The Dam Builders E-Book

James Miller

• Herausgeber: Birlinn
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 431

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

In the thirty years after the end of the Second World War, the construction schemes of the North of Scotland Hydro-Electic Board changed the face of the Highlands and brought electricity to almost the whole of the country north of the Highland Line. Nothing on such a scale had been attempted before. Fired by the idealism of Tom Johnston, the Board's founder and Secretary of State for Scotland, the schemes brought regeneration and hope. The names of the schemes - Loch Sloy, Glen Shira, Tummel-Garry, the Conon valley, Glen Affric, Strathfarrar-Kilmorack, Glenmoriston-Garry, Shin, Breadalbane, Ben Cruchan - are vivid in the memories of all who worked on them, in an epic of hard physical labour in a beautiful landscape. By the time the last scheme was opened in Foyers in 1975, the engineers had built some fifty major dams and power stations, almost 200 miles of tunnel, 400 miles of road, and over 20,000 miles of power line. The Board had to overcome adverse weather and thrawn geology, as well as political opposition. At the peak of construction the workforce numbered around 12,000 and included men from Ireland and many parts of Europe as well as indigenous Scots. The Dam Builders: Power From the Glens is a vivid account of the schemes and includes eyewitness stories from many of the workers who made the elecrification of the Highlands a reality.

Leseprobe

This eBook edition published in 2012 by Birlinn Limited West Newington House Newington Road Edinburgh EH9 1QSwww.birlinn.co.uk

First published in 2002 by Birlinn Ltd

Copyright © James Miller 2002

The moral right of James Miller to be identified as the 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.

eBook ISBN: 978-0-85790-563-5 ISBN 13: 978-1-84158-225-2

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Contents

INTRODUCTION

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

PICTURE CREDITS

1. ‘... the most hopeful thing ...’

2. ‘... a cold job it was ...’

3. ‘... Bonus, Bonus ...’

4. ‘You wouldn’t call the King your uncle’

5. ‘... power and light have come to us ...’

6. ‘... still a huge part to play ...’

NOTES AND REFERENCES

MAIN SOURCES

APPENDIX

Introduction

Glen Cannich extends westward from the village of the same name in the heart of Inverness-shire. In the 1920s part of it belonged to the Chisholm estate, where the gamekeeper was Archie Chisholm. It was a remote and beautiful place, a long trough between ranges of hills, unfrequented by many visitors except for a brief period late every summer when the estate owners and their friends came for the hunting and fishing. It was the custom for tradesmen to come up from Inverness in the spring to do maintenance and prepare the buildings for occupancy. In one particular spring, Archie’s wife, Margaret, said she would go along to open the lodge and check that the bothy where the tradesmen would stay was ready for their arrival. As she rounded a corner on the approach to the lodge she heard the sound of hammering, of boards being thrown down, of workmen talking, and, being a shy person, she turned back for home. When she told her husband the men had arrived, he said that was strange, they weren’t expected until the next day, and went along to check. He found the place to be absolutely deserted. Margaret Chisholm was to maintain for the rest of her life that the noises she heard were a premonition of the work to come, for the Mullardoch dam stands now where she had this uncanny experience. There are many strands to the story of the building of the hydro-electric schemes in the Highlands after the Second World War. Mrs Chisholm’s story typifies one strand and also shows how folklore thrives and still seeks to grace the more prosaic facts surrounding an historical event with an indication of their importance in the people’s story.

The founding of the North of Scotland Hydro-Electric Board in 1943 and the subsequent construction of hydro-electric schemes and electrification of virtually all of the country north of the Highland Line was a major event in Highland history in the latter half of the twentieth century. A full account of the technical and political aspects of the great endeavour can be found in Peter Payne’s The Hydro, published in 1988. It is in many respects an official history, done by Professor Payne with full access to Board archives. The story in this book is more of a people’s history: it is very much how the momentous achievement of Highland electrification has been remembered by the men and women who worked on the schemes, and how it was recorded in local newspapers and other sources at the time. I have tried, therefore, to compliment Professor Payne’s account in The Hydro, but have repeated enough of the official story to provide the political and historical framework in which the coming of ‘the electric’, as it was termed in everyday speech, took place.

My own memory of the time when electricity reached the village in Caithness where I was born and raised is fragmentary: I was only four or five years old, but I can recall the sudden appearance of street lamps. We lived in a house where we used Tilley paraffin lamps for illumination and a peat-fired range for cooking; both were then standard fixtures in Highland homes.

The building of the hydro-electric schemes in the Highlands in the three decades after the Second World War – the Hydro Board’s major construction schemes came to an end in 1975 – is a story about rock and cement, frost, sweat and grease, and hard physical labour in a beautiful landscape. There is an heroic aspect to it, as nothing on such a scale had been attempted before; and the dams and tunnels came to symbolise far more than huge devices simply for the generation of electricity.

All the schemes came to be built in the belt of rugged mountain country that extends in a northward sweep from the Kintyre peninsula to the rolling vastness of Sutherland. The watershed dividing the burns and rivers that flow to the Atlantic from those that eventually disgorge into the North Sea lies close to the western side of the mainland. The Highlands are therefore scored by a series of long glens that lie with their heads within a few miles of the western seaboard but whose drainage is eastward. The catchment areas of the Tay, the Spey, the Findhorn, the Moriston, the Beauly, the Conon, the Shin and the other eastward-flowing rivers had all been mapped and surveyed by the end of the 1930s, and found ripe for exploitation. In 1921 the Water Power Resources Committee, chaired by Sir John Snell, estimated that the water power resources of Scotland, mostly in the Highlands, were capable of generating 1,880 million units per annum, or 217,965 kW. Another government committee, the Scottish Economic Committee (Hilleary Committee), examined the Highlands in 1938 and found a potential output of 1,972 million units per year.1 During the 1920s and the 1930s, young engineers out from the Central Belt on hillwalking trips noticed the potential of particular sites and filed away their knowledge for future use. In the eyes of the engineers the glens and straths nursed lochs begging to be dammed, cataracts asking to be harnessed. There would of course be obstacles to be overcome, human and natural, but the engineers were confident that, given enough men and material, they could do the job.

