Highland Herald E-Book

Ross David

• Herausgeber: Birlinn
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 519

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

From 1988 to 2017 David Ross was the Highland Correspondent of The Herald. His patch stretched from the Mull of Kintyre in the south to the Shetland island of Unst in the north; and from St Kilda, in the West, to the whisky country of Speyside in the east. From his home on the Black Isle he covered all the big stories, from the fight against a nuclear waste dump in Caithness to plans to remove half a mountain on the island of Harris. He helped the first community land buyout in modern times in Assynt, covered in depth the anti-toll campaign on the Skye Bridge, the efforts to save Gaelic and protect ferry services. In Highland Herald he reflects on the important issues which affected the Highlands and Islands during his time. He tells how his late father-in-law, the Gaelic poet Sorley MacLean, helped him. He had never written in depth about Sorley when he was alive, as it would have been 'excruciatingly embarrassing for both of us', but does so now.

Leseprobe

David Ross was brought up in Blairgowrie, Perthshire and North Connel, Argyll. After studying history at Edinburgh University and training to be a teacher, he entered the world of journalism, where he worked for his whole professional life. In February 2017 he won the Barron Trophy in recognition for his lifetime achievement in journalism in the Highlands and Islands. In 1986 he wrote An Unlikely Anger (Mainstream), about the Scottish teachers’ controversial campaign of industrial action.

For Mary, Calum and Catherine

First published in 2018 by

Birlinn Limited

West Newington House

10 Newington Road

Edinburgh

EH9 1QS

www.birlinn.co.uk

Copyright © David Ross 2018

The moral right of David Ross 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 78885 087 2

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Typeset by Initial Typesetting Services, Edinburgh

Printed and bound by Gutenberg Press, Malta

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

Foreword

Introduction

  1   First Few Paragraphs

  2   The Herald’s Man in the North

  3   Sorley

  4   Gaelic

  5   History Matters

  6   Religion

  7   Politics and Politicians

  8   The Land: Assynt

  9   In the Footsteps of Assynt

10   Sport

11   Catching the Ferry

12   Hebridean Travails

13   Sir Humphrey in the Hebrides

14   For Whom the Bridge Tolled

15   Blowing the Whistle

16   Dounreay

17   Cromarty Rising

Index

List of Illustrations

In Peter Jolly’s back garden

Sorley MacLean

On top of the world at Cape Wrath

Assynt crofters John MacKenzie, Bill Ritchie and Allan MacRae

On Gigha

With Uncle Neil on Iona

Coinneach Maclean on tour

Cromarty from the sea

On board the ferry to Eriskay before the causeway was built

With Renee and Sorley in Galway

Cromarty Rising campaigners outside Holyrood

Jim Hunter near the Ballachulish bridge

An oil rig passes the Royal Hotel in Cromarty

With John Ross interviewing one of the residents of the island of Rum

Brian Wilson, Maggie Fyffe and Colin Carr on Eigg

‘The Prof’ (Norman Macdonald) interviews Drew Millar at the Skye Bridge

Chris Tyler’s cartoon for the West Highland Free Press on the MacDonald clan chief’s offer to North Americans to ‘honor’ their forebears

The Herald front page: Highland councillors shocked by Dounreay waste pit

Protestors against oil transfers on the beach at Nairn

Acknowledgements

THIS BOOK WOULD not have been possible without the support and encouragement of senior editors at The Herald, particularly Tom Thomson and Graeme Smith, who allowed me to use articles and photographs under copyright. Multimedia editor Craig Alexander and his colleague Colin Mearns have been particularly helpful. Literary editor Rosemary Goring emboldened me. Peter Jolly (my accomplice on so many missions), Cailean Maclean, Greg Fullarton and Dipesh Gosar also provided photographs. The assistance of John McNaught, studio manager at the Highland Print Studio in Inverness, has simply been immense throughout. He also supplied the photograph for the front cover. John Ross (much more of him later) provided wise counsel. Cailean Maclean has helped and advised me on innumerable projects, including this one.

I am indebted to Chris Tyler for allowing me to reproduce a cartoon of his in the West Highland Free Press. Free Press editor Ian McCormack also deserves my gratitude for help over many years. Meanwhile, Norman Campbell of BBC Radio nan Gàidheal provided invaluable guidance on many matters, as has Hugh Dan MacLennan.

