindley, The Sutherland Estate, pp. 10 ff.

75. Tindley, The Sutherland Estate, pp. 10–11, 171–2.

76. NLS, Dep. 313, 1524, McIver to Loch, 16th September 1859; Richards, Leviathan of Wealth, pp. 261, 274–8; Richards, Patrick Sellar, p. 355.

77. NLS, Dep. 313, 1181, McIver to Loch, 20th June 1851; Tindley, The Sutherland Estate, p. 11.

78. NLS, Dep. 313, 1181, Loch to McIver, 24th June 1851.

79. NLS, Dep. 313, 1181, McIver to Loch, 20th June 1851.

80. NLS, Dep. 313, 1516, McIver to Loch, 25th April 1851.

81. NLS, Dep. 313, 1516, McIver to Loch, 20th June 1851.

82. Richards, ‘Highland Emigration’, 65–8.

83. SCRO, D593, P/22/1/22, McIver to Duke, 5th January 1849.

84. In the teeth of an angry and resistant people, McIver was determined to individualise the lots in Stoer and to destroy the traditional communality of the pre-clearance world. The severity of these changes was described by his close friend, Reverend Dr Donald T. Masson, quoted in McIver, Memoirs of a Highland Gentleman, pp. 291–2.

85. In 1851, for example, the crofters of Clashmore wrote to the Duke to ‘lay their distressed case before him’ and beg that ‘they never would be desired to change their houses or make any further lots as long as they were able to pay their rent’: NLS, Dep. 313, 1397, Clashmore crofters to Duke, 1851.

86. Tindley, The Sutherland Estate, p. 10.

87. McIver, Memoirs of a Highland Gentleman, p. 79.

88. McIver, Memoirs of a Highland Gentleman, p. 330.

89. McIver, Memoirs of a Highland Gentleman, p. 67. He remarked, however, that, ‘The Highland people are not, as a rule, disposed to migrate or emigrate’, but in an emergency it was the only solution; Memoirs of the Highland Gentleman, p. 133; Richards, ‘Highland Emigration,’ 64–6, 71.

90. McIver, Memoirs of a Highland Gentleman, p. 77.

91. McIver, Memoirs of a Highland Gentleman, p. 280; Tindley, The Sutherland Estate, p. 20. He was not alone among the Sutherland factors in his dismissal of the crofting system: Tindley, p. 17.

92. NLS, Acc. 10225, Policy Papers, 211, McIver to Loch, 27th December 1861; Tindley, , ‘“Actual Pinching and Suffering”: Estate Responses to Poverty in Sutherland, 1845–1886’, Scottish Historical Review 230, 90:2 (2011), 239–42Google Scholar; Donnelly, J. S., ‘The Irish Agricultural Depression of 1859–64’, Irish Economic and Social History, 3 (1976), 33, 46–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

93. NLS, Acc. 10225, Policy Papers, 211, McIver to Loch, 20th October 1863.

94. George Loch had taken the position of commissioner on his father's death in 1855; Tindley, The Sutherland Estate, p. 14.

95. NLS, Acc. 10225, Policy Papers, 211, McIver to Loch, 8th December 1862.

96. NLS, Acc. 10225, Policy Papers, 211, McIver to Loch, 2nd October 1863.

97. McIver, Memoirs of a Highland Gentleman, p. 269.

98. In 1864 his twenty-one year old daughter Catherine died, followed by sixteen year old Donald in 1865; another son, Evander, died aged twenty in 1868 and lastly James, aged twenty-eight, died in India in 1869. McIver, Memoirs of a Highland Gentleman, p. 100.

99. McIver, Memoirs of a Highland Gentleman, p. 98.

100. NLS, Acc. 10225, Policy Papers, 211, McIver to Loch, 29th March 1869.

101. NLS, Acc. 10225, Policy Papers, 211, McIver to Loch, 17th March 1869.

102. Tindley, The Sutherland Estate, pp. 92, 95, 97.

103. Hunter, Crofting Community, pp. 128–30.

104. Tindley, The Sutherland Estate, pp. 138–40.

105. The total cost to reclaim Clashmore farm was £4964.9s.2d. for ninety-two acres; Tindley, The Sutherland Estate, p. 140.

106. SCRO, D593, K/1/3/62, McIver to Loch, 26th March 1873; 13th October 1873.

107. A distant anticipation of the philosophy that would inform the reforms of Stolypin in the last years of Tsarist Russia.

108. For an excellent synoptic account of the currents running through the region in the nineteenth century see, Newby, A. G., ‘Land and the “Crofter Question” in Nineteenth-Century Scotland’, International Review of Scottish Studies, 35 (2010), 7–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

109. Quoted in Tindley, The Sutherland Estate, p. 30.

110. Quoted in Tindley, The Sutherland Estate, pp. 30, 123, 147.

111. McIver's career beyond 1873, and the context of the furious crofter agitation and government intervention in the Highlands, is explored in our forthcoming paper, ‘Turmoil amongst the Crofters: Evander McIver and the “Highland Question”, 1873–1903’.