Geology presented problems. Most of the upland had a thin skin of soil and vegetation over unyielding, dense rock of tremendous age. The metamorphic schists and gneisses were also shot through in places with granite intrusions from long-dead volcanoes and faultlines where earth tremors were regularly detected; and the surface had been gouged by ice to leave deep U-shaped valleys, jumbled ridges of clay and boulders, and rounded corries. On top of that there was the climate, but this was ultimately a boon. From the point of view of the engineers, the mountain belt fronting the westerlies was blessed with a high rainfall. In fact, it was drenched, with hardly less than sixty inches a year anywhere and over 120 inches in some particularly sodden spots. There would be no shortage of water, as all the workforce remembered: ‘You’d stand on the scheme and you’d look up the hill and you’d see black spears and then you would look for the nearest bloody shelter because that was the rain coming and when it hit you, my God, it was hard.’2

Neither was the temperature always very comfortable. Snow lay from October to May on the higher ground and frost could strike in any month. Men up in the Affric hills working in topcoats would make a seventeen-mile bus journey down to Beauly and find the locals in their shirtsleeves, basking in a heatwave. And then, of course, there were the midgies, although the winds usually scurrying through the corries at least made them lie low most of the time.

This, then, is the story of the men who built the dams, tunnels, pipelines, power stations, and distribution lines; and of some of the consequences of their labours. I hope that I have not let any of them down in the telling and that they will forgive the errors.

Acknowledgements

In the course of researching the book, I interviewed many men and women who worked on the different parts of the schemes. They all gave their time willingly and, without their help, this project would have been impossible. Their accounts of their experiences in their own words are the heart of this narrative and bring the period and the endeavour vividly to life. I am grateful to them all for their hospitality and kindness. In alphabetical order they are: Henry ‘Ben’ Bentley, Dingwall; Ronald Birse, Edinburgh; Paddy Boyle, Glasgow; Archie Chisholm, Kirkhill; Bill Cooper, Inverness; Sybil Davidson and Mairi Stewart, Muir of Ord; Laurie Donald, Inverness; Pat Kennedy, East Kilbride; Alastair Kirk, Inverness; Patrick McBride, Donegal; Hugh McCorriston, Cannich; Barry McDermott, Clydebank; Jimmy Macdonald, Invergordon; Patrick McGinley, Donegal; Roy Macintyre, Gairloch; Bill MacKenzie, Muir of Ord; Hamish Mackinven, Edinburgh; Dougie Maclennan, Dingwall; Donald and Jean MacLeod, Golspie; Iain Macmaster, Acharacle; Sandy MacPherson, Inveruglas; Iain MacRae, Inchmore; Wodek Majewski, Barbaraville; Sir Duncan Michael; Stanley Mills, Auchlochan; John Farquhar Munro MSP; Roy Osborne, Ullapool; Paddy Paterson, Fort Augustus; Sandy Payne, Wester Clunes; George Rennie, Connel; William Rosie, John o’Groats; Hamish Ross, Dingwall; Ian Sim, Polmont; Bob Sim, Inverness; Otton Stainke, Kildary; Don Smith, Fortrose; and Don West, Cabrich.

Antoin MacGabhann, Letterkenny, Donegal, kindly sent me a letter describing his experiences as a student worker. Patrick Campbell, a native of Dungloe now living in New Jersey, sent me his published memoir Tunnel Tigers; and Moira McNicol in the Stirling Council libraries service supplied me with a copy of Gillean Ford’s compilation of memories of the Breadalbane schemes. James Stevenson kindly photocopied for me his account of the construction of the Loch Sloy dam; and Tom Leith in Strathaven went to considerable trouble to get me a copy of Edward MacColl’s 1946 paper on the schemes. Professor Peter Payne, whose own book remains the definitive official account of the achievement of the Hydro-Electric Board and without which my task would have been much more difficult, was supportive of this work.

Dr Walther Bindemann in Edinburgh, Gisela Cumming in Inverness, Heinz Ohff in Berlin, J. Anthony Hellen in Tyne and Wear, and the staff of the German Consulate, Edinburgh, all tried to help me track down any former-POWs who worked on the schemes. Our joint efforts were unsuccessful but I am grateful to everyone for their cooperation freely given.

Jennifer Paice, Julian Reeves, Peter Donaldson and Heather Ward of Scottish and Southern Energy were immensely helpful in providing access to the Hydro-Electric Board archives. Angela Greig at Scottish Power likewise dealt with my queries with unfailing kindness. I would also like to thank Elaine Rodger and the staff at the Ben Cruachan Visitor Centre for their hospitality. Martin Broome, Roger Reid, Jim Donaldson and Louise Jones of Miller Civil Engineering Services Ltd welcomed me to the site of the Cuileig River scheme.