Ian McCrorie was always so generous with his encyclopaedic knowledge of ferries on the Clyde and Hebrides routes. I would often go to him for information. The Papa Westray-based writer and historian Jim Hewitson was my first news editor in the Edinburgh office of The Herald, and has long been a trusted adviser. So many members of the Highland press corps, too many to list, deserve my gratitude for their help over the years, including Pete Bevington and Hans Marter in Shetland, especially Stuart Taylor and Ken Jones in Lochaber, Moira Kerr in Argyll and Bill Lucas on Lewis.

I am also grateful to my cousins Marjorie Kennedy, Janetta Tindal and Mairi MacArthur for information provided and encouragement given for this book. The same applies to my sisters Janet Sirrell and Isabelle Macdonald.

Finally I would like to thank all at Birlinn for their advice, encouragement and patience in the production of this book, in particular Andrew Simmons, editorial manager, whose quiet but steady guidance has been much appreciated.

Foreword

DAVID ROSS IS a man apart – literally so because for several decades he has been reporting and interpreting the Highlands and Islands of Scotland for an audience that is largely based in the country’s Central Belt. He is a man apart in another, more important and more personal sense, for he is an authentic character, a natural optimist and a wonderful friend. I write that with total confidence, as I have known him well for many years. We first met as far back as 1975, when I was education correspondent of The Scotsman and David was a student leader. In that controversial role he was, unlike some of his colleagues, always effective, reasonable and friendly. Later, when I was deputy editor and then editor of The Herald, I became ever more aware of his merit as a journalist and friend.

The Highlands and Islands is a huge beat, almost impossible for one correspondent to cover effectively if you want old-fashioned reporting but also interpretation. David excelled at both. In a sense he explained the Highlands and Islands to the rest of Scotland.

David is the cheeriest of men, always optimistic and always good company. His job at times placed him under severe stress and strain, not least because of the need to travel long distances often on difficult roads in bad conditions. Never once, over several decades, did he complain.

This fine book gives you a keen sense of the Highlands. It is written by an exceptional journalist and an unusually decent man.

Harry ReidAugust 2018

Introduction

THE MAN LARGELY responsible for persuading me to write this book is a consultant medical psychotherapist, but hopefully his professional expertise has not influenced his enthusiasm for this project. I have known Ian Kerr since we were students at Edinburgh University. We have kept in touch ever since and on a regular basis, with telephone calls normally starting with the comparative fortunes of Stirling Albion and Ross County. Every time we have talked these past five years, however, he has also been badgering me to write a book and not to throw away the memories, professional and personal, of the last 30 years as Highland correspondent of The Herald. He thought my position had best been defined by the anthropological notion of ‘participantobserver’ as opposed to that of a detached or remote reporter. Initially I thought I would want a break from writing, but as my actual retirement approached last year, I started to think maybe Ian was right. Mind you, I am not entirely sure this is the book he really wanted me to write, but for all that I am indebted to him for his relentless but comradely encouragement.

There will be some that might be disappointed that I have not tackled, or have just touched on, other important issues about which I have written in the past, from wind farms to red deer numbers; or from the Crown Estate to the impressive Our Islands Our Future campaign conducted by Shetland, Orkney and Western Isles councils. This book can lay no claim to being an exhaustive modern history of the Highlands and Islands. It simply tries to pull together my reflections on some of the most significant issues which have occupied me. Not least amongst these has been the growth of community land ownership, and as I finished writing this book the island of Ulva off the north-west of Mull and its six inhabitants were set to join the ranks of community landlords.

There are people I deeply regret not writing about in the book, such as the late North Strome crofter Angus MacRae, chairman of the old Scottish Crofters’ Union. He was a big man in every way: in physique, intellect and character. It has been one of the great joys of my job to get to know so many fascinating characters and tell their stories. There was another MacRae, Calum Og, a renowned GP on Skye and a man possessed with the most wonderful sense of the ridiculous – he once had my mother-in-law believing that he had got a great bargain on his latest Mercedes, having bought it ‘from the Argentinian ambassador to Peru’. Then there was the Danish ceramicist Lotte Glob, who lives on Sutherland’s north coast and leaves examples of her work, Floating Stones, in lonely lochans for the enjoyment of walkers.

