Beacon in the West E-Book

Roger Hutchinson

• Herausgeber: Origin
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 278

Beschreibung

In 1918 Lord Leverhulme bought the island of Lewis with ambitious plans to massively expand its fishing industry and increase its population. In 1923, when his plans had failed, he offered it free of charge to the islanders in two parts. One part, which included impoverished rural areas, was economically unviable. But the other, based around the busy fishing port and administrative centre of Stornoway, was a different matter. In accepting Leverhulme's offer, the hardheaded, churchgoing business class of Stornoway took on the responsibility of making the radical slogan 'Land for the People' a reality. It was an unlikely coupling, but it worked to perfection. The 20th century was a tumultuous time for Lewis. Migration and depopulation were exacerbated by two world wars. Such problems could not be addressed in the lottery of private landownership, but in the stable, democratic government of the Stornoway Trust, town and country alike would weather the storms. Roger Hutchinson tells the story of those storms, and of the people who guided their pioneering estate into the relative security and prosperity of the 21st century. In doing so he paints a vivid portrait of a unique landholding experiment, of Highland land struggle and of the island of Lewis itself.

Leseprobe

BEACONIN THE WEST

First published in 2023 by

Origin, an imprint of

Birlinn Limited

West Newington House

10 Newington Road

Edinburgh

EH9 1QS

www.birlinn.co.uk

Copyright © Roger Hutchinson 2023

The right of Roger Hutchinson to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

ISBN: 978 1 78885 593 8

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication DataA catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Typeset by Initial Typesetting Services, Edinburgh

Papers used by Birlinn are from well-managed forests and other responsible sources

Printed and bound by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A.

Contents

Map

1   Leaving Lewis

2   The Biggest Offshore British Island

3   Prohibition and Population

4   Crofts Fit for Heroes

5   The First in the Field

6   Aviators, Golfers and Crofters

7   Not a Land Problem, But a Housing One

8   A New Party and a New Council

9   The Yukon Comes to Lewis

10   Blowing in the Wind

11   A Quiet Revolution in the Western Isles

Appendices

Bibliography

Index

1

Leaving Lewis

On a September day in 1924, the trim figure of William Hesketh Lever stood atop a rise in the Outer Hebrides and addressed a sombre gathering of several hundred people. Viscount Leverhulme of the Western Isles in the Counties of Inverness and Ross & Cromarty, as he had been known since 1922, was a practised public speaker. He had campaigned on five occasions as a Liberal Party candidate in his native northwest of England and had served in the House of Commons as Member of Parliament for Ormskirk in Lancashire between 1906 and 1909. On that afternoon in the Hebrides he was just fourteen days shy of his seventy-third birthday, but his voice, his eloquence and his verbal stamina appeared undiminished.

Leverhulme was on a small hill outside the town of Stornoway to complete his final duty as the outgoing proprietor of the island of Lewis. He was inaugurating its memorial to 1,151 local men who had fallen while serving in the First World War. The memorial was raised on the modest summit of Cnoc nan Uan, Hill of the Lambs, because that point was visible from Barvas, Lochs, Stornoway and Uig: all four of the traditional parishes of Lewis.

They had enlisted from all corners of Lewis, and many of their surviving comrades were also present on the memorial mound in September 1924. ‘In the first week of the War going through the whole of the Western Isles,’ their Member of Parliament Dr Donald Murray had told the House of Commons in 1918, ‘. . . and especially through the Island of Lewis, you could hardly find a man capable of bearing arms. Every man, I should say, between nineteen and forty-one or forty-two was either in the Army or the Navy fighting on land or sea.

‘We have had from the beginning of the War the long shadow cast by the setting sun of many a young life, darkening many a home in Lewis and the Western Isles. These sacrifices have continued throughout the War . . .’

As their proprietor, Viscount Leverhulme had issues with at least some of the returned soldiers and sailors. He had accused them of hunger for land, which they had expressed in nighttime raids to stake out small plots and house sites, of subverting his grandiose plans to reshape and reinvigorate Lewis as a densely populated industrial island.

