Father Allan E-Book

Roger Hutchinson

• Herausgeber: Birlinn
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 349

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

Early on a Sunday morning in October 1905, in Eriskay, one of the smallest and most isolated of Hebridean islands, a forty-five year old Catholic parish priest died of pleurisy. It was a disease which had claimed many of his parishioners, and Father Allan McDonald undoubtedly contracted it while ministering to his flock. He was mourned all over Scotland. Now, over a century later, his name is still remembered with reverence throughout Catholic Scotland and beyond. Father Allan – Maighstir Ailein to his Gaelic-speaking people – was a witty, accomplished, intellectual and dedicated man; one of the most renowned of Hebridean personalities and probably the most celebrated Hebridean priest since St Columba. An exceptionally effective and articulate local politician in the southern Outer Hebrides, which at the turn of the twentieth century was amongst the poorest and most neglected in Europe, he was also an accomplished Gaelic poet and writer and one of Scotland's greatest collectors of folklore. His achievements attracted attention and visitors came to his lonely parish from the United States, England and elsewhere. The compelling tale of his remarkable life is also implicitly the story of the north-west Highlands in the late nineteenth century and the Catholic Hebrides in their transcendent prime, where culture overflows with myth and adventure, colour, character and extraordinary unspoilt beauty.

Leseprobe

Roger Hutchinson is an author and journalist. He is a columnist for the radical weekly West Highland Free Press. His book The Soap Man was shortlisted for the Saltire Scottish Book of the Year in 2004 and Calum’s Road was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize in 2007.

FATHER ALLAN

The Life and Legacy of a Hebridean Priest

Roger Hutchinson

First published in 2010 byBirlinn LimitedWest Newington House10 Newington RoadEdinburghEH9 1QS

www.birlinn.co.uk

Reissued 2017

Copyright © Roger Hutchinson 2010

The moral right of Roger Hutchinson 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.

ISBN: 978 1 78027 496 6

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

Typeset by Edderston Book Design, PeeblesPrinted and bound by MBM Print SCS Ltd, Glasgow

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Preface

Maps

October 1905

1 The Post-Horn

2 The Strange Life of Catholic Scotland

3 Blairs

4 Valladolid

5 Oban

6 South Uist

7 Eriskay

October 1905

Notes

Bibliography

Index

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Father Allan MacDonald of Eriskay

Blairs Seminary on Deeside

A group of pupils at Blairs in 1863, eight years before Allan MacDonald arrived there

Allan with some fellow students in Valladolid in about 1878, when he was 19 years old

The Lord of the Isles: Father Allan at sea in oilskins, crossing between South Uist and Eriskay

Sagart Mor nan Each, Father John Mackintosh of Bornish

Father George Rigg of Daliburgh

The old St Michael’s Church in Eriskay, with Father Allan sitting on a rock before it

The new St Michael’s Church in Eriskay

Island and mainland clergymen from the Diocese of Argyll and the Isles at the consecration of the new St Michael’s Church in May 1903

‘It was on Sunday mornings that the whole island turned out’

A group of Eriskay women waulking tweed and singing their worksongs, as their priest looks on

Father Allan MacDonald as his congregation knew him, at the age of 39 in 1898

PREFACE

In July 2009 the South Uist arts organisation Ceolas held in the island of Eriskay a four-day Gaisgeach an t-Sluaigh (Champion of the People) symposium on the life and work of Father Allan MacDonald. The sun shone on a perfect event. The symposium was opened by Eriskay’s Freeman of the Western Isles – and self-confessed ‘oldest Eriskay man still living in Eriskay’ – Father Calum MacLellan.

The broadcasters Angela MacKinnon, herself of Eriskay, and Jo MacDonald of Lewis discussed, with the help of some local ladies, the life of Eriskay during Father Allan’s time, and his unique collection of Gaelic words and phrases from South Uist and Eriskay. Dr Roddy Campbell of Lochboisdale delivered a witty address on typhus and other viruses which struck down islanders 100 years ago, and Father Michael MacDonald of Bornish explored – with the help of Father Allan’s diaries – the intriguing detail of his priestly life and colleagues in the Southern Isles.

Magda Sagarzazu and Hugh Cheape plundered the Canna archives left by John Lorne Campbell to offer photographic and literary insights into the great priest’s friends and visitors. The proceeds culminated with a scholarly and entertaining workshop by Isabel T. MacDonald, with the assistance of Paul MacCallum and other singers, on Father Allan’s enduring Gaelic hymns.