It has been a privilege to work in the Highlands and Islands, which have been described as ‘Scotland’s lungs’. It can be a dangerous place, often attended by tragedy. Too many news bulletins start with deaths on the road, the mountains and at sea. The loss of four young men in the Sound of Iona in 1998, and that of five members of three generations of one family swept away by a storm on South Uist in 2005, are amongst the saddest I covered. They offended against the Hebridean ideal of the young staying or returning to build their lives in the islands.

In 2013 the Highland press corps lost one of our own when Clive Dennier failed to return from walking on the Knoydart peninsula. The alarm was raised when he did not turn up for work at the Strathspey and Badenoch Herald. The Highlands also has one of the highest rates of suicide in the land amongst young men. A cruel statistic, which leaves so many families bereft, but is as yet not properly understood.

The Herald

I joined The Herald when Arnold Kemp was editor and Harry Reid his deputy. I had been friendly with Harry ever since my days as a student involved in campaigning, when he was the Scotsman’s education correspondent. Harry was to become the Herald’s editor, and always supported and encouraged me in my career, as he did others. When I was appointed Highland correspondent, Arnold joked that henceforth every place with the ‘CH’ sound would be my responsibility. He would come north for a visit once a year, when we would head off on different trips so that he would be better informed on Highland issues. Highly enjoyable times, but they always meant more work for me on our return. On one occasion on these Johnson-and-Boswell-style tours we were invited up on to the bridge of the Caledonian MacBrayne ferry that was taking us across the Minch from North Uist to Skye. This pleased Arnold, but he told me I had to follow up whatever intelligence the skipper was imparting to us as soon as I was back at my desk.

He believed deeply in the importance of good journalism and would always back his staff. That certainly was my experience when I got into scrapes. He was very hospitable, some would say too hospitable. Newspapers can be tough on staff. Whatever his failings, Arnold’s Herald was a civilised and enlightened place to work, a legacy that Harry protected when he became editor, as did others. That certainly was my view, albeit from 200 miles away. I don’t remember falling out too badly even with my line managers, the procession of those who occupied the news editor’s chair. It was a position popularly associated with sharp exchanges, but as far as I can recall the worst meted out to me was Bob Sutter yawning very loudly over the phone when I was trying to explain why I thought some crofting story or the like was vitally important.

When I started working in the Highlands, it was long before mobile phones. I was given a bleeper at one point, but it only worked in Inverness, and at that time all my stories seemed to be elsewhere. It was easy to go off Glasgow’s radar, but I like to think I only did so rarely. Working at such a distance also meant that I could know people for years, talking to them almost daily on the phone, without actually meeting them. I went down to Glasgow infrequently. When I did, I used to go into the Press Bar in Albion Street and listen into conversations so I could identify long-standing colleagues.

The poet

This book is also my own small tribute to my late father-in-law, the poet Somhairle MacGill-Eain/Sorley MacLean. I never wrote about him when he was alive, apart from the odd passing reference. It would have been excruciatingly embarrassing for him, and the rest of the family, had I done otherwise. I certainly don’t try to comment on the importance of his writing. I am not qualified and am happy to leave that to the likes of Aonghas Phàdraig Caimbeul and Aonghas MacNeacail, amongst others. It has, however, been an honour to have been associated with him and to write about our relationship. I call him Sorley in the book, something I never did when he was alive; it was always Sam. But somehow that didn’t seem appropriate. When I met him first his fame had begun to grow internationally, and he was invited to speak or be honoured at different gatherings in England, Wales, Ireland, Canada and France, as well as at home in Scotland. He and my mother-in-law loved these trips.

The first I heard about Sorley’s family – the Macleans of Raasay – was from my granny on Iona, who had heard of his academic achievements and those of his siblings. Like so many in the Highlands and Islands she greatly valued education. The first member of the Maclean family (Sorley latterly spelt his surname MacLean; I don’t know why) I met was Uisdean, Sorley’s nephew. It was in the Captain’s Bar in South College Street in Edinburgh. We were supposed to be studying in the late-night reading room next door. Our books were there even if we weren’t.

In the interests of candour and in anticipation of allegations of hidden agendas, I would declare that I am a member of no political party and have not been since I left Edinburgh three decades ago. I was then a member of the Labour Party (Leith CLP), and before that I was in the breakaway Scottish Labour Party led by Jim Sillars. I was also a member of the Young Liberals as a teenager. I was in favour of ‘Devo-Max’ but voted Yes in the independence referendum of 2014 and Remain in the one on European Union membership in 2016. I tried to give fair coverage to all the politicians in the Highlands and Islands, of whichever party or none. It is up to others to say whether I was successful in that.