Many friends rallied to the task of helping me with accommodation, information or contacts, and in particular I would like to thank Roger and Anne Boulter, Dublin; Dr Jim Calder; Donald and Jean Campbell, Edinburgh; Isabel and Jimmy Gunn, Muir of Ord; and Alistair MacEachran, Raddery. I also owe a thank you to the editors of the Derry People and Donegal News, the Donegal Democrat, and the Galway Advertiser.

Research inevitably involves much use of libraries and I would particularly like to thank Paul Adair, Perth Museum; Perth Library, Local Studies Section; Highlands and Islands Enterprise; Inverness Library Reference Section; Rachel Chisholm, Highland Folk Museum; Carol Morgan, the archivist of the Institution of Civil Engineers; and Fiona MacCallum, Oban Public Library. Keith Moore, the senior librarian and archivist of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers kindly invited me to use their library but unfortunately I was unable to visit it.

Bob Sim, Archie Chisholm, Alastair Kirk and Hamish Mackinven read parts of the text and corrected several of my errors. Any that remain are all my own work. And once again I would like to thank Dick Raynor for his expert assistance with the photographs, my long-suffering agent Duncan McAra for his continuing support, and Hugh Andrew at Birlinn for his patience. Work on this book began when the author held a Hawthornden Fellowship.

INVERNESS

FEBRUARY 2002

Picture credits

The sources of the photographs are indicated in the individual captions, but I would like to record a special thankyou to Ann Yule; Donald Macleod; Ian Macleod, Dingwall Museum; Don West; Sybil Davidson; Archie Chisholm; Ronald Birse for the Report of the Mitchell Construction Company on the Moriston Scheme, and the copy of the Civil Engineering and Public Works Review with the article about the Breadalbane Scheme; Wodek Majewski; the Aberdeen Press and Journal; Nicholas McCormick of Edmund Nuttall Ltd; Hamish Ross; Iain Macmaster; Barry McDermot; Heather Ward of Scottish and Southern Energy plc for all the plates from the archive of the North of Scotland Hydro-Electric Board (NOSHEB) and for permission to adapt Hydro-Board maps to show the various schemes; Perth Museum and Louis Flood; and Carol Morgan, the archivist of the Institution of Civil Engineers, for permission to reproduce the four figures from the Institution’s Proceedings.

Every reasonable effort was made to track down copyright holders and obtain permission for use of the illustrations, but if anyone has been overlooked, I hope they will accept this apology.

[1] ‘... the most hopeful thing ...’

Vast in size but thinly populated, the Highlands evoked opposing views in all who were concerned in the 1930s for their future. For many they were, in a phrase that came later, ‘the last great wilderness in Europe’, some 16,000 square miles of magnificent mountains, sprawling moors, mysterious glens and a wealth of wildlife that included the red deer, the golden eagle and the wildcat. For others the landscape represented a man-made wilderness, the sad result of decades of oppressive landlordism, evictions and social deprivation from which the only escape had been and still was emigration. Between 1921 and 1951 the population of the Highlands and Islands fell by around 15 per cent, from 371,372 to 316,471.1 The land was being emptied of its inhabitants, and what to do to reverse this trend was the subject of many books, articles and reports, often peppered with such loaded phrases as ‘the Highland problem’ or ‘the Highland question’.

Life in the Highlands had never been easy – the thin soil and the harsh winters saw to that – but surely something could be done. The Highlanders were an enterprising, intelligent people; they had proved their abilities time and again in every corner of the Empire, but somehow on their home ground they remained acquiescent and, the occasional land raid apart, not nearly as troublesome to politicians as their urban relatives.

‘What is then at issue is not so much restoration of a prosperity which never really existed as the application of modern methods and modern knowledge to the old agricultural economy of the Highlands,’ wrote Hugh Quigley.2 Looking north from his suburban home in Esher, Quigley spoke for many who loved the Highlands but recognised that ‘resurrection’ (his term) was desperately needed. Tourism, forestry, fisheries, improved transport and the development of cottage industries were among the favoured options. The Forestry Commission, established in 1919, had planted thousands of acres with conifers in Argyll and the Great Glen, where Neil Gunn saw them in 1937 and considered their green spires: ‘What he [the Highlander] wants now – where the spirit has been left in him to want anything constructive – is hope for the future, and these new forests along the banks of the Canal and on both sides of Loch Lochy were somehow like a symbol of a new order. The trees were full of sap, of young life, green and eager, larches and other pines, pointed in aspiration, and with an air about them not of privilege but of freedom.’3

The Second World War brought men and women once again from the glens to serve the country, and added another set of names to the memorials in every parish, but it also gave impetus to a sense that something had to be done and to a feeling that from the all-consuming effort of war would emerge a new future.

Industry in the Highlands had always been small and local in scale. Some processing of primary produce – the turning of grain into whisky and wool into tweed, the curing of fish – was established and significant; but the Highlands had no coal, apart from isolated mines at Brora and Machrihanish, and it was accepted that large-scale manufacturing belonged elsewhere, in the lowland cities where the labour force, markets and infrastructure favoured a concentration of effort. In the last decade of the nineteenth century, however, the potential of the region for water power had been realised. The North British Aluminium Company, formed in 1894, looked to the Highlands for a reliable supply of electricity, essential in the relatively new technology of converting raw bauxite to aluminium, and found it at Foyers on the south side of Loch Ness. Up to 19,000 kW of electricity were needed to convert four tons of bauxite to one ton of pure metal. Construction of the first major hydro-electric scheme in Britain began in 1895, and the smelting plant produced its first metal the following year, some 200 tons but already 10 per cent of the world output at that time. By 1900 production at Foyers had risen to over 1,000 tons, as the world demand for aluminium rose.4