I owe a debt to Ceolas and to all of the people mentioned above. That symposium crystallised what had previously been my own inchoate interest in the priest from Fort William who became celebrated throughout Scotland and beyond, and whose name also became synonymous with the southern Outer Hebrides. The seminars and discussions in Eriskay School in July 2009 were dignified by the presence of several local people. A man observed at one point that during the nineteenth century the name ‘Allan’ was almost unknown among Eriskay boys. After 1905, however, it became commonplace. Much of this book is an attempt to discover why.

The late John Lorne Campbell of Canna had a fascination with Allan MacDonald that stopped short of preparing a long written life. John Campbell did almost everything but write a complete biography of Father Allan. He eulogised him in a short booklet. He edited and introduced the diaries of Frederick Rea, in which Father Allan featured strongly. He examined in Strange Things the bizarre relationships between the Society for Psychical Research, Ada Goodrich-Freer and Father Allan MacDonald. He collated and prefaced the priest’s collection of Gaelic words and expressions for publication. He amassed memorabilia. He pursued Allan MacDonald’s own explorations of Hebridean folklore.

But John Campbell did not write the book. Somehow that task fell to me. Any merit in this product can be attributed in part to the author’s nervous awareness of the shade of the scholar of Canna House gazing critically over his shoulder.

Ronald Black, another specialist in the work of Allan MacDonald and the editor of his collected poems and hymns, who is presently preparing Father Allan’s residual folklore collection for publication, was characteristically helpful and supportive. The Gaelic–English translations of Allan MacDonald’s verse and songs are all taken from Ronnie’s anthology Eilein na h-Oige. I am deeply grateful for Ronnie Black’s forensic reading of my manuscript, and his correction of many important details and insertion of others.

Andrew Nicoll of the Scottish Catholic Archives in Edinburgh directed me into useful, dusty corners. My old friend Cailean Maclean patiently corrected my geography and my Gaelic. The survey of nineteenth-century Gaelic usage throughout Scotland conducted and collated by Kurt C. Duwe was invaluable. Davie McClymont and Morna MacLaren of Portree Public Library located and obtained for me rare books and pamphlets. Thanks also to Hugh Andrew and Andrew Simmons of Birlinn, that brilliant book jacket designer Jim Hutcheson, my editor Helen Bleck and my agent, Stan, of Jenny Brown Associates.

Most of all I must thank the two contemporary Hebridean Roman Catholic priests who illuminated the 2009 Ceolas symposium. Father Michael J. MacDonald of Bornish has been generous to a fault with his time, his judgement and his own researches. Father Calum MacLellan of Eriskay was always a wise and witty host at the priest’s house once occupied by Allan MacDonald and a perfect guide to the church which he built, to the island that both men have loved, and to the best qualities of Highland clergymen. None of the people mentioned above are responsible for any inadequacies, errors or misrepresentations in this biography.

Like most other people with the surname MacDonald, Father Allan spelt it himself and saw it written in at least four different ways. In this book I have retained the different versions used by others in their quoted stories of him and other members of Clan Donald, but in my own narrative I have dispensed with McDonald, Mcdonald and Macdonald and used MacDonald throughout, for no reasons other than consistency.

Roger HutchinsonMay 2010

OCTOBER 1905

Glasgow Herald, 14 October 1905

Amid ceremonial that was touched with pathos and yet was not without more than a little of the romantic and picturesque, the mortal remains of Father Allan MacDonald, the famous priest and scholar of Eriskay, were on Thursday laid in the grave.

The lonely island so far from the heart and hum of human things was a scene of weeping. The entire population is of the Roman Catholic faith, the ancient religion of Eriskay never having been interrupted by the Reformation upheaval, and for its spiritual and no less its material wellbeing Father Allan had lived and toiled.

He was not only the priest but the staff upon whom everyone leant, the kindly advisor to whom everyone turned; and the hand of death in removing him has laid a heavy blow upon the little remote community that he loved so well and that loved him in return.

Born in Lochaber, he desired that he should lie in the island where he had laboured so long and so zealously, and within hearing of the swell of the Atlantic. He pointed out the spot three years ago and recalled it with perfect clarity shortly before he died.

The funeral was an unforgettable sight. No fewer than twenty-one priests crossed the seas of the Minch to be there, the whole of the islanders were mourners and Father Allan went to his long rest amid the tears of strong men not used to weeping.

Not only Eriskay, but a wide world of friends lament the death of this heroic, humble-spirited priest and greatest of Celtic scholars and lorists.

1

THE POST-HORN

‘Many a person was regaled by him with old lore and tales that lightened their journey for them.’

A few years before Allan MacDonald was born in 1859, his father worked as a coach guard.