But by September 1924 that battle had been fought and lost, and Leverhulme had too much political sense to rekindle the fire. The servicemen were nonetheless on his mind and in his sight as he looked over the gathering and said, ‘Lewis men love their home, their wife, their children with a passionate ardour that few can realise who have not lived in these wind-and storm-swept isles.’

Turning to address directly the young men in old uniforms, he continued, ‘You have returned from the war demobilised but not demoralised. You and we all must live our lives bravely and worthily of the sacrifice the dead heroes have made and set ourselves to perform our task . . . Farewell, brave dead! . . . With parting words we pray that your brave lives and noble deeds may forever endure fresh and fragrant in the memories and lives of all living and of countless generations yet unborn.’

His duty done, Viscount Leverhulme of the Western Isles accepted the thanks of the provost of Stornoway, Kenneth Mackenzie. ‘Although I am not today as closely connected with Stornoway and Lewis as I was twelve months ago, my heart is in that Canadian Boat Song,’ he said in reply. The ‘Canadian Boat Song’ to which he referred was an early nineteenth-century exile’s lament whose anonymous authorship attracted perennial speculation. Its most celebrated quatrain runs:

From the lone shieling of the misty island,Mountains divide us, and the waste of seas –Yet still the blood is strong, the heart is Highland,And we in dreams behold the Hebrides.

Leverhulme then departed Lewis for the last time. He left behind not so much a single ‘lone shieling’ as a baronial man-sion overlooking Stornoway and 683 square miles of moorland and loch which contained a multitude of relatively busy shielings.

He also left behind the most significant and enduring benefaction ever gifted to a large Hebridean island. One hundred square miles of Lewis, containing the town of Stornoway, several busy crofting districts and almost half of the island’s population would henceforth be owned, governed and managed not by the private landowners for whom the Scottish Highlands were infamous, and of which he had been a late example, but by a democratically elected local trust. It was a revolutionary gesture. Leverhulme had given the land to the people.

2

The Biggest Offshore British Island

The establishment of what would become known as ‘community land ownership’ in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland had been the last thing on Leverhulme’s mind six years earlier.

In 1918 he bought the island of Lewis, which was then one single Hebridean estate. The 67-year-old multi-millionaire was in semi-retirement from Lever Brothers, the international business colossus which he had painstakingly assembled.

He had also been widowed for five years. His beloved wife, Elizabeth, had died in 1913, leaving this most devoted of husbands bereft. In the spring of 1874, the newlywed William Hesketh Lever and Elizabeth Ellen Hulme had taken a honeymoon cruise around the western and northern Scottish islands which allowed them a happy afternoon ashore in Stornoway. When, forty-three years later, he noticed an advertisement in The Times which announced that the ‘sporting estate’ of Lewis, complete with Lews Castle in Stornoway, was on the market, he will have remembered that land of lost content. He remembered everything.

He seems to have paid around £170,000 for the entire island of Lewis. It was a bargain basement price. The seller, a serving army officer named Lieutenant-Colonel Duncan Matheson, was the latest of his family to inherit the estate since his grand-uncle, the Hong Kong opium magnate James Matheson, a son of Lairg on the Highland mainland, had bought it in 1844 from the Seaforth MacKenzies.

In 1844 James Matheson had paid £500,000. He promptly doubled his investment by raising the Victorian splendour of Lews Castle on the site of an old lodge, building utilities and curing plants in Stornoway, and creating shooting parks and private farms.

James Matheson cannot have anticipated that within sixty years the value of the estate of the island of Lewis would actually have fallen. He did not foresee the Crofters Holdings (Scotland) Act 1886, which was passed by William Gladstone’s Liberal government in London and which, among other results, prevented Scottish landowners from clearing Hebrideans and other Highlanders by giving crofting tenants security of tenure at an independently adjudicated fair rent.

The 1886 Act tied the hands of Scottish landowners and therefore slashed the value of their estates. It also, as was its intention, confirmed the presence on their land of the Lewis people who, as Viscount Leverhulme would later acknowledge, ‘love their home . . . with a passionate ardour that few can realise’.