Scotland’s first hydro-electric plant for public supply had been installed at Greenock in 1885, only four years after the first in Britain opened in Godalming, Surrey.5 The Greenock experiment ran for only two years but it had been enough to show the potential of hydro-electricity as a clean source of energy for daily activities. The next place to benefit from hydro-electric power was the village of Fort Augustus; in 1890 the Benedictine monks installed an 18-kilowatt turbine in one of the burns supplying their abbey at the southern end of Loch Ness and distributed the excess energy to their secular neighbours. The hotels and houses of the village were to have the benefit of this local supply until nationalisation of the industry in 1948. In 1896, the Fort William Electric Light Company began to operate two turbines at Blarmachfoldach on the Kiachnish River to supply light to the town. Another local scheme, this time at Ravens Rock in Glen Sgathaich, to the north of Strathpeffer, was built in 1903 with funding from Colonel E. W. Blunt-Mackenzie, husband of the Countess of Cromarty, and brought power to Dingwall and Strathpeffer. This enterprise was later transferred to a larger power station at the Falls of Conon on Loch Luichart. The coming of the new source of light was a wonder of the age. ‘On Monday evening’, reported the North Star in Dingwall, ‘the electric light was turned on in the premises of Baillie Frew, jeweller, by his niece, Miss Christine Frew. The glitter and dazzle of the jewellery, caused by the numerous arc lamps, attracted great attention.’ An ironmonger’s and a bookseller’s shop were also illuminated.6 Blair Atholl received its first hydro-electricity supply in a similar way in 1910 when the Duke of Atholl built a 130-kilowatt generator on the Banrie Burn, a tributary of the Tilt, to supply his castle and the adjoining village.7 Beyond the ends of the wires strung in these isolated localities, the people still depended on the oil lamp and the kitchen range and, in the countryside, were to do so for around another fifty years. These small beginnings had, however, been literally a glimmer of the future.

The aluminium industry continued to grow. A village grew up at Foyers to house the staff of the plant beside Loch Ness. The British Aluminium Company decided to expand its facilities and initiated an extensive scheme in the Loch Leven area that was to create the industrial village of Kinlochleven, with its smelting plant and the associated hydro-electric works drawing on the abundant water of Rannoch Moor. A dam was built across the Blackwater River to turn it into an eight-mile-long reservoir whose waters were then led down the mountainside to a power station above Kinlochleven. Construction began in 1905 and was complete four years later. As a major undertaking in remote mountain country, with the creation of a new loch and the redirection of existing water courses, it was a forerunner of what was to come.

It also marked the end of a more primitive era: the Blackwater Dam, 3,000 feet long and 90 feet high, in its time the largest in Europe, was the last large construction project built by the hard labour, unassisted by machinery, of itinerant Irish navvies. What that was like was captured in Patrick MacGill’s novel, Children of the Dead End, first published in 1914 and based on the author’s own experience of wielding shovel and drilling hammer in the uninhabited, waterlogged wastes of Rannoch Moor. The Kinlochleven project also attracted a large number of labourers from the Hebrides, so many in fact that foremen or ‘gangers’ had to have a command of Gaelic.

The navvies lived in shacks with tarred canvas roofs and slept in bunks, sometimes shared by three men, arranged in tiers around the flimsy walls. Cooking was done in frying pans on a stove in the centre of the muddy floor, and light was provided by naptha-burning lamps. There was almost no law and order among the 3,000 workers beyond what men could exert with their fists, and the only diversions were drinking and gambling. It was less a life than an existence. The highest paid workers, the hammermen, earned sixpence an hour, with rises to sevenpence-ha’penny for overtime and ninepence on Sundays. Drilling the rock was done by teams of five: one man, the holder, sat gripping the steel drill between his knees while his four companions struck it in rotation with sledgehammers until they had driven a hole four or five feet deep. Dynamite was then packed in the hole and the rock blown apart. ‘We spoke of waterworks’, wrote MacGill, ‘but only the contractors knew what the work was intended for. We did not know, and we did not care.’ MacGill also recorded how life in the camp rolled relentlesly and violently on without contact with the native Highlanders: the navvies were ‘outcasts ... despised ... rejected ... forgotten’. A small graveyard with cement tombstones lies on a hillock a little to the west of the dam, the last resting place of some twenty of the navvies. The work camps associated with the later hydro-electric schemes had their share of violence, drinking and gambling but they were a world away from what MacGill and his mates endured.8

The First World War brought about a massive rise in the demand for aluminium and the Blackwater Reservoir had to be expanded to cope with the extra electricity requirement. Five hundred British troops and 1,200 German prisoners of war were brought in to build a five-mile aqueduct to lead water from Loch Eilde Mhor into the Blackwater. The British Aluminium Company set in train another development in 1924. Called the Lochaber project, it continued until the end of 1943. The main elements of this scheme were a 900-foot dam to divert water from the upper reaches of the Spey into Loch Laggan which, in turn, fed water through a tunnel to Loch Treig. A fifteen-foot diameter pressure tunnel was driven fifteen miles under the Ben Nevis massif to emerge at the head of a steel pipeline 600 feet above a power station in Fort William. The original plan to build an extra power station at Kinlochleven had to be shelved when Inverness County Council, in whose territory lay the Spey and the Laggan, refused to allow its resources to be piped across the county boundary to Kinlochleven in Argyllshire.

