Looking for the Campbells
When she befriended a man who had been one of the last Hebridean drovers, Terry J Williams wanted to find out more about his former colleagues. In this first part of a serialisation of her book, she explains how she did so.
I had spent a day at the North Uist Show with a smaller version of the Highland Drover exhibition at Dingwall hoping to meet people interested enough to share memories of the cattle sales of the 1950s and 1960s when my friend Ian Munro used to go across to work on the island as a drover. Local people expressed enthusiasm for my project, invited me into their homes, plied me with food and cups of tea and were usually still sharing stories when I left, often several hours later.
In the family croft on South Uist, John Macmillan soon had us surrounded by photographs and papers as he generously shared his wealth of local knowledge. He told me his great-greatgreat-grandfather used to keep 600 cattle on the rugged east side of the island. I brought out an archive photograph of a sale in progress and he picked out his grandfather in the crowd. Had I noticed a big stone enclosure as I left the main road? That was Milton Fank where the sale used to be held, though it had been much altered and added to over the years and was still in use for handling the crofters’ livestock. The voice recorder caught story after story.
Back in the van I spent the evening typing up my notes. Two names caught my attention: Neil and Simon Campbell. Back in Dingwall, Ian Munro had told me to look them up. Their family croft, he remembered, was near Lochboisdale.
Neil Campbell’s wife answered my phone call. Yes, I could come to see him any time at all for wasn’t he retired now? Just come, any time.
Looking two decades younger than his 82 years, Neil welcomed me with a firm handshake. He was not impressed to hear of his unsought fame. There was a pride in him nonetheless when he began telling me about droving cattle, recalling the exhaustion of long days in difficult conditions and frequently poor weather, with insufficient helpers and uncooperative animals. The drovers’ skill had been vital to the sale and transfer of island cattle to the mainland, and he assured me that, whatever information I might get from other people, only those who had actually walked with the cattle knew the full story.
I heard about the cold and the beasts running off, and no fences and the dogs, and the pay of £8 or so for the week’s work and the long days out in the weather...
‘Some of the cattle were easy enough,’ said Neil, ‘but you would get the awkward ones, oh yes, trying to get away all the time. They didn’t have time for grazing … There’s something else as well. You were without food all day. Well, later on in years there were vans going round but that time, when I started out, nothing ... I must be the oldest at this end of the island that was involved with it. There used to be another five of us.’ His brother Charlie was no longer with us, he said, but Simon still lived in the family home near Lochboisdale. Was I going to see him? Yes – and I’d been given instructions for finding the house.
Simon Campbell was waiting for me as my van bumped gently along a grassy track towards a plain grey house with smoke streaming from the chimney. Once again, I was made me to feel like a special guest.
There was a clear family likeness between the two brothers but each cast a different light on their droving days. Neil’s tales of hardship and misadventure turned to comedy in Simon’s telling of them. Hardly had I set up the recorder than we were out walking the roads with the cattle. Gesticulating, eyes flashing, he brought each scene to vivid life. At several points, he jumped up from his chair, miming the effect of island hospitality on a mainland cattle dealer or a beast leaping over a fence with men and dogs in pursuit. His voice rose and fell to suit the drama of the occasion, the rhythms of his native Gaelic underpinning his answers to my English questions.
The result was almost musical. Gaelic was the first language of nearly everyone who helped me. An occasional slight pause between my question and the response hinted at the moment it took to shift their instinctive answer into English for my benefit. I brought out my file of photographs and we were soon putting names to faces among the dealers.
‘That’s Andrew Hendry from Stirling there,’ said Simon. ‘And then there was a Mr Binnie – the one on the right, I think. Then the one on the left is Ian Oswald … Some of them were staying here – was Neil telling you? … They were sleeping down in the room. Bob Love and Tom Adams and Willie Hendry and Andrew Hendry. Two double beds down there, just two in each bed. They were staying here until my mother got old.’
A tingle ran up my spine. I was sitting by the fire next to the room where the cattle buyers had slept and a tea tray was waiting for me in the kitchen where they had eaten their meals. It all suddenly felt very real. I mentioned that the Dingwall team had stayed at the Lochboisdale Hotel. Oh yes, Simon remembered, and the Oban folk stayed ‘at our neighbours down here. They would phone to say they would be home at eight or nine o’clock. Maybe the sale was finished at six o’clock but there was a couple of jars going after that and sorting the cattle …’ His mother, wanting to have the dinner ready as soon as her lodgers got in, would put the potatoes on to boil at eight o’clock, but ‘they would be nine o’clock and after nine,’ said Simon. ‘She was worrying about the potatoes getting cold.’ Her neighbour, wiser to the ways of these cattlemen, waited until they came through the door before putting the potato pan on the stove. ‘And then there was drams going in the house down there,’ said Simon. ‘They were getting good feeds and they were happy.’
I thought there must have been a lot of fun as well as a great deal of hard work. ‘Oh yes,’ said Simon, ‘down at the pier and watching them going on the boat and this hullabaloo going on. There was never a dull moment. You would get a wee dram now and again. That was keeping morale going. There was no such a thing as tiredness, no.’
The Campbell brothers had both been eager to share their memories and, as I played back the recordings, I realised that each of the three drovers had spun me a different colour of the same yarn. Ian, the son of a mainland farmer, found wonder in sights and sounds that Neil and Simon had known all their days. For them, the adventure began with the arrival of the twice-yearly cavalcade of strangers in their midst and the welcome break in routine that the sales provided. Their talk was of the characters, the disasters and funny incidents along the way that enlivened the journey. They were on familiar ground, they knew the cattle and the people and, of course, they were at ease in their own language.
‘At every second croft you would hear the weavers at work,’ Ian had said and I could almost hear the soft thud of cattle hooves, the clack-clacking of the looms as crofts came and went, the constant booming presence of the Atlantic. By the time I reached the islands, only the last of these was unchanged. Ian’s was the thread that had led me here and now I held two more. My task was that of the weaver.