On top of that, it massively increased the desirability of a croft and its secured crofting tenure to those same people. From 1886 onwards, crofts meant more than other small agricultural holdings. They represented stable footholds by entire communities on their precious land. ‘These people in the Highlands are often looked upon as crofters and nothing else,’ explained Donald Murray MP in his maiden parliamentary speech.

‘[You should] look upon them as men who want to make a living. There is hardly an economic croft in the Western Isles on which from one year’s end to another a family can depend for its living. The croft is only a part of the living, but it is a homestead on which they can fall back, and it gives them a sense of independence which working men in some large cities cannot possess.’

If the benefits of the 1886 Act, which had been introduced by his own political party, enabled Leverhulme to buy Lewis cheaply, the clear and present advantages offered by crofting tenure to residents would finally scupper his plans for the island.

Those plans were lavish. Viscount Leverhulme saw no reason why the island of Lewis, which in the 1920s had 28,000 residents, should not aspire to a similar population density as his home county of Lancashire and contain 200,000 people.

It was an interesting point to make. Lewis is a very large offshore island. Even without its southern adjunct of Harris, topographically Lewis is the third-biggest island in the entire archipelago of the British Isles. It is smaller than only the two main islands of Britain and Ireland. But in common with most other Scottish islands, Lewis had missed out on the British population boom of the nineteenth century. In 1821 there were roughly 12,000 people in Lewis. The ninth-biggest island, the Isle of Man in the Irish Sea, had 6,000 people in the same year.

One hundred years later in 1921, the population of Lewis had more than doubled to 28,000 – but that of Man had increased almost eightfold to 45,000. In the same century the Isle of Wight off the south coast of England, which has less than a quarter of the acreage of Lewis and is only the twelfth-biggest British island, jumped from 31,616 to 94,666 people.

In Hebridean terms Lewis had done well, for in the same period the populations of most other north-western islands fell. But compared to almost all inhabited islands south of the Scottish border, the third-biggest British landmass was lagging far behind. Leverhulme’s mission was to correct that imbalance. His figure of 200,000 people was madly extravagant. In 1918 there were barely 200,000 people in the whole vast expanse of the mainland Scottish Highlands. But as a headline figure it would attract attention, and if his schemes reached fruition they would certainly demand a hugely increased population.

To sustain them at work, home and play, the new Lewis would be rebuilt and redeveloped from shore to shore. Its economy would be underpinned by fishing on an industrial level. Sea-going fleets of trawlers would set forth from modernised ports on every Lewis coast. Guided to the shoals by dedicated spotter planes, which would be modelled on First World War reconnaissance aircraft and fly in and out of local landing strips, the trawlers would harvest the fruits of the North Atlantic Ocean and carry their bounty home to be processed, packaged and canned by a huge workforce in Lewis itself.

The produce would then be exported to a chain of retail shops on every town and city parish in the United Kingdom. Those shops, which were usually independent high-street fishmongers bought up in the early 1920s by Leverhulme’s people and rebranded as Mac Fisheries, became the residual remnants in the wider world of their founder’s Hebridean adventure. The last Mac Fisheries outlet did not close its doors until 1979. The chain’s half-century of active trading life was ultimately of no use to Lewis, but did serve as yet another tribute to William Hesketh Lever’s keen eye for a marketing opportunity.

His plans for Lewis began with fish but did not end on the sea. Railways would be built to carry people and goods to and from all corners of the island, and even down to its smaller, adjacent neighbour, the island of Harris. Six hundred inland lochs would be stocked with such freshwater fish as trout, and beats would be rented to visiting anglers, who would eat, drink and sleep in newly built hotels.

Dairy farms, of which Lewis already had a handful, would be expanded and built to keep the busy multitudes in fresh milk. The empty moors and hillsides would be reclaimed and transformed into soft-fruit orchards, which would maintain a Lewis jam factory, and fields of herbs. ‘Lewis,’ Leverhulme told a guest in 1918, ‘will become a great food-producing island.’

The plentiful seaweed on the shore would be processed into iodine and other chemicals. Lewis’s prodigious reserves of peat would be mined and deployed at power stations to light and heat the island. Each year, 5 million spruce and fir trees would be planted on Lewis, to satisfy the burgeoning UK domestic market for wood. White willow would be introduced to meet the national demand for baskets.