There were several schemes in the 1920s and 1930s to generate power for public use. The Clyde Valley Company’s power stations on the Falls of Clyde opened in 1926. The chief technical engineer on this scheme was Edward MacColl who was later to bring his expertise to the Hydro Board. A larger scheme in Galloway was built between 1931 and 1936. In the Highlands, the main effort was made by the Grampian Electricity Supply Company (acquired by the Scottish Power Company Ltd in 1927) and involved tapping Lochs Ericht, Rannoch and Tummel, with extra feed from Lochs Seilich and Garry, to generate electricity to serve a wide area of the central, southern Highlands and the Central Belt. The power stations opened in 1930 and 1933. The hydro-electric schemes of the interwar years established the pattern that was to be followed after 1945. They all employed large numbers of men – for example, 3,000 at the height of the Lochaber project – who lived in work camps and used technology to allow them to build and drill in the harsh landscape. Compressed air drills were deployed on boring out the pressure tunnel under Ben Nevis, and the workers had electrical power from a temporary generating station on the River Spean.

The Grampian scheme showed how Highland water could be harnessed for the public good and the Cooper Committee, sitting during the early years of the Second World War, looked with approval on its achievement. Not everybody was happy about the ambitions of the Grampian company and when, in 1929, they first put forward plans to develop the waters of the river system that discharged through the Beauly River into the Beauly Firth they met with considerable opposition. This plan would have involved the lochs of Affric, Mullardoch and Monar but it was rejected by the House of Lords, after strong arguments from A. M. MacEwan, the Provost of Inverness, and the Mining Association. Their combined opposition was based on the destruction of the beauty of this area of the Highlands and the fact that there were not enough consumers to benefit from the power to be generated.

Inverness had considered in 1921 accepting an extension of the power output from Loch Luichart to supply the town but the costs, estimated to be in the region of £230,000, made them cautious.9 At that time there was not considered to be enough of a demand for electricity to justify the expenditure. A few years later the Town Council plumped for a turbine and generator installed in the Caledonian Canal on the southern outskirts of the town and, in 1926, this municipal initiative came on stream so successfully that in its first ten months it made a net profit of £7,00010 and enabled the steam-powered generating plant in the town centre to be closed down at certain periods.

Throughout the interwar years private companies supplied electricity to several areas. For example, the Ross-shire Electric Supply Company, the firm founded in 1903 by Colonel Blunt-Mackenzie, had a transmission line running north up the Moray Firth seaboard from its generating station at Loch Luichart in Strathconon through Dingwall and the Easter Ross towns as far as Dornoch in Sutherland, where there was a switch-on ceremony in March 1933. John Murray, the Provost of the small Royal burgh, presided at the ceremony to which, in view of the short notice, a large crowd had been summoned by the town crier and his bell. The Provost’s wife pressed the button to switch on six lamps: these shone with a ‘cheery, mellow light while ... the street lamps shone forth in all their brilliance’.11 A steam power station had been established in Perth in 1901 and was taken over by the Grampian company in 1933. Other small firms ran local generating plants in such towns as Crieff and Dunblane. In the south-west Highlands, there were private or municipal supplies in Campbeltown, Ardrishaig, Dunoon, Oban, Tobermory and a few other centres. A small plant had been installed at Gorten to supply Acharacle and Salen on the Ardnamurchan peninsula by K. M. Clark, the landowner, in 1928; this system remained in private hands until the mid-1950s when, in a sadly deteriorating condition, it was taken over by the Hydro Board.

Each proposed hydro-electric scheme had to receive parliamentary approval and it was during the lengthy process of consideration at Westminster that opponents could deliver the fatal thrust to kill a scheme dead. There were strong interests against hydro-electric power. The coal industry, Highland landowners and sportsmen made an unlikely but effective alliance against hydro-electricity. Some MPs and local authorities also voiced their objections, often basing their opposition on the perception of the schemes as simply another way in which Highland resources were to be exploited by lowlanders. If a private firm received the go-ahead for such a scheme, stated the Inverness Courier, the town would be deprived of ‘valuable rights which are legally and morally hers’ and referred to the support for the schemes from Fort William Town Council and the Lochaber Labour Party as ‘base treachery’.12 Some MPs argued for the schemes, acknowledging the growing importance of tourism and the need to conserve the landscape but also recognising that the Highlanders needed some industry to provide employment. In April 1938, when the Caledonian Power scheme, the latest proposal to develop the water power resources in Glen Affric, failed to survive the Second Reading in the House of Commons, the Inverness Courier printed a triumphant editorial: ‘The opponents of [the Bill] have been falsely represented as being opposed to the development of water power and the introduction of industry in every shape and form. Nothing could be further from the truth. What we ... maintain is that there shall be no further development of the water power resources of the Highlands until a Committee is set up by the Government to enquire into [how] ... these water resources should be developed for the benefit of the Highlands.’13

The leader writer was presumably the Courier’s editor, Dr Evan Barron, whom we shall meet again. He could not have foreseen that in just a few years such a Committee would get down to business, thanks to the foresight and drive of one man.

Tom Johnston was both a socialist and an unrepentantly patriotic Scot. On the ship taking him and other British journalists to Russia for a tour of the Soviet state in 1934, he wore a Kilmarnock bonnet to declare, as he put it, his ‘national status’ (although he resisted appeals to do the Highland Fling). Born in Kirkintilloch in 1881, Johnston joined a cousin’s printing and journalism business in Glasgow and launched the socialist weekly Forward in 1906. At the same time he cut his political teeth in local government, implementing innovative projects in adult education and municipal finance. In 1909, he published a scorching attack on the aristocracy in Our Scots Noble Families, a title dripping in irony as Johnston aimed to show how the prominent landowning dynasties had reached their eminent positions through robbery and fraud. The book was to prove to be an embarrassment to him later,14 but it established him on the political stage and by the end of the First World War he was a leading figure in Labour politics. In 1922 he was elected as the Independent Labour Member of Parliament for West Stirlingshire but he lost the seat within two years when Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour government fell to the Conservatives. A by-election a few weeks later brought Johnston back to the House of Commons; and in Ramsay MacDonald’s second Labour administration between 1929 and 1931, Johnston briefly held Cabinet rank. He was returned to Westminster again in 1935.