John MacDonald was responsible for safety and comfort on the Marquess of Breadalbane stagecoach in the Scottish Highlands; he would perch, wearing livery of scarlet and gold, with a blunderbuss and pistols in the outside rear box of the coach. The blunderbuss would be, according to a Highland writer in the 1850s, ‘full charged to the muzzle, – not wishing harm to any one, but bound in duty to let drive at all and sundry who would make war upon the passengers, or attempt running the conveyance off the road . . .’

The Marquess of Breadalbane, known colloquially as ‘the Breadalbane’, was a celebrated Highland coach in the middle of the nineteenth century. Its most usual routes were to and from Inverarnan at the head of Loch Lomond, where it would pick up steamer passengers who had sailed 25 miles up the loch from the jetty at Balloch, to destinations in Perthshire and Inverness-shire such as Aberfeldy and Fort William. The Breadalbane coach was advertised in July 1843 as ‘departing from the Head of Loch Lomond for Fort William every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday on the arrival of the Loch Lomond Steamer’.

From the head of Loch Lomond the coach track mainly followed the old convex, six yards-wide gravel roads which had been laid over a century earlier, between 1725 and 1737 under the direction of General George Wade, to allow the British Army to march more easily about a previously intractable region.

When John MacDonald was on the Fort William run, after boarding at Inverarnan his stage went down Glen Falloch to Crianlarich, then north through Tyndrum and Bridge of Orchy. From Bridge of Orchy it would fork left around Loch Tulla through the small community at Black Mount, across the forbidding Monadh Dubh and then spin over the wilderness of Rannoch Moor into Glencoe. It would wind down the precipitous track to Glencoe and Ballachulish villages. Passengers would dismount at the inn on the shore of the Ballachulish narrows, where Argyll was just one furlong of salt water from Lochaber. The coach, its horses, its human contents and its cargo would then be loaded separately onto the antique ferry and towed across the kyle of Loch Leven to be reunited at the other side. It finally rolled round the coast and up the southern shore of Loch Linnhe to its destination at Fort William.

It was an arduous journey. The Highland Roads and Bridges Commission reported in 1845 that:

The distance from Glasgow to Fort William has latterly been usually accomplished by travellers using the route of Loch Lomond, in about twelve or thirteen hours, reaching the head of Loch Lomond by the steam boats, and thence proceeding by the Black Mount. The commissioners have already done much upon this line, which, like the other military roads, was originally of very imperfect construction; but a very considerable outlay will still be absolutely necessary to remove the steepest of the ascents and the most sudden of the turns which abound upon it, before it can be considered safe for the rapid transit of heavily-laden stage carriages.

John MacDonald was employed directly by the Post Office to protect its mails from highway robbery. He was individually accountable for the safe delivery of the post. If the Marquess of Breadalbane lost a wheel or was stalled in any other way, John MacDonald was expected to continue to its destination with the mail, on foot or by other means. He was not allowed to leave his cargo. If there was mail on board when the Marquess of Breadalbane stopped at Crianlarich or Ballachulish, John MacDonald could not accompany the driver and passengers indoors for warmth and refreshment. Whatever the season, he had to remain with his weapons in his open-air box beside his parcels and bags. Very occasionally British stagecoach guards died from hypothermia in the execution of their duties. As a result of their heavy responsibilities, and to forestall corruption, coach guards were well paid and handsomely pensioned.

Coach guards were naturally familiar with their territory and the people on their routes were familiar with them. In a twentieth-century obituary of his son Allan, it was recalled that John MacDonald had been ‘for many years the highly-respected conductor of the once famous four-in-hand coach which ran between Fort William, via Glencoe and Blackmount, to Glasgow. He and Duncan MacMaster, the famous driver, were two well-known personalities on this route.’ In 1933 a Skyeman of a later generation imputed to John MacDonald some of the interests for which his son Allan would become celebrated, writing that the Breadalbane conductor ‘was closely acquainted with everyone whom he would meet on the long and difficult road that used to wend its way through those bounds at that time, and many a person was regaled by him with old lore and tales that lightened their journey for them.’

John MacDonald’s blunderbuss and other weapons were largely ceremonial. Pedestrians were occasionally ambushed, but there were no highway robberies of coaches in the Highlands in the middle of the nineteenth century. Passengers and cargo on the routes north of Loch Lomond at that time were safer from molestation than those on the Dover Road out of London or the Glasgow to Edinburgh turnpike.

Most people in Fort William would have heard John MacDonald arrive before they saw him. The most vivid residual public memory of coach guards was only realised when the stagecoaches had gone and been replaced in all quarters of the British Isles by the faster, warmer, drier and safer railway trains.