The people would live in purpose-built terraced houses equipped with peat stoves. They would no longer require their old, thatched houses in the countryside, for in the new world they would no longer have their crofts. There was room in Leverhulme’s vision for every manner of horticulture, but there was no room whatsoever for crofting communities. It was a hill that he was prepared to die on, and a hill on whose slopes his tattered dreams would finally perish.

In fact, Leverhulme began to row back from his grand prospectus almost as soon as it had been articulated. The export value of herring, which had been the main catch of the British commercial fishing fleet, collapsed after the end of the First World War in 1918, which presented an existential challenge to the established Stornoway drifters. In other areas of commerce, Leverhulme might have been an old man in a hurry, but even he cannot have imagined that peat-fired power stations and fields of soft fruit, a railway network and vast spruce plantations would spring up overnight on the Lewis machair and moor.

As the complexity of his ambitions dawned on him, the proprietor was further niggled by intermittent land raids. The people of Lewis, especially the young men returned from the war, wanted not fewer crofts but more. They wanted crofts not only for enough land to keep a few sheep and a milking cow, but also because following the 1886 Act, crofting tenants had security of tenure. Once a croft had been allocated and a house built, its occupants and their descendants were there for eternity. After four years on the Western Front or the North Atlantic Ocean, that was the basic desire of the returned servicemen. Everything else, jobs in processing plants or on fishing boats or in forestry plantations, would be all very well, but they could wait until everybody’s feet were safely beneath their own kitchen table. The wartime prime minister David Lloyd George had famously promised them ‘homes fit for heroes’. They would settle for homes fit for Lewis crofters.

The Leòdhasaich were also far less interested in being the subjects of social engineering than were the inhabitants of the rancid Liverpool slums, who had willingly resettled in Leverhulme’s model village in Birkenhead. Unlike the deracinated Merseysiders, the people of Lewis had something to lose in the form of an ancestral society, a familiar and beloved environment, a language and a culture. Unlike the new residents of Port Sunlight, they were the proud children of the third-largest landmass in the British Isles, and they would not easily relinquish their birthright.

They expressed it by raiding. When war broke out in August 1914, the Board of Agriculture had shelved longstanding plans to create new crofts in Lewis, particularly in the extensive, relatively fertile and crowded district of Back to the north of Stornoway. It was naturally assumed that following the Armistice of 1918 and the return of the servicemen, those proposals would be taken down again, dusted off and turned into reality.

They were not, because in 1914 nobody in the Scottish Office or the Board of Agriculture had anticipated the arrival in the north-west of one of the richest men in the world, brandishing more banknotes than anybody had ever seen and promising to transform the economy of the island of Lewis. The Board’s crofting proposals were once again shuffled to the back of the shelf.

So the servicemen took matters into their own hands. As early as March 1919 dairy farms on good land in the district of Back were occupied and marked out for crofts. The group of recently demobilised servicemen who spearheaded raids at Tong, Gress and Coll wrote first to the Secretary of State for Scotland in Edinburgh and to David Lloyd George at 10 Downing Street, advising them ‘that there isn’t a landlord or even a Duke in the British Isles that will keep the land from us, that has been promised to us by the Premier and the Country at Large without bloodshed’.

They were irreconcilable. The servicemen could not understand why Leverhulme would not both create new crofts and launch new industries on the ample territory of Lewis. Leverhulme himself was unable to compromise and unwilling to have any small part of his vision or his authority denied. ‘I had never met a man who was so obviously a megalomaniac and accustomed to having his own way,’ said the Board of Agriculture’s Colin MacDonald, a Highlander who met Leverhulme in Lewis on several occasions.

‘Give me a period of ten years to develop my schemes,’ Leverhulme told a crowd of 1,000 people in the Back district in 1919, ‘and I venture to prophesy that long before then – in fact in the near future – so many people, young and old – will believe in them, that crofts will be going a-begging – and then if there are still some who prefer life on the land they can have two, three, four crofts apiece.’