On the outbreak of the War in 1939, Johnston was appointed Regional [sic] Commissioner for Civil Defence in Scotland. Then, in February 1941, Winston Churchill summoned him to Downing Street. The Prime Minister had already tried to persuade the craggy Johnston to accept a London post but now he had another plan. Johnston compared an interview with Churchill to being like a rabbit before a boa constrictor. When the Scot said he wanted to get out of politics to write history, Churchill gave a disdainful snort and said Johnston should join him and ‘help ... make history’. The Prime Minister then laid his cards on the table: he wanted Johnston to be Secretary of State for Scotland. If Johnston felt himself to be like a rabbit, he remained a canny rabbit and agreed to take the post on certain conditions. The most important of these was that he could try out a Council of State comprising all five surviving former Secretaries of State and that whenever they agreed on a Scottish issue Johnston could look to Churchill for backing.

‘I’ll look sympathetically upon anything about which Scotland is unanimous,’ Johnston records the Prime Minister as saying. ‘What next?’

Johnston said he wanted no payment for the job as long as the War lasted. ‘Right!’ agreed Churchill. ‘Nobody can prevent you taking nothing.’

Johnston said later that he was ‘bundled out, a little bewildered’, and miserable at the thought of the commuting he would have to endure between London and his beloved homeland; but he was also pleased that he had been given a unique opportunity ‘to inaugurate some large-scale reforms ... which ... might mean Scotia Resurgent’. As he strode down Whitehall he was already listing the projects he was itching to start, and they included ‘a jolly good try at a public corporation on a non-profit basis to harness Highland water power for electricity’.15

No one can be sure of the reasons for Churchill’s choice of Johnston as Secretary of State. It is tempting to speculate that it may have stemmed from the Prime Minister’s memory of the First World War and the Red Clydesiders but there is no evidence for this. Although he had never shared all the extreme left-wing views of some of the Red Clydesiders, Johnston had been a leading radical voice in that troubled time but had become more moderate since election to Westminster. Churchill may have been attracted by this poacher-turned-gamekeeper side to Johnston’s career but he would also have known that Johnston was a highly respected man north of the border and was well equipped to keep the home fires loyally burning.16

Johnston’s Council of State was officially named the Scottish Advisory Council of ex-Secretaries. The other members were Lord Alness, Sir Archibald Sinclair, Sir John Colville (later Lord Clydesmuir), Walter Elliot and Ernest Brown, and, by Johnston’s account, they got on well, despite representing widely varying points on the political spectrum, and proposed projects and reforms in quick succession that laid the basis for postwar reconstruction in Scotland in a broad sweep of public life.

In 1938 Johnston had voted against the Caledonian Power scheme, sharing the opinion of many Highlanders that a private firm should not be allowed to take over a national resource. A Grampian company scheme for Glen Affric was again voted down in the House of Commons in September 1941; at the same time Johnston announced that the government had its own plans in train.17 Johnston’s view of hydro-electricity, in keeping with his socialist principles, was that public resources should be handled by publicly owned corporations. He had been impressed by the work of the Tennessee Valley Authority in the United States. The TVA, a government agency with the flexibility of a private corporation, was one of the most innovative ideas to emerge from the desk of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in his New Deal aimed to raise the American economy from the depths of the Depression. In the early 1930s, the valley of the Tennessee River was suffering severely from soil erosion and falling fertility, impoverishing thousands of farmers along its banks. As part of an integrated approach to the restoration of the area, the TVA built hydro-electric dams to provide power and control flooding, and integrated power generation into the rural landscape. It was an attractive model for what could be done in the Highlands.

The Cooper Committee was appointed in October 1941 to consider anew the potential for hydro-electricity generation in the Highlands. This body’s official name was the Committee on Hydro-Electric Development in Scotland but it quickly became known by the name of its chairman, Baron Cooper of Culross. Thomas Mackay Cooper, son of an Edinburgh burgh engineer and a Caithness mother, had risen high in public service since graduating in law from Edinburgh University: he had been awarded the OBE in 1920 for his work in the War Trade Department, won the West Edinburgh parliamentary seat as a Tory in 1935, became a judge in June 1941 and was now Lord Justice General of Scotland. He was a firm supporter of Scots law and in one of his legal judgments had questioned the sovereignty of Westminster in relation to the Treaty of Union; this patriotic streak, as well as his intellect and his capacity for hard work, probably appealed to Tom Johnston.18

The other members of the Cooper Committee were the Viscount, William Douglas Weir, whose family background encompassed an engineering firm in Glasgow and who had served on the committee that devised Britain’s national grid in the 1920s; Neil Beaton, the chairman of the Scottish Cooperative Wholesale Society and the son of a Sutherland shepherd; James Williamson, the chief civil engineer with the consultants to the construction of the Galloway hydro-electric scheme in the 1930s; and John A. Cameron of the Land Court.

