Hyperbole amid changing times is nothing new
We have survived bigger upheavals in our history than Brexit threatens to be in spite of the apocalyptic language used by both pro and anti campaigners. For example, as light relief from Brexit hysteria I recommend Sir Tom Devine’s masterly dissection of one of the most emotionally-charged parts of Scotland’s history “The Scottish Clearances – A history of the dispossessed.”
In fact that should probably be the most emotionally charged part of Scottish history because any mention of clearances triggers the instant response “Highland clearances” and – choose your own adjective – wicked landowners.
Authors of previous books on the Highland clearances, seen in black and white terms as the replacement of people with sheep in the 1800s, have not held back, although John Prebble, probably the most influential opinion-former with sales of hundreds of thousands for his trilogy of books in the 1960s, was restrained compared with several since. Devine lists a few: “The policy of genocide could scarcely have been carried out further;” “Sellar’s crimes against the people of Strathnaver were to be ranked with those of Heydrich” (one of the Nazi organisers of the holocaust against the Jews); “Like the shipping-off of the Polish and other Jews in cattle trucks.”
Strong stuff and ridiculously over-stated. As Devine makes forensically clear there were many more complicated reasons for the move of Gaels from their often-tiny Highland crofts where far too many people thought they had a hereditary right to land,
poor quality and providing the most miserable of existences as it might be.
As he also explains, much the same process had already taken place in Lowland Scotland more than half a century earlier with the disappearance of the cottars, a low-key process that has barely registered in public perception.
Robert Burns spells it “cotter” in his poem “The Cotter’s Saturday night” and invokes “His wee bit ingle, blinking bonnily,” the happy family, the Bible, the well-known line “From scenes like these old Scotia’s grandeur springs” and the wish that “Long may thy hardy sons of rustic toil/ Be blest with health, and peace, and sweet content.”
Nice rural image for a hard-scrabble way of life. Devine notes that cottars, families living in nearhovels on (very) smallholdings in return for supplying labour to the main farm tenant, accounted for about one third of the Lowland rural population in many areas in the late 1690s.
Consolidation of direct tenancies and eradication of multiple tenancies for one farm removed the cottars. By the time Burns wrote of them in the late 1700s, most had gone. Devine says that Lowland cottars, servants and small tenants had a culture of moving regularly within a locality and many found jobs in the developing textile industry of the Borders or jobs, and houses, on the
bigger tenanted farms now appearing.
But he adds that the “vexatious nature” of the process must not be underestimated: “The experience was one of dispersal and not always of carefully planned transfer … the silence of the people should not be interpreted as happy acceptance.”
Yet the low land clearances took place with little fuss compared with the drama of the Highland Clearances the best part of a century later. Devine notes that the Highland story has been told as dispossession and brutal repression of a famed warrior race driven to penury and starvation.
He says: “The narrative is compelling and poignant, but one in which some uncomfortable truths rarely intrude.” These include the limitations of the Highlands to provide a living from the land; a big increase in population on that poor land with no long-term alternatives for subsistence or employment; bankruptcy, because of hubristic extravagance by the traditional landed class who sold estates to businessmen and bankers; competition from Lowland manufacturing.
There is much more to read and ponder in Devine’s meticulously researched and wellwritten book. But will he change any minds among the rabid nationalists and believers in the half truths of the Prebble version of the Clearances? How very like Brexit.