As well as his armoury, each coach guard was equipped with a post-horn. He blew a peremptory series of blasts, usually before entering a township, to warn toll-keepers to open their gates, posthouses to open their doors, and other traffic and pedestrians to get out of the way of Her Majesty’s Mail. From Fort William in the north-west to Folkestone in the south-east, that sound was for two centuries as familiar a feature of muted British rural life as the chiming of church bells. It was the ‘rapid crescendo of the coach guard’s horn’ which ‘wakens the echoes of the place’, whose sudden absence was lamented in 1890 by the Scottish essayist George Eyre-Todd.

John MacDonald was well qualified to be a coach guard. He came from a family of carters. When he worked as the guard on the stagecoach Marquess of Breadalbane in the early 1850s, John was in his late 20s and early 30s. He was a bachelor and still living with his parents in Fort William. But his parents had only moved back to the Lochaber district in their later years.

John’s father, Allan MacDonald, was known as Ailean Og (Young Allan), which in turn gave John himself the patronymic of Iain Ailein Oig (John of Young Allan). Allan MacDonald was born in 1782 in the huge rural parish of Kilmonivaig, which stretched from Appin in the south to Glenshiel and Glenmoriston in the north, from Laggan in the east to Glenelg in the west, and which included the two central townships of Spean Bridge and Invergarry. The parish of Kilmonivaig spread across four different counties (Inverness-shire, Argyllshire, Ross-shire and Perthshire) and in the nineteenth century was larger than most of the Lowland Scottish shires. Allan was born in the Inverness-shire section of Kilmonivaig, which suggests the Lochaber region to the north of Fort William. Allan MacDonald was one of the MacDonalds of Keppoch, an old Lochaber clan which fell on hard times after the defeat of the 1745 Jacobite Rising at the Battle of Culloden just 36 years before Allan MacDonald was born. The original seat of the MacDonalds of Keppoch was at Torr Lunndaidh, two miles north of the British Army garrison called Fort William.

But Allan MacDonald did not stay at home for long. Early in the nineteenth century he became a roving carter. He met, presumably while travelling, a woman called Elizabeth MacPherson from Cromdale, 60 miles away on the eastern fringes of Inverness-shire, where the Highland hills begin to descend to the English-and Doric-speaking plains of Moray, Banff and Buchan. They married, Elizabeth MacDonald joined her husband in the haulage business and they set up house in her local parish of Inverallan, possibly a short walk from Cromdale in the planned new town of Grantown-on-Spey, which had been founded 50 years earlier.

Their sons and daughters were born there, on the north-eastern fringe of the shrinking Scottish Gaidhealtachd. John MacDonald arrived in 1821 and, like his younger brothers Ranald and Allan, as soon as he was able he joined the family business.

A carter’s job was to move heavy goods by horse and cart. There were town carters in the urban conurbations, whose delivery work rarely took them outside the city streets and who survived well into the twentieth century. There were farm carters, who were usually hired hands directed to drive agricultural produce about their employer’s estate. Given their location and their apparent independence, it is probable that the MacDonalds were freelance distance carters who owned their own carthorses and packhorses and equipment and were contracted to export materials from one part of Scotland to another. They often also carried passengers for extremely cheap fares – cheap because those passengers had to squat beside cargo on the cart’s open flat-bed, and because there was no tax payable on personnel who were transported at less than four miles per hour. There was little more to it than that. They were the wheels of commerce. But as they operated in the north and north-west of Scotland the MacDonalds had to negotiate some of the most difficult tracks through some of the most hostile terrain in the wettest and windiest climate in northern Europe. The MacDonald family would have been strong, tough people in an age of hard outdoorsmen and women.

They ran their haulage operation out of the parish of Inverallan until the later 1830s, by which time Allan MacDonald was in his fifties and Elizabeth in her forties, and they had three strong sons to help them carry on the business. As it was by nature an itinerant business they were able then to return as a family to the Lochaber of Allan’s birth. They bought a house by the shore on Low Street in Fort William. Ranald and young Allan in their late teens and twenties continued as carters, their older brother John got that prized job as guard on the Marquess of Breadalbane stagecoach, their younger sister Mary found work as a domestic servant, and their parents Allan and Elizabeth were able to retire looking over the sheltered waters of Loch Linnhe and the distant Sunart hills.