1

First Few Paragraphs

IN LATE AUGUST 2017 I finished writing a story about the SNP MSP Kate Forbes raising concerns over staffing levels in a Ross-shire primary school, sent it to Glasgow, and that was it. After more than 30 years I had transmitted my last copy down to The Herald and had officially retired. Much of my working life had been taken up with stories just like the one concerning Kate Forbes, involving communities fighting to safeguard their services, the more so in the most remote outposts of humanity in the UK. As it happened, by the end of the day the Highland Council had taken steps to answer the MSP’s concerns.

No longer would I have to check local bulletins on radio or headlines in the weekly papers or work out what ungodly hour I’d have to rise in order to get across the Minch or the Pentland Firth in time for a meeting. It was an end to the constant low-level dread that some huge event had just happened somewhere in the Highlands and Islands, and the only person who didn’t know about it was the Herald’s man in the north.

After my retirement was announced, good wishes followed from many Herald readers, including members of the family of Kevin McLeod. They thanked me for my efforts over the years in keeping their search for the truth about Kevin, whom they believe had been murdered, in the headlines. He was found dead in Wick harbour aged 24 in February 1997 after a night out. Police Scotland made an ‘unreserved apology’ to them just before Christmas 2017 as the latest review of the case said that failures in the initial investigation, 20 years earlier, meant it was uncertain how he had died. In May 2018 police were ‘actively investigating new evidence’.

On a happier note, there was cross-party support for a motion tabled in the Scottish Parliament by the Scottish Green Party MSP for the Highlands and Islands, John Finnie, which stated that ‘the Parliament notes the retirement from The Herald of the journalist David Ross, who has covered the Highlands for the newspaper since 1988; praises his dedication to the region, covering issues ranging from land reform and the environment to transport and Gaelic; further notes his award earlier in 2017 of the Barron Trophy for lifetime achievement in journalism in the Highlands and Islands, and wishes him well in his retirement’.

Both very flattering and much appreciated. My retirement was reported through local news outlets. There was, however, a different reaction at home in Cromarty, where I had lived and worked since 1988, but where it appeared I had been held to have been pretty indolent. I met a man in the local shop with whom I normally discussed football. He had heard of the Holyrood motion and said, ‘I hear you are now retired officially. Well you have had plenty practice.’ Others present seemed to agree, clearly still unconvinced by the concept of home working.

Apart from a brief period working in Inverness, my base was our house, which for the most part worked well. Every so often, however, combining work and home life in the same building would become complicated. On one occasion I was on the phone to the Crown Office seeking guidance to avoid a possible contempt of court in an article I was preparing. I was rudely interrupted by my daughter Catherine, who had just returned home from the local primary school. She picked up the extension and asked me to get off the line as her friend Vaila wanted to phone home. Nowhere is far from anywhere in Cromarty, and Vaila’s home was all of 25 yards away. The official in the Crown Office, however, agreed that Vaila should indeed take precedence over the Contempt of Court Act.

In truth I was leaving behind a job that had taken me from a cliff top on the Shetland island of Unst looking down on Muckle Flugga Lighthouse to the Mull of Kintyre. My bailiwick had been the size of Belgium but with fewer people than Edinburgh. It had thrown up issues of national, and at times international, significance over the past three decades, from the prospects of a nuclear waste dump in Caithness to a super-quarry that would replace a mountain on Harris; and from the creation of a University of the Highlands and Islands to the first wave of wind farms and opposition to them.

Nothing in my early life had suggested I would join the Fourth Estate, nor that I would devote most of my working life to the Highlands and Islands. I had gone to Edinburgh University to train as a dentist. The training didn’t go well and fairly early I realised I had made a pretty poor career choice, and I often found myself in the university library reading books on history and politics, not teeth. Inevitably this was reflected in examination results. The draw of the arts faculty grew irresistible and I transferred to study history. After that it was a year at Moray House College of Education to train as a teacher, but I never taught. My time at Moray House coincided with students occupying colleges of education up and down the land. This was in protest at the lack of job opportunities due to public spending cuts as Britain tried to haul itself out of recession. History and Modern Studies, the subjects I would be qualified to teach, were particularly oversubscribed. It was during that time I first met Harry Reid, the Scotsman’s education correspondent, who was to be my future editor. After Moray House I got work on a Job Creation Programme research project run by the Manpower Services Commission, which employed unemployed teachers in Scotland to survey the employment opportunities for young unemployed teachers being offered by the Job Creation Programme. This ludicrous symmetry wouldn’t have been out of place in a satirical sketch. It was, however, to give me my first journalistic opportunity.