Although ‘handicapped by war conditions’, the Committee examined every aspect of its remit throughout the first half of 1942. It combed through existing data, records and reports (the Snell Committee at the end of the First World War and the Hilleary Committee in the late 1930s had already considered hydro-electricity development in Britain). It also consulted the Electricity Commission, the Central Electricity Board, local authorities, power companies, industry, fishery boards, estate owners and representatives of a wide range of miscellaneous bodies, including the Royal Scottish Automobile Club and the Saltire Society. At the beginning Lord Cooper was sceptical of the Committee’s ability to come up with much to supersede earlier work but, as the data accumulated, he became an increasingly enthusiastic supporter of hydro-electricity.

On its peregrination around the country, the Committee met Evan Barron, the editor of the Inverness Courier, in his office in the newspaper building on the east bank of the Ness; and Barron impressed on them the need for a quid pro quo if Highland water were to be harnessed.19 In their final report, the Cooper Committee recognised that the ‘portion of the area popularly designated the Highlands has for long been a depressed area and will remain so unless vigorous and farsighted remedial action is taken in hand without delay’. The Committee looked long and hard at not only the potential for hydro-electric development in the Highlands but also at some of the likely results of such development. To those who objected on what was then called ‘amenity grounds’, the Committee retorted sharply that ‘If it is desired to preserve the natural features of the Highlands unchanged in all time coming for the benefit of those holiday makers who wish to contemplate them in their natural state during the comparatively brief season imposed by the climatic conditions, then the logical outcome ... would be to convert the greater part ... into a national park and to sterilise it in perpetuity, providing a few “reservations” in which the dwindling remnants of the native population could for a time ... reside until they eventually became extinct’.

‘We accordingly recommend’, wrote Lord Cooper and his colleagues, ‘that there should be created a new public service corporation called the North Scotland Hydro-Electric Board’ to be responsible for the generation, transmission and supply of power in all the parts of the Highlands currently outside the ‘limits of existing undertakers’. (In time, with the nationalisation of electricity in 1948, the whole of the Highlands and Islands came under the aegis of the Board.)

As the Cooper Committee had been gathering its evidence, Tom Johnston had asked Evan Barron to come down to St Andrew’s House to talk about how hydro-electricity might be made acceptable in the Highlands. Barron was ill at the time and sent a member of his staff with a written summary of his views. Such was the weight given to Barron’s opinion that his submission was included in the final Bill almost word for word. Although the Courier editor was politically much further to the right than the Secretary of State, the two men respected each other highly and maintained a close friendship.20

Barron repeated his assertion that Highlanders would agree to hydroelectricity development only if they were to benefit directly from this surrender of their resources. Johnston responded by passing to Barron a draft copy of the Cooper Committee’s report with the warning not to publish it: Johnston is reported to have said, ‘If anything appears about the Cooper report before Parliament gets it, Scotland will have another secretary of state next week.’21

Barron said nothing publicly until, three days after Johnston had laid the Cooper Report before the House of Commons on 15 December 1942, he was able to welcome it in an editorial.22 In a long leader in the issue of the Courier on 23 January 1943, he broke from his usual comments on the progress of the War to give his opinion of the Hydro-Electric Development (Scotland) Bill under the headline, ‘Hope for the Highlands’. The introduction of the Bill based on the Cooper Committee findings, he wrote, ‘is the most hopeful thing for the Highlands which has happened for many a day’. Although the Cooper Report had included many ‘mis-statements and misconceptions’ it was the final recommendations included in the Bill that mattered and these, in Barron’s opinion, conceded ‘practically all we had fought for for twenty-five years’. The water resources of the Highlands were to be developed in the interests of the native Highlander. Barron dismissed the objections raised in editorials of other newspapers such as The Scotsman, which he saw as being the voice of Big Business, and called on Highlanders to see that the Bill became law more or less as it stood and put their water resources ‘forever beyond the reach of the clutching hands’ of outside companies. Now, said the Courier, the State had the chance to undo the illtreatment meted out to the region for the last 150 years and, reminding the Secretary of State of the service to the nation being rendered by the 51st Division, at that time slogging through the African desert, declared the passing of the Bill was not a favour but the fulfilment of a duty.23

The Bill recognised the broader role of the Board in what became known as the social clause: this stated that the profit from the sale of surplus electricity to the Central Electricity Board for the national grid would be ploughed back into reducing the costs of distributing power to the more remote, low-populated areas of the Highlands for ‘the economic development and social improvement’ of the region. In May 1943 the Courier was pleased to say that Tom Johnston had ‘earned the gratitude of all who love the Highlands and who believe they have a future as great and as noble as their past’.24 After collecting a few minor amendments on its passage through Parliament, the Hydro-Electric Development (Scotland) Act became law in August. Writing of the opponents of the Act, Johnston returned to the rhetoric of his younger days:

I knew most of the nests from which the corbies would operate; the colliery owners had retired from the struggle, and their shareholders wanted no notice taken of the pit bings and so stopped talking about how the hydro schemes would destroy amenity. A few shameless twelfth of August shooting tourists, who themselves took care to live in the electrified south for eleven months in the year, moaned about the possible disappearance in the Highlands of the picturesque cruisie; and I had one deputation whose spokesman was sure we were engaged in a conspiracy to clear Glen Affric of its crofters and its sheep; in response to enquiries, he had not been up at Glen Affric himself, and he really was surprised to learn that there were neither crofters nor sheep in the Glen for these many years past.25

In September the names of the first members of the Board were made public. The Earl of Airlie was appointed chairman, with Edward MacColl as deputy chairman and chief executive. After his success on the Falls of Clyde scheme, MacColl, whose forebears came from Melfert in Argyllshire, had been appointed engineer for the Central Scotland District of the Central Electricity Board and had overseen the construction of the first regional grid in Britain. He brought a vast experience of the technical aspects of electricity generation and distribution to the Board, and added to this formidable expertise a flair for innovation. The other three members were Neil Beaton, who had already served on the Cooper Committee; Hugh Mackenzie, the Provost of Inverness; and Walter Whigham, a director of the Bank of England and the representative of the Central Electricity Board. (Whigham was soon to resign through ill health and his place was filled by Sir Duncan Watson, a Scottish engineer.)

