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The Highland Clearances - An Introduction

by Steve Blamires

During the years 1846-7 famine struck again when the potato crop was devastated by the potato blight (the cause of the famous "Famine" in Ireland) and this brought even further hardship to the poor crofters. A meeting was held in Edinburgh with Sir Charles Trevelyan, the government minister in charge of famine relief in Ireland, to see what could be done for the Highlanders and Islanders who were also on the brink of starvation. Present at the meeting were most of the large landlords of the day and representatives of the church. The Rev. Norman MacLeod suggested that nothing should be done by way of relief as the famine was "God's pleasure" and had been placed on the Highlanders "because of their sin." Fortunately his remarks were ignored and the landlords surprisingly pledged the huge sum of 300,000 pounds Sterling which was to be given to Trevelyan for famine relief.

He decreed that no relief should be given to anyone who was capable of manual labour and that one pound of meal should be given for every ten hours labour. Trevelyan then said that the landlords should disperse the money themselves as they knew best who was in genuine need of help and who was not. The statistics which then followed beggar belief - Lord MacDonald, for example, had pledged a mere 1,000 pounds Sterling but was paid back in excess of 3,000 pounds Sterling by the Treasury. The Duke of Sutherland had pledged 2,000 pounds Sterling and he was given back 6,000 pounds Sterling by the Treasury. He used this windfall to build himself a new hunting lodge in the North West of his estate. Not one penny went to his starving tenants. He also bought a large quantity of meal but all of it was used to feed his own dogs, pigs, poultry and cattle. When what was left became unfit for the animals to eat it was dumped in the sea while the people starved.

Eventually the public demanded an account of exactly how the pledged 300,000 pounds Sterling had been spent and it was discovered that 7,000 pounds Sterling was totally unaccounted for. It was also discovered that the captain and crew of the Royal Navy ship under Trevelyan's command had been paying themselves one pound ten shillings per day - a huge sum of money at that time. No records were found to show that any of the money had ever been used for direct relief to the starving. In Ireland the situation was exactly the same. When the Bishop of Cashel died his personal estate was worth 400,000 pounds Sterling. Eleven other Catholic bishops left a total of 1,875,000 pounds Sterling. Yet they insisted the starving people would have to leave Ireland on the coffin ships bound for America as there was no money available for Poor Relief.

The legislation governing slave ships from Africa was far more humane that the legislation governing the emigration ships. Ships carrying in excess of 700 emigrants would only have been allowed by law to carry 490 slaves. 3 out of every 20 emigrants died on board the ships. In 1834 more than 700 people died in shipwrecks. Between 1847-53 at least 49 emigrants' boats, each carrying between 600-1,000 passengers, were lost. Exactly the same fate was befalling the Irish emigrants who were victims of the "Famine" and in 1848, due to the same potato blight, 17,300 Scottish emigrants died on the coffin ships or in the quarantine stations of Canada and America.

The medical examiner at the Gross Isle Immigration Station in the St. Lawrence River, Canada reported on seeing the Cleared Highlanders, "I never, during my long experience at the station, saw a body of emigrants so destitute of clothing and bedding. Many children of 9 or 10 years old had not a rag to cover them. Mrs. Crisp, the wife of the master of the ship 'Admiral' was busily employed all the voyage in converting empty bread bags, old canvas, and blankets into coverings for them. One full-grown man passed my inspection with no other garment than a woman's petticoat."

The statistics are dreadful - in Sutherland 40 sheep farmers occupied an area once lived and worked by 15,000 people; between 1815-38 Nova Scotia received 22,000 Cleared Highlanders; in 1841 the records of Quebec note that they could not keep up with the number of destitute Scottish immigrants being given Poor Relief; on 15th May 1851 the factor at Lewis complained that the people being forced to emigrate to the States were entering the ships too slowly. He told the captain that at his next stop he should push the men, women and children on board without their luggage as this would speed things up and make room for even more people. 3,200 families were Cleared from Lewis alone in that year.

