When cowboys rode the Great Glen
No one travelling along the A82 between Fort William and Spean Bridge can fail to see two unusual white buildings by the roadside with ‘Great Glen Cattle Ranch’ written across them and speculate about their origin.
These concrete shelters owe their existence to Joseph W Hobbs (1891-1963), Scotland’s first and most successful cattle rancher who, two years after the end of the Second World War, boldly went where few farmers in the west Highlands had dared to go before.
When he was nine years old, Joe, the son of a Hampshire yeoman-farmer emigrated to British Columbia with his family. There, with his father and younger brother, he helped to develop 480 acres of unbroken land.
He visited Scotland during the 1914-18 war with the Royal Naval Air Service and returned to Canada as the representative of a number of Scottish whisky distillers establishing covert outlets across America from east to west and from the Yukon to Panama at the time of Prohibition.
Returning to London in 1930, he started a whisky export business of his own. In five years he did so well that he was able to buy distilleries in Stonehaven, Forres and Islay, and build one at Fettercairn, Kincardineshire.
He was attracted to Lochaber by the Ben Nevis Distillery. Taking a liking to the countryside, he purchased 3,500 acres of the Inverlochy Estate from Lord Abinger in 1945. This brought him not only a salmon river but a dairy farm with its herd of tested cattle, a sheep farm at Achindaul, and the imposing Inverlochy Castle.
The entrepreneurial Joe Hobbs had no plans to retire or become a tweeded Highland laird moving sedately between his castle, distillery, the river and his factor’s office. He wanted a new interest and he found it in cattle.
In 1939, Lord Abinger had offered the castle and home farm to the government as an agricultural training centre, which they accepted but, with the outbreak of war, the offer was withdrawn.
In the post-war years there was a huge demand for beef from around the world. Joe saw this as an opportunity to make another fortune and grasped it quickly and firmly.
‘The way the Canadians run prairie ranches has always interested me,’ he said, ‘so one day, when I saw a vast stretch of Highland hill land going cheap on my doorstep, I took it over.’
He began with 35 acres and by 1958 had reclaimed 1,260 acres of bog, rock and bracken; had thousands of yards of drains dug and erected miles of fences.
Once the ground was limed from his nearby quarry, it was good enough to sustain 600 breeding cows which in a decade produced 2,000 tons of prime beef.
‘I send them to the markets when they’re only 10 months old, then they go to the southern pastures to fatten.
‘The trouble in Britain is the lack of cattle breeders on a large scale. Shortage of land is a big factor. You need money, but it’s the only way. My own little unit cost me £20,000 in machinery and £50,000 to stock up with cattle. But I got out of the red after five years and now I’m making money.
‘Dammit,’ said the Highlands’ answer to Lord Sugar, ‘I wouldn’t be doing it if I wasn’t.’
To reclaim rocky wasteland and sheep-sick slopes on which to run more cattle, Joe imported the latest agricultural machinery from Canada.
He planted thousands of trees for shelter and to replace timber which had been cut down during the First and Second World Wars. He built houses, some at the rate of one a day, for his distillery and estate employees.
This was a man in a hurry and he did not spare himself, even working alongside his team of bonneted Lochaber ‘cowboys’ on horseback rounding up the preferred West of Ireland Connemara cattle on the rugged hillsides in true Western style, although lariats, sombreros and chaps-leggings were discarded!
The Great Glen Cattle Ranch attracted ridicule as well as wide interest and praise. His plans for carrying a huge herd of cattle on Highland deer forests right round the year were dismissed as romantic nonsense.
But reclamation on a vast scale allowed him to grow grass for the cattle and their calves during the summer and provide winter keep for the whole herd.
Soon this human dynamo and his pioneering passion came to the attention of the government. Keen to see more cattle raised in the Highlands, Joe hosted a visit by Hector McNeill, MP and Secretary of State for Scotland.
Impressed by what he saw, McNeill announced publicly: ‘Mr Hobbs is doing many valuable things for Great Britain; producing beef in quantity where none was produced before; producing silage which is a valuable conditioning factor for beef and a good form of winter feeding; turning bracken-infested hillsides into quality farmland; introducing new ideas in an area capable of helping to feed the nation and testing the possibility of creating fish oil for cattle feeding.’
Plans were afoot to equip the Torlundy lime quarry with modern machinery not only to meet the demands of the Highland building industry but, more importantly, to avoid having to import it from England.
Fort William – 100 miles nearer to America than Glasgow – was to be developed as an ocean port; a pulp/paper mill would be built at Corpach; a better rail network would serve the Highlands and open up the mountains to tourists from all over the world.
Mr Hobbs, ahead of his time, was certainly making things hum in Fort William in the 1940s and 1950s. Little wonder he was
made a Freeman of Lochaber along with Sir Donald Walter Cameron of Lochiel KT, chief of Clan Cameron and Lord Lieutenant of Inverness-shire.
Two more contrasting personalities would be hard to find. Lochiel, tall, aristocratic, belying his years, rarely out of Highland dress, and the romantic Gaelic speaking clan chief to the life.
Chubby Joe Hobbs, shipping magnate, naval veteran and bootlegger speaking with a slight transatlantic drawl, and a comparative newcomer to Lochaber.
The previous occupants of Inverlochy Castle appeared in Burke’s Landed Gentry. The Hobbs did not and, as a result, some of the Lochaber class-conscious brigade looked down their noses at them – that is until their annual cocktail party at the castle which was considered the best for miles around and not to be missed.
If Joe was popular in Lochaber, so too was his wife when she said at a conference in Edinburgh on the development of services for pensioners, that she was very keen on giving large drams to old people.
‘It helps buck them up no end,’ she announced. ‘Whenever I go visiting in the Highlands I always carry a bottle of whisky in my handbag. It works wonders.’
Mrs Hobbs said that on one occasion a large dram had succeeded where a doctor and a priest had failed to persuade an old man to go into a home for treatment.
Later, when asked, she said she paid for the whisky herself, but did not mind because the old folk enjoyed it so much.