While John was working on the Breadalbane in the early 1850s, a young woman named Margaret MacPherson and her elderly mother Charlotte were staying with their relatives Alexander and Mary MacIntosh in a village at the foot of the immense shoulder of Ben Nevis just north of Fort William called Torlundy – the same Torr Lunndaidh which had been the seat of the MacDonalds of Keppoch. The MacPhersons were originally from Laggan, 20 miles to the north-east on Upper Speyside. Their deceased husband and father had been a Badenoch shepherd and farm manager named Donald MacPherson. If he was an estate employee it is unlikely that he left so much as a roof over their heads to his wife and daughter. In 1851 the widowed Charlotte was 64 years old, and her 21-year-old fatherless daughter Margaret made some money as a seamstress.

We do not know whether 30-year-old John MacDonald met 21-year-old Margaret MacPherson while he was on some carting expedition, or riding shotgun on a stage, or simply and most probably when she strolled down to Fort William from Torlundy. However they met, on 21 November 1852 they were married in Fort William, within the old parish of Kilmallie.

John then gave up both the carting business – which he left in the hands of his brothers – and the stagecoach guardsman’s job. He had been able to save some money and he became a tavern-keeper on Fort William’s High Street, the main thoroughfare which ran south from the town’s military garrison along the first stages of the road to Rannoch Moor, Crianlarich, Loch Lomondside and Glasgow.

In 1855 Margaret gave birth to their first surviving child; a daughter whom they christened Charlotte after Margaret’s mother. In 1857 a son arrived, who was called Donald, possibly after Margaret’s father.

On 25 October 1859 Charlotte and Donald were given a baby brother. Nine months earlier, in January 1859, John’s father Allan MacDonald, Ailean Og, had died in Fort William at the age of 77. There was only one providential name for the newborn boy. He was called Allan after his paternal grandfather.

Allan MacDonald was born in a room at his father’s tavern at 179 High Street at the south-west end of Fort William. The building was torn down later in the nineteenth century and replaced by taller Victorian buildings. From the few early nineteenth-century structures which still stand in Fort William it is possible to imagine the town as it was in the 1850s and 1860s: three modest files of long, low-slung one-and-a-half-storey premises enclosing two parallel streets, each broken occasionally by a hefty three-storey granite omen of the future. The low stone walls of rectangular crofts still stretched back up the hillside behind the High Street.

Allan MacDonald grew up on the upper street, the High Street, with his back to the hill, along with his older siblings Charlotte and Donald and his younger brother and sister Ronald and Elizabeth, who were born in 1861 and 1864.

They would not have noticed at the time, when it was the only world they knew, but Fort William was a hybrid town. It was not a natural Highland development. A garrison had been established at the northern head of Loch Linnhe, by an old castle at Inverlochy, in the 1650s by forces of Oliver Cromwell’s army of the Commonwealth. It was at first nothing more than a timber palisade, but it contained nine or ten companies of foot soldiers posted to a notoriously bleak and hostile part of the western Highlands.

After the Restoration and then the Glorious Revolution of 1688–89, which usurped James VII of Scotland and James II of England, the last Stuart king of Great Britain, and replaced him with the dependably Protestant William and Mary, it was deemed prudent to strengthen the garrison at Inverlochy, which stood in the middle of a number of sinewy and irredeemably Jacobite Highland clans. So barracks for 1,000 soldiers were built inside 20-foot high stone walls. In case their allegiance was mistaken by the locals, in 1690 the bastion was christened Fort William and the adjacent village was called Maryburgh. For almost two centuries neither name was accepted by most Highland Gaels. They called the fort ‘Gearasdan dubh Inbhir-Lochaidh’ (‘The black garrison at Inverlochy’), and they let the name Maryburgh, or Baile Mairi, slip slowly out of use.

Fort William was dependent on the sea for its survival. Without the Royal Navy to provision, reinforce and defend it from the waters of Loch Linnhe, those thousand troopers could have been overwhelmed from the surrounding hills on at least two occasions during the violent eighteenth century. But by then the Highland clans had lost control of their seas, and by the end of the eighteenth century they would also have lost control of their land.