The Earl of Airlie seems at first glance to have been an unlikely choice for the figurehead of a new public corporation. He was the twelfth member of his family to hold the Airlie title, had been educated at Eton, had won the Military Cross in The Black Watch during the First World War, owned around 40,000 acres, was Lord Lieutenant of Angus, a member of Angus County Council and a staff officer at Scottish Command HQ. The good-natured Airlie had, however, been Tom Johnston’s second-in-command when he had been in charge of civil defence, and the two men obviously felt that they could work well together.

Two sub-committees of the Board were set up – the Amenity Committee under the chairmanship of Colonel the Hon Ian Campbell and including Lady MacGregor of MacGregor, the only woman in the upper echelons of the Board; and the Fisheries Committee with Colonel Sir D. W. Cameron of Lochiel in the chair. The registered office was established in Edinburgh, and the Lord Lyon King of Arms granted the Board its own coat of arms in 1944.The shield bore a winged thunderbolt emitting forked flashes of lightning suspended above a cruisie-lamp, the ancient form of domestic illumination. These symbols, encapsulating the Board’s aspirations, were supported by two rampant stags on either side of a fir tree and a rock from which water gushed. The motto was in Gaelic: Neart nan Gleann, the power of the glens.

Plate 1. The shield of the North of Scotland Hydro-Electric Board as depicted in wrought iron on the gates of Invergarry power station (author).

The Board benefited in its early decades from the calibre of the almosthandpicked senior staff – ‘men steeped in their subject’, according to Hamish Mackinven. Edward MacColl selected Angus Fulton, as enthusiastically in favour of hydro-electric development as himself, as his chief civil and hydraulic engineer; and wooed David Fenton back to Scotland from the English Midlands to be his commercial engineer. Thomas Lawrie became the Board’s secretary on its inception. W. Guthrie was appointed as the first chief electrical engineer and A. N. Ferrier as the chief accountant.26

Inverness Town Council organised a conference in August 1943 where representatives from all the Highland and Islands local authorities could discuss the implications of the new Act.27 Fearing that once again Highland resources might be exploited for the benefit of others, the so-called Scottish Local Authorities Hydro-Electric General Committee that emerged from the conference resolved to ‘watch the interests of the area’.28 For example, John Murray, the Provost of Dornoch, while calling for a bold policy to take advantage of the new source of energy and expressing confidence that industry would follow power, was concerned that the remote places wouldn’t be forgotten.29

In March 1944, the Board published its development programme and listed no less than 102 projects, ranging in size from small local ones to giant schemes covering whole series of glens. At one end of the spectrum lay the streams draining into Loch nan Gillean, near Plockton, calculated to be capable of generating four million units (kilowatt-hours per year), the streams on Islay and Jura (five million units), two streams on the north side of Loch Nevis (five million units), and streams in Arisaig (six million units). The biggest schemes pinpointed the Affric-Beauly river system (440 million units), the Orrin-Conon and the Garry-Moriston systems (each 350 million units), and the Tummel-Garry system (300 million units).30 It seemed as if every corner of the Highlands and Islands were included, from the burns on Shetland to those draining the Mull of Kintyre. The impressively ambitious programme recorded a total potential output of 6,274 million units of electricity per year, considerably more than the 4,000 million units per year estimated by the Cooper Committee. Edward MacColl pointed out in an address to the Institution of Engineers and Shipbuilders in Scotland that the programme did not include ‘a substantial amount of power still available in the form of high-head run-off schemes’ with little or no storage capacity in the form of lochs. He also conceded that not all the schemes in the list of 102 were economic ‘when compared with other means of producing power’, although in the future when coal became scarce or dear they might become viable.

The prospects were, however, exciting enough. ‘Just before the War finished, the Ministry of Information made a film to show how good it would be to have power in the Highlands,’ said Archie Chisholm, who was a schoolboy in Strathglass at the time. ‘I remember seeing the team coming to make part of the film. They had my grand-uncle, Jim Simpson, with a pair of Clydesdales and a horse plough ploughing up on a very barren bit of ground. This was supposed to show worthless ground that was to be recovered. We were all supposed to get power for nothing. The idea was that the people coming home from the War would get better things. Of course we had no power then; unless you lived on an estate where there was a wee water turbine or a generator, it was the Tilley lamp, double-wick lamps and candles.’

The Scottish branch of the Association of Scientific Workers, a body firmly in favour of centrally planned, publicly owned advancement, hailed the Board’s development programme by issuing a brochure Highland Power, which made direct reference to the Tennessee Valley Authority (‘one of the greatest sociological experiments of history’) and stated that the proposed developments offered ‘a golden opportunity to test a new approach to British social and economic problems’. Other bodies more concerned with what might result when a great concrete dam was thrown across a glen also soon made their voices heard. In the summer of 1944, the Association for the Preservation of Rural Scotland protested that areas of outstanding natural beauty, such as Glen Affric, Glen Garry and Loch Maree, should be safeguarded.31

The schemes in the counties of Perth, Dunbarton, Argyll and Inverness were already being surveyed and planned in the spring of 194432