They would not swallow such assurances. A young, returned serviceman named John MacLeod calmly told his new landlord at the same gathering, ‘I would impress on you that we are not in opposition to your schemes of work; we only oppose you when you say you cannot give us the land, and on that point we will oppose you with all our strength . . .

‘Lord Leverhulme – you have bought this island. But you have not bought us, and we refuse to be the bondslaves of any man. We want to live our own lives in our own way, poor in material things it may be, but at least it will be clear of the fear of the factory bell; it will be free and independent.’

Leverhulme was not given ten years. Neither the Liberal nor the Conservative governments which spanned his time in Lewis could or would, in those delicate post-war years, support the vaunting ambitions of a landowner before the modest aspirations of former soldiers and sailors.

The Scottish Secretary of State until late in 1922 was a Highland Liberal from Ross-shire named Robert Munro. Munro, the son of a Free Church manse, was on the right of his party but had a disdain for Leverhulme’s fevered fantasies which in this case accorded with his party’s political sympathies with crofters.

The island’s Member of Parliament, Donald Murray, was another Liberal. Murray, a Stornoway doctor who had been the medical officer for Lewis, had called in his 1918 election address for ‘a strong and effective scheme of land reform which would result in a speedy distribution of all the available land in the Highlands and Islands among the people’. In one of his earliest parliamentary interventions, in June 1919 Donald Murray called on Scottish Secretary Robert Munro to ‘state when he will be in a position to introduce his proposals for the settlement of soldiers and sailors upon the land; and whether, in view of the unrest in Lewis and Harris, he will direct the Board of Agriculture to proceed at once’.

When he looked around, Leverhulme saw nothing but opposition to his proposals, particularly from representatives of his own political party. He would not relent, of course. He drew solace from the backing of a plurality of the hard-headed Stornoway business community. Opposition made him double down and embed himself in his bunker.

On their part, the politicians could do little but vainly attempt to strike a balance between encouraging Leverhulme’s investments while also supporting the local demand for crofts. In the meantime, they held back from actually creating new crofts in Lewis, but pointedly and unusually refused to prosecute anybody in the island for illegal land raiding. In return, in 1921 Viscount Leverhulme, who was beset by other financial difficulties overseas, ceased to invest in Lewis.

The deadlock was suffocating. In April 1923 a tipping point was reached. An occurrence which was both symbolically and actually harmful to both causes, and to the future of Lewis itself, darkened Stornoway harbour. An ocean liner named the SS Metagama, which was then operated by the Canadian Pacific Steamship Company, sailed from Lewis to North America with 242 young Lewis men and eighteen Lewis women.

The Metagama was neither the first nor the last emigrant ship of the time. Perhaps 1,000 Lewis people went abroad in 1923 and 1924. She was, however, the most significant. Her passage in the spring of 1923 marked the end of an era.

Somebody had to give. In the end it was Viscount Leverhulme. Rather than compromise, he withdrew completely from the game and took his ball home.

On 3 September 1923 he called virtually every public representative in the island to a meeting at the Town Council Chambers in Stornoway. There he announced that he was to relinquish his ownership of the estate.

‘I am now left without any object or motive for remaining here,’ he explained. ‘For me merely to come each year as an ordinary visitor to the castle, and knowing that I could take no interest in fishing or sport, would be meaningless. I am like Othello with my occupation gone, and I could only be like the ghost of Hamlet’s father haunting the place as a shadow.’

But Lewis need not go back on the open market. Leverhulme would divide the island into two parts. Stornoway and its suburbs – which on that day he defined as everywhere within a ‘seven-mile radius’ of the town centre – would be offered wholesale to Stornoway Town Council. Everything else, the crofting districts from Ness in the north to Uig in the west and South Lochs towards the Harris border, was to become the property of the Lewis District Committee.

They were two distinctly different bodies in the potpourri of Hebridean local government. Until widespread local government reorganisation in 1975, Lewis was part of Ross-shire and was therefore administered by Ross & Cromarty County Council. All of the other Outer Hebrides to the south, including, counter-intuitively, Lewis’s smaller Siamese twin of Harris, were part of Inverness-shire.