By the beginning of the nineteenth century the Highlands were effectively ‘pacified’. The Jacobite rebellions had been crushed, the clan system was dissolving, emigrations both voluntary and forced were reducing the population of the Scottish Gaidhealtachd. The comfortable classes could congratulate themselves that ‘There is not an instance of any country having made so sudden a change in its morals as that of the Highlands; security and civilization now possess every part; yet 30 years have not elapsed since the whole was a den of thieves of the most extraordinary kind.’ An Gearasdan Dubh Inbhir-Lochaidh no longer had an active military function, and its complement was wound down. It was used as a recruiting station and as a sanitorium. As late as 1855, just four years before the birth of Allan MacDonald, it was briefly occupied by a detachment of a sergeant and 24 men of 80th Foot (Staffordshire Volunteers), who were presumably on manoeuvres. But in 1864, when Allan MacDonald was five years old, the War Office sold the fort to a local dignitary, and in 1889 most of it was demolished to make way for the new West Highland railway line and a goods yard. In 1888 the romantic novelist William Black would write:

Peace reigns in Fort William now. Lochiel has no trouble with his clansmen; the Government have no trouble with Lochiel; the garrison buildings have been turned into private dwellings; women sit on the grassy bastions of the fort and knit stockings, sheltering themselves from the sun with an old umbrella; in the square are wooden benches for looking on at the tossing of the caber, putting the stone, and other Highland games; in the fosse is grown an excellent crop of potatoes and cabbages; and just outside there is a trimly kept bowling-green, in which the club-members practise the gentle art of reaching the tee when the waning afternoon releases them from their desk or counter.

Indeed it is possible that [a traveller], who had visited Edinburgh once or twice, and had passed the lofty crags and castle walls of Stirling, may have been disappointed to find a place of fair historic fame with so little to show for itself; but if Fort William is not in itself picturesque, it is in the very midst of wonderfully picturesque surroundings.

The straggling civilian garrison settlement which abandoned the name of Maryburgh and adopted the name of Fort William turned out to be a lucky place. For most of the eighteenth century its people made a decent, if occasionally hazardous, living from serving the needs of up to 1,000 soldiers. Early in the peaceful nineteenth century, as the soldiers began to disappear, the Caledonian Canal was opened in 1822, connecting the head of Loch Linnhe by water to the town of Inverness and the east coast of Scotland. The trading benefits of the canal to Fort William were soon augmented by tourism. Southern Victorian products of the Romantic era ventured ever further north beyond the Highland Line, into the once-forbidding badlands. Fort William, which had been established as the region’s police station, became its gateway.

According to the Ordnance Gazetteer of Scotland of 1882–84, the town was a bustling little place:

It chiefly consists of three parallel lines of buildings, forming two streets [High Street and Low Street], and containing several good hotels and shops, whilst in the suburbs are a number of handsome villas. A favourite tourist resort, and the headquarters of one of the 26 Scottish fishery districts, Fort William has a post office, with money order, savings bank, and telegraph departments, branches of the Bank of Scotland and the British Linen Company and National Banks, 9 insurance agencies, 6 hotels, a gas company, a public-hall, a new courthouse, a police station, a substantial stone quay (1834), a masonic lodge, a volunteer corps, a hospital founded by Andrew Belford, Esq. of Glenfintaig, for the poor of Kilmallie and Kilmonivaig parishes, and fairs on the forth [sic] Wednesday of March, the second Wednesday of June and November, the Tuesday after the second Thursday of July, and the Tuesday fortnight before Falkirk October Tryst.

Trade and tourism in the middle of a relatively healthy crofting and fishing district cemented the fortunes of Fort William. Its economic foundations were well suited to a family of carters and inn-keepers. Allan MacDonald grew up in a comfortable home in a fresh, free and healthy environment. It is an indication of his family’s class and aspirations that he was brought up as an accomplished and literate Anglophone, rather than a fluent Gaelic speaker.

‘I would give anything if I had been born fifteen miles to the westward [of Fort William],’ the adult Allan MacDonald would tell a friend. He meant that in the rural croftlands 15 miles west (or east, or north, or south) of the town he would have been brought up with Gaelic as his first if not only language. His parents, a friend years later would report Allan MacDonald as saying, were ‘Highlanders of long descent in Far Lochaber though they were, being innkeepers had the English, and practised it about the house while he was first getting the use of his own tongue. So that the idiom the child of the black house never wastes time learning, that the old folk salt every sentence with (as he would say it), he felt he had never fully mastered.’

In fact, despite the fact that his family’s quarters in his father’s Fort William inns were apparently English-speaking, Allan MacDonald was brought up surrounded by the language. He would write later of the village of his boyhood being ‘half lowland and half highland’. But in 1881, the first year in which the British National Census recorded Gaelic speakers, of the 1,600 people who lived in the town of Fort William, no fewer than 1,120 – or 70 per cent – were fluent in the language, as was 85 per cent of the population of the surrounding Lochaber countryside. As Gaelic was not taught to ordinary people in schools at that time, the statistics mean that in 1881 easily three-quarters of Allan’s neighbours were native Highlanders.