Part of my job was to write reports in the community education newspaper Scan, published monthly by the Scottish Community Education Centre, which at that time was bringing the youth and community work sector together with that of adult education. It was led by the late Jim McKinney, who had been something of a visionary in this field. He was to give me a full-time job with responsibility for editing Scan. While I was working there I started doing some freelance reporting for the Times Educational Supplement Scotland (TESS), courtesy of an old university friend, Neil Munro. He had returned to Edinburgh to join the staff of TESS having spent a year editing the Skye-based West Highland Free Press. The TESS was to undergo staffing changes itself with the departure of its founding editor Colin MacLean and then its deputy editor, the wonderful Iain Thorburn. Neil was promoted deputy and the new editor was Willis Pickard, formerly features editor and leader writer on The Scotsman. He appointed me to the staff in Neil’s former position, my first real job in journalism. I was to spend nine happy years learning my trade and, more importantly, how this participative democracy of ours in Scotland actually worked.

A dentist’s hands

When I eventually transferred from dentistry to history, it was after taking a year out in what was not then called a ‘gap year’. My abandonment of dental surgery was explained by some on my mother’s native island of Iona as being due to my hands not being suitable for the tasks that would lie ahead in patients’ mouths. It was a kindly, if inaccurate, spin on academic failure by people who wanted the best for children of the island’s diaspora. When I was growing up, the island was like a second home to me and my two sisters. Every summer holiday was spent there on the croft at Clachanach that had been home to our mother. It was worked intensively by her brother Neil. Our grandmother, originally from Mull, and my unmarried aunt, Mary, still stayed in the house they had once run as a guest house, where artists would sometimes stay.

When very young Iona meant playing with cousins. Seven others would arrive from Gourock (Lambs, five) and St Andrews (MacArthurs, two) on holiday and two, Uncle Neil’s daughters, lived on the island. Looking back, it seems every day was spent at the beach below the croft; my mother was so often in charge that her favoured spot was called Aunty Eilidh’s Bay by my Iona cousins Marjorie and Janetta. There were trips in my uncle’s motorboat for picnics in more exciting places such as Balfour’s Bay on the island of Erraid. This was where in Kidnapped Robert Louis Stevenson imagined David Balfour being washed ashore after having been shipwrecked on the Torran Rocks to the south-west. Uncle Neil would usually be working on the croft, so his elder brother Dugald, chief librarian at St Andrews University and wartime officer in the Royal Navy, would often be at the helm on such expeditions (his daughter Mairi was to write well-received histories of the island and its people – Iona: The Living Memory of a Crofting Community and Columba’s Island, both published by Edinburgh University Press).

There were other forms of recreation, including rolling down a hill inside a rusty old oil drum. For some reason the wearing of goggles and a lady’s bathing hat was mandatory for those taking the challenge. As my parents were both teachers, the best part of two months, and the occasional Easter break, would be spent there by the Rosses every year. Admiration grew in me of how the islanders would adapt to whatever nature threw at them. The crofters and boatmen were heroic figures in young eyes as they battled through storms in oilskins and waders.

Teenage years were spent trying to help Uncle Neil on the croft, largely haymaking or working with sheep. The high point would be preparing for the lamb sales in Oban. We would gather on the family’s second croft on the north-west of the island before getting the sheep and their lambs back to be marked and taken down to a park behind the Argyll Hotel, where they would be held overnight. In the early hours of the morning one of MacBrayne’s cargo ships would slip into the Sound of Iona. There was real excitement seeing the Loch Carron, Loch Ard or Loch Broom lying at anchor in the morning light. The lambs would be ferried out in one of the open motor boats normally used to take tourists off the steamer King George V on her daily summertime cruises from Oban. My uncle would board the cargo boat and head to Oban with his lambs and we would head back to Clachanach, often charged with checking the ‘slochs’ at the back of the island to see if any sheep had got lost. These are amongst the more inhospitable and inaccessible places on Iona. On one occasion while checking them with Janetta, we were greeted by a middle-aged woman emerging from behind a rock. She had been staying at the Iona Community and had come out for a late-night walk, only to get lost. But she was convinced that ‘David the shepherd boy and his sister’ had been sent to take her back. This we did, only to hear that later that day she had chased a holidaying doctor with a bread knife and had to be taken off the island in a straitjacket.