In 1840, 30,000 Highlanders were forced to move to Glasgow. None of them could speak English, none of them had ever seen a city before and none of them had ever performed any kind of work other than tending their own patch of land and their few cows and chickens. They were forced from a life of subsistence farming to one of working indoors in a factory. Others were Cleared from their Highland homes to the seaside fishing villages where they too had to give up the only way of life they knew and learn overnight how to fish in order to survive.The "Scotsman" newspaper reported on 11th March 1820 a riot which had taken place at Culrain in Ross-Shire, "On notice being given to these poor creatures to remove, they remonstrated, and stated unequivocally, that as they neither had money to transport them to America, nor the prospect of another situation to retire to, they neither could nor would remove, and that if force was to be used, they would rather die on the spot that gave them birth than elsewhere." - note that the Press only ever reported instances of disorder, they did not report the thousands of other evictions where the people simply gave in to the wishes of the clan chieftain. It seems odd to us today that anyone should capitulate so easily to a gang of often drunk men who were about to tear down and destroy their home and possessions and place them in a state of total loss and destitution. But so strong was the tradition of hospitality amongst these gentle people that it was not unknown for the family about to be turned out and have their house destroyed to offer the Clearance gangs refreshment before they started their work.

After two generations of Clearances the tradition of crofters following their chieftain into battle stopped when they finally had to acknowledge that their chieftains no longer cared for them. The crofters of the Sutherland Estate, for example, had traditionally enlisted in the Army at a moments notice when asked to do so by the estate. In 1745 2,550 men from Sutherland fought; in 1760 1,100 men enlisted in 9 days; in 1777 1,100 enlisted; in 1794 1,800 enlisted. When the enlisting officers toured the Highlands in 1854 to recruit men to fight in the Crimea they were greeted with the men bleating like sheep and turning away from them. The duke of Sutherland was personally told, "Since you have preferred sheep to men, let sheep defend you."

Eventually the people made a stand and after riots on Skye in which gun boats, marines and police officers were called in to fight unarmed men and women, massive rent strikes and articulate appeals via the Press, the Crofter's Act was passed in 1886 finally giving the Highlanders and Islanders some basic land rights and rights of tenure. The Crofters Act had been drafted mainly by the landlords themselves, who were also the Members of Parliament, and it was treated by the crofters with the same contempt as were the so-called treaties the Native Americans were given when being Cleared to reservations. A speech made at the Lochcarron School Hall in 1886 after hearing about the Crofter's Act being passed articulately expresses this -

"The plough is put away, up on the hen-roost,
The land it once ploughed is empty, a waste -
The land of our ancestors, stolen away from us.
If it came back to us again, we'd complain no more
Of landlords' injustice, of the injury and prejudice
Handed out to the Gaels.
Ah then we would know exactly what to do.

We'd drive out the keepers, and the English who come here
To ruin us and our land for their sport on the hill.
We'd drive the deer that have taken over our ploughing land
Up, high up the tops of the mountains - And down would come Nimrod.

And the sheep, oh the sheep, has been the cause
of great suffering,
Starvation and sorrow. It has driven many to the shore,
And over the sea. My body has known the pain of seeing
White sheep and deer nibble at the land they have left,
That would feed many and many a Gael.
But the time will come when plough will be out again,
When the garron will be harnessed and pulling away,
When the people will eat well, with cattle on the hill,
And milk in the dairy, and go no more to the Caithness fishing -
When we earn cash at home.

This Bill the government shows to us, what is it?
There is in it no word of all this.
No word of a patch to plant a crop,
No word of the right to a place where a poor man's cows might graze,
We will not submit to it, for it has no word of what we need:
A share of the good, low-lying land, to produce food
For our children - and their children.

What the government, the landlords and the Press totally failed to understand was that the crofters did not want ownership of the land - they never personally owned it anyway, being clan land, but what they did want was the imposition of certain standards of conduct and responsibility on the landlords. They never received this.

It was not until until 1976, ninety years later, that the crofters were eventually given the right to buy the freehold of their croft if they so wished. The price though was 15 times the holding's controlled rent. Incredibly it was not until 1991, 105 years after the passing of the Crofter's Act, that crofters were eventually given the right to plant trees on their land. Up until then trees planted on crofts were considered the property of the landlord.

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