By that year of 1881, when Allan MacDonald had left the town, its population had risen by a third from the 1,100–1,200 people that he had known as a boy. It is certain that then, back in the 1860s, before the railway line brought people and goods from the south, a higher proportion than 70 per cent of Fort William’s people had the native language of the Highlands. The Fort William of Allan MacDonald’s childhood was effectively a Gaelic-speaking town, although almost all of its Gaelic-speaking majority would also have been conversant with English.*

The settlement and the district were both still redolent of Gaelic tradition and mythology. As a boy, Allan MacDonald enjoyed wandering by himself along the side of what he knew only as ‘the loch’ – he would not realise that its full name was Loch Linnhe until he was taught geography at school. Horses were pastured there, on the grassy banks. Although Allan liked and was familiar with horses, he steered well clear of those beasts. One of them might have been the each uisge, the water horse of Highland fable: a supernatural creature which could assume the shape of a fine steed but which, if mounted within sight of water, carried its rider to death in the deep loch. ‘There was a story the children had,’ said Allan, ‘of one that let them mount him. His back would be getting longer and longer until they were all on. Then he plunged into the loch, and that was the last of them.’

But English was increasingly the language of commerce, and young Allan MacDonald’s family was steeped in commerce. A conscious decision must have been taken – as it would be taken by thousands of other Gaelic parents in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – to educate their children out of the language of the unprofitable, disappearing Highland past, and into the language of the imperial present and glittering future. That decision may have been assisted in the case of John and Margaret MacDonald by the possibility that, while both of their fathers were certainly Gaels, neither John nor John’s mother was a native Gaelic speaker.

John MacDonald was, as we have seen, born and brought up in his mother’s native parish of Cromdale, Inverallan and Advie, which contained the large new settlement of Grantown-on-Spey. At the time this small district was in eastern Inverness-shire. It would later be absorbed into Morayshire. That transfer was culturally significant. By the nineteenth century most of eastern Inverness-shire was no longer part of the linguistic Gaidhealtachd. In 1881 (the first year that we know for sure) only 27 per cent of the population of Cromdale and Advie combined was Gaelic-speaking, just 22 per cent of the population of Inverallan had the language, as did only 13 per cent of the people of Grantown-on-Spey.

Earlier in the nineteenth century, when John and his mother Elizabeth were raised in Cromdale, Inverallan and Advie, the percentages were probably higher. But they were still not high enough to create a Gaelic-speaking day-to-day environment. When the proportion of Gaelic-speakers in a bilingual community fell below half, Gaelic ceased to be the tongue of regular discourse and its role in that community quickly unravelled. John and Elizabeth MacDonald, baby Allan’s father and grandmother, would unavoidably have had some Gaelic words and phrases – nobody in the north of Scotland in their time could practically ignore the language, and their father and husband was a Gaelic speaker. But it is more than likely that the main language of their home and, at least until they moved to Fort William, their neighbourhood, was English.

Margaret MacDonald, Allan’s mother, was born and bred further west in Inverness-shire, in the rural Badenoch district of Laggan, and for that reason alone she will have been fluent in Gaelic. In 1881 Laggan was 88 per cent Gaelic-speaking, and when Margaret was a girl in the 1830s there must have been very little else heard on the smallholdings and sheep farms of Laggan.

Margaret’s father, Donald MacPherson, was a native Gaelic speaker. Margaret’s mother Charlotte’s maiden name was MacHardy. She had been born in the Badenoch township of Kingussie in 1787 and was raised there before moving down the strath to marry Donald MacPherson in Laggan. MacHardy was not a common Gaidhealtachd family name, being associated mostly with Banffshire in the north-east of Scotland, which was no longer, in the nineteenth century, a Gaelic-speaking area. But some MacHardys had relocated westward to Kingussie, and Charlotte’s childhood there at the end of the eighteenth century would probably have given her complete fluency in Gaelic and would certainly have offered more than a casual acquaintanceship with the language. It is unlikely that Charlotte MacHardy was not a Gaelic speaker, but it is probable that she was completely bilingual, and that her family’s default dialect had been Doric, Scots or even English.

She will therefore have been completely comfortable in Gaelic-speaking Laggan early in the nineteenth century. But it is possible that in the privacy of their home her husband deferred to her family’s own native language, and that at least one household in Laggan had at times an English-speaking interior.

If those suppositions are correct, it is likely that John MacDonald was not brought up with cradle Gaelic from his mother, and had little opportunity to learn it in the fields of Cromdale, Inverallan and Advie. It is equally probable that Margaret MacDonald was totally conversant in the language, but had been raised by a mother who held English in higher esteem.