The county seat and local government headquarters of Lewis was therefore in the burgh of Dingwall, 100 miles and a long sea crossing away on the east coast of the mainland Highlands. As Lewis was almost half as large as the substantial county of Ross-shire, and Stornoway was actually twice the size of Dingwall, that arrangement was extraordinary. It was tempered by two devolved bodies.

Between 1889 and 1930, the Lewis District Committee, which was composed of the elected representatives from the rural Lewis parishes of Barvas, Lochs and Uig, administered on behalf of Ross & Cromarty Council such matters as public health, housing, roads, bridges and other public infrastructure in ‘country’ Lewis, which is to say, all of the island outside the town of Stornoway.

Following some agonised meetings in the September and October of 1923, Lewis District Committee rejected Viscount Leverhulme’s offer. Most of its members wanted to accept it and take ‘outlander’ Lewis into public hands. But the sums did not add up; the books did not balance. Removed from cross-subsidy by the economic engine room of Stornoway, rural Lewis ran at a loss. ‘For my own part I cannot see – although it is difficult and although it is disagreeable, and I would certainly like to be the first to accept the gift if I saw my way clear, but owing to this deficit, and not sure of what might take place, there’s a certain amount of risk in it – I cannot personally see my way to accept,’ said Alexander MacFarquhar of Dell.

After being refused financial support by the new Scottish Secretary of State, the rural councillors voted by six to three, with three abstentions, to tell Leverhulme that ‘[the Lewis District Committee] much regret that they cannot see their way to become the nucleus of the proposed Trust for the sphere lying beyond the radius of seven miles from the Post Office of Stornoway’. When the rural portion of the old Lewis estate could not attract one buyer, it was broken into its shooting and fishing lets at such places as Soval, Pairc, Barvas and Galson. The sitting tenants were given first option to buy outright their formerly rented playgrounds. A couple, at Carloway and at Galson, could still not be sold, and they were taken by purchasers from within Leverhulme’s operation. A young Lancastrian named Edwin Aldred, who would play a large role in the early chapters of the story of the Stornoway Trust, found himself by such means to be the landowner of the newly formed Carloway estate.

Stornoway Town Council was a different matter altogether.

Like many another metropolitan capital, Stornoway had developed its own character and identity, semi-detached from outlander Lewis. The town had been a chartered royal burgh since 1607. In 1862 its modern Town Council was established, its elected members assuming responsibility for roads and pavements, lighting, cleansing, water and drainage, regulation of building, public health, public order, licensing and general amenities. Throw in a provost, two bailies and several magistrates, and early-twentieth-century Stornoway was not deficient in qualified and experienced public servants.

Stornoway Town Council was often indistinguishable from its business community. Its members therefore included some of the confidantes of Viscount Leverhulme and most committed supporters of his prospectus. It is unlikely that at least some town councillors were not consulted before the landowner made his parting offer.

Those men – and they were virtually all men – had made Stornoway into a proud and functional twentieth-century municipality. They were also more aware than most of the declining role of the island of Lewis within the United Kingdom, and of their responsibility to reassert their island. They did not hang around. Their acceptance of the town’s assets such as Lews Castle and its utilities such as the steam laundry and gasworks was never in serious doubt. Within a week the Council had met and agreed ‘to accept the gift subject to the adjustment of details’. The adjustment of details would be substantial and important.

On 8 November 1923 Stornoway Town Council met to consider, and to approve, the draft deeds of property which would become the estate of the new, democratically accountable landlord of eastern Lewis which would be named the Stornoway Trust. They noted with satisfaction that Viscount Leverhulme’s initial offer of everything within a ‘seven-mile radius’ of Stornoway post office had been radically amended. It was now improved to encompass all of the old parish of Stornoway.

‘Within a seven-mile radius of Stornoway post office’ proved to be negotiable. British post offices were frequently used as the terminal for roadside milestones, in part to tell the post chaise how far it had to travel. Leverhulme’s legal people will have drawn up the papers with such precedence in mind. Stornoway post office was in the early 1920s situated in a tall and elegant building at the north side of Perceval Square, facing out into Cromwell Street. Sixty years later, in 1982, that former post office building would become the home of the Stornoway Trust.