Margaret MacDonald consequently continued an English-speaking tradition with Allan and her other infants. That would not have stopped every member of both of the generations from having at the very least a useful foundation in Gaelic, and heads full of Gaelic words and phrases. They would be bound to pick some up, from their work and their localities and from the ubiquity of Gaelic in their time. But the fall-back language at their former homes in Inverallan and in Laggan could very well have been English, as it certainly was at Allan MacDonald’s childhood home in Fort William.

Allan MacDonald’s parents came from households in which Gaelic was very far from being a foreign language, but where, in his words, ‘the tradition of Gaelic speech’ was broken.

Nonetheless, the grounding in Gaelic given by their environment and by their broad family to Allan and his siblings would relatively easily be lifted into fluency. Allan MacDonald himself was not the only illustration of that fact. His younger brother Ronald left Fort William in his teens to work in Glen Shiel. That rural north-western district was then almost entirely Gaelic-speaking, with a high proportion of people who could speak only Gaelic, and in 1881 the 19-year-old Ronald felt comfortable enough to tell the census enumerator that he also was a Gaelic speaker. If he was not conversant with the language when he left Fort William, Ronald picked up Gaelic extremely quickly in Glen Shiel without the benefit of night school or postal classes. Young Elizabeth, the baby of the family, was 17 at the time of the 1881 census. For reasons which will become clear, Lizzie had by then been living in a fully Gaelic-speaking household for the previous six years. She had fallen into the language with ease. Like her brother Ronald in Glen Shiel, in 1881 the teenaged Lizzie pronounced herself to be a Gaelic speaker.

The MacDonald family might have partly ‘given over the use of their mother tongue’ but they stayed completely true to their old religion. Allan MacDonald was born into a Roman Catholic family.

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*   The rate of decline in Fort William Gaelic between 1881 and 1891, when records were taken, was roughly 5 per cent over the ten years (it accelerated more steeply downhill during the twentieth century). If the same rate of decline can be presumed during the unrecorded decades of the 1860s and 1870s, then the population of Fort William in 1861, when Allan MacDonald was an infant, would have been at least 80 per cent Gaelic-speaking. To put it another way, out of 1,100 people in the town in 1861, it is fair to presume that only about 200 were not Gaelic speakers.

2

THE STRANGE LIFE OF CATHOLIC SCOTLAND

‘That portion of Scotland which has remained pious and faithful.’

The sixteenth-century Reformation almost destroyed Catholicism in Scotland. If it had not been for the residual strength of the faith in parts of the inaccessible Highlands and Islands, the Scottish Roman Catholic Church would have been reduced to a cypher.

The Protestant fires lit by John Knox in the 1560s laid waste to Catholicism in central and southern Scotland. The penal statutes against the Church of Rome, which were first enacted by the Scottish Parliament in 1560 and were pursued and supplemented in piecemeal form from both Edinburgh and Westminster for a further 233 years, effectively outlawed Catholicism in Scotland. By 1681 it was reported after a four-year survey commissioned by the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith that in a total Scottish population of about a million people, only 14,000 were still Catholics.

Of those 14,000 Scottish recusants, the same investigator discovered, no fewer than 12,000 were in the Highlands and Islands. Even allowing for the fact that in 1681 the Scottish Highlands were still relatively well populated in comparison with the rest of the country, that was a remarkable imbalance.

A Morayshire Catholic told Rome seven years later, in 1688, that although there were some 1,200 churches in Scotland, not one of them was Catholic, and ‘the severity of the penal laws . . . forbid the clergy to celebrate, and the laity to assist at, Mass, under the penal pain of exile, confiscation of property, and death’. There were at the end of the seventeenth century just two Catholic schools in the whole of Scotland, one in the western Highlands in Glengarry, 16 miles north of Fort William, and one in the Hebridean island of Barra.* ‘Catholics, in consequence, hold their services in private houses, where sermons are preached and the sacraments are administered: in the Highlands, however, this is done with much greater freedom.’

The Highlands were an exception, though not a complete one: Catholics were still in an overall minority north of the Highland Line. Nor was the survival of the faith purely a product of remoteness. Catholicism remained strong in the southern Outer Hebridean islands, but not in the more distant northern Outer Hebrides of Harris and Lewis, let alone in the ulterior archipelagos of Orkney and Shetland. There were large Catholic communities in western Lochaber and not far to the north in Sutherland and Caithness. The well-populated east-coast counties of Aberdeen and Kincardineshire contained many Catholic redoubts; other less accessible regions did not.

In the Gaelic west Highlands, Catholicism persisted chiefly in a broad arc around the garrison and new town of Fort William.