The parish was traditionally a piece of land which reached far beyond the borders of the town. In the words of a late-Victorian Statistical Account of Scotland, Stornoway parish was:

in the NE [north-east] of the island of Lewis. It is bounded E by the Minch, S by the parish of Lochs, SW by the parish of Uig, and NW by the parish of Barvas.

There is a compact main portion with a narrow peninsula running out eastward. The length of the mainland portion, from NNE at a point on the coast 9 miles S of the Butt of Lewis south-south-westward to the boundary with Lochs, is about 20 miles; and the extreme breadth is about 6 miles.

Some distance S of the centre of this at the town of Stornoway, an isthmus projects east-north-eastward between Broad Bay on the N, and Loch Stornoway on the S, for 3½ miles, and is at its narrowest point on the E only about 200 yards wide; and from this neck the Peninsula of Eye extends north-eastward almost parallel to the coast-line of the compact main portion of the parish for 7 miles with an average breadth of 2½ miles.

The total area [of Stornoway parish] is 67,651.862 acres, of which 2145.419 are water, and 2282.275 foreshore.

The revised estate map included the whole of Stornoway parish, and a portion of North Lochs which included both the Arnish and Manor Farm moorlands.

It contained all of the extensive district of Broad Bay, up to and including the township of Tolsta, which sat 13 miles north of Stornoway post office, as well as the whole of the busy and quasi-autonomous Point peninsula, whose furthest headland was over 11 miles from Stornoway town centre. The property extended even further inland, west to the Barvas hills and north to Muirneag.

Point was the Statistical Account’s ‘Peninsula of Eye’. The word ‘Eye’ was an antique corruption of the Norse Ui, meaning a neck of land. The term was displaced by ‘Point’ during the twentieth century. The Gaelic-speaking people of the peninsula, who famously cared little for what others thought of them or called them, rarely referred to their home by any other name than An Rubha, The Peninsula, and to themselves as Rubhaich.

The Stornoway Trustees were looking at a property which included not only a busy and prosperous town, but also the fourteen Rubhaich villages – or ‘townships’, in crofting terms – of Melbost, Branahuie, Aignish, Knock, Swordale, Garrabost, Lower Bayble, Upper Bayble, Shulishader, Sheshader, Flesherin, Cnoc Amhlaigh, Portnaguran, Aird, Broker and Portvoller, and the further nine of Tong, Coll, Upper Coll, Vatisker, Gress, Back, North Tolsta, Glen Tolsta and New Tolsta on the machair greensward of Broad Bay, north of Stornoway.

As well as the coastal settlements, it included a large mouthful of Barvas Moor, the island’s central feature which had for centuries offered summer grazing and shielings, and occasional haven to the hermit and the runaway. It had the 2,000 acres of freshwater lochs mentioned in the Statistical Account, some of which contained trout, such salmon rivers as the Gress, Laxdale and Creed, and peat bogs without which most Leòdhasaich would have had no heating or cooking fuel.

The estate finally ran to 68,000 acres, or 106 square miles. That was 15 per cent of the total land area of Lewis. It contained 10,000 people, or 35 per cent of the island’s population of 28,000 inhabitants.

At a further meeting on 28 January 1924, Provost Kenneth Mackenzie told his fellow councillors that he had received the complete Deeds of Trust from Viscount Leverhulme’s Edinburgh solicitors. The Stornoway Trust, the first and for several decades the only large community-owned estate in the United Kingdom, was almost up and running.

3

Prohibition and Population

The first task of the Stornoway Trust was to stabilise Lewis. As the voyage of the Metagama indicated, the most serious effect of the Leverhulme withdrawal was to create an almost existential uncertainty in that previously confident and assertive island.

Lewis in the 1920s was not a happy place. The Glaswegian physician Halliday Sutherland visited the island for the first time in 1923, shortly after Leverhulme’s departure. ‘When I reached Stornoway,’ Sutherland recalled ten years later in his travelogue Hebridean Journey, ‘I found a half-built factory on which work had been abandoned, a derelict small-gauge railway, and thousands of pounds’ worth of machinery rusting on the shore.’