My uncle also had the grazing of two tiny islands off the west of Iona, and going out in his motor boat to remove or deposit sheep was enormously exciting. On one occasion he left his cromac behind on one of them. This shepherd’s crook had a shaped wooden handle rather than one of horn, and when he returned a year or so later it had been all but straightened by the weather. There must be a metaphor in that about island life.

Coal used to arrive in a puffer which would sail into Martyrs Bay just to the south of the village on the high tide and wait till the ebb left it resting on the sand. Horses and carts, then tractors and trailers, would come alongside to be filled by large metal buckets, which were swung out over the side of the puffer by a derrick. As one bucket was being emptied another was filled by three men with shovels until there was no coal left. I was in one such team with my cousin’s husband, Ken Tindal, himself an islander, along with a man from Mull whose name escapes me. I think we held the record for the amount of coal discharged in one tide. I certainly have been claiming as much ever since.

Such memories of Iona have remained with me and certainly helped in my later role as the Herald’s Highland correspondent. I knew the difference between inbye land and common grazings, and that between a ewe and a tup. I also learnt how to moor a motor boat, drive an old grey Ferguson tractor and reverse a trailer, although these skills were rarely called on in my journalistic career. But probably most important of all was that I gained some kind of understanding of life on a small island.

Iona, however, could only ever be claimed as a second home. I grew up in Blairgowrie in Perthshire before we moved back to Argyll, where my parents had met. My father, the son of a Presbyterian minister from Perthshire, was a time-served joiner who retrained to become a technical teacher. My mother had gone to the Dunfermline College of Physical Education to train as a PE or ‘gym’ teacher, as they used to be called. She had started her training in Dunfermline College when it was still in the Fife town. My parents both taught at Oban High School, but part of my mother’s job was to travel up the old Connel to Ballachulish rail line and then onwards to Kinlochleven Junior High School for two days of PE classes. They were to begin their married life there after my father returned from the war. They also lived briefly in Glencoe village before heading east.

Blairgowrie was a good place to grow up. My parents were very involved in the nearby St Andrew’s Church of Scotland. My father was an elder and my mother used to take the Sunday School. The other great parental focus in the early years was the local Highland Society, which was really an embryonic branch of An Comunn Gàidhealach. It organised ceilidhs and dances. I remember the excitement when Alasdair Gillies would come to sing. My mother was secretary and some of the other officers were also exiled islanders. She was particularly close to a young primary teacher from Barra, Anne Campbell, who was to marry physiotherapist Tom Kearney. One of their sons is actor/presenter/director Tony Kearney. There were people who came down from Strathardle and Glenshee to these social events in Blairgowrie. These were places from which Gaelic had retreated in the not-too-distant past. The 1901 census had 31.1 per cent of residents in Kirkmichael in Strathardle as Gaelic speakers. My mother taught there for some time and she said local people told her Gaelic could still be heard in the main street till the First World War. The figure in 1901 for Glenshee, where my paternal grandfather James Ross had been minister for a time (there was also a Ross Memorial Church named after him in Dalmuir, since renamed), was almost 20 per cent, but some facility in the language survived. The celebrated folklorist and poet Hamish Henderson was taught his first Gaelic phrases there. He and his unmarried mother moved to a rented cottage at the Spittal of Glenshee to get away from her home in Blairgowrie and her family’s shame of illegitimacy. Hamish told me of his connection with Glenshee and Blairgowrie during the many hours – too many – I spent in his company as a student in Sandy Bell’s Bar in Forrest Road, Edinburgh. Hamish’s biographer Timothy Neat starts the first volume of his work on the man in Glenshee, underlining its importance to his subject.

Children from Strathardle and Glenshee attended Blairgowrie High School, being bussed in daily. We would head up the glen for grouse beating in the late summer. For those of us who liked walking, although we would never admit it, this was always seen as a great way to earn 30 shillings. Especially in the mid to late 1960s, when an underage drinker could buy a pint of light for one shilling and tenpence in a public bar, and a bottle of the considerably stronger Carlsberg Special for three shillings and sixpence. The gamekeepers also used to pass round beer and the occasional dram if they had been happy with our day’s work, something I would have to hide from my parents. We were paid the same for a day picking tatties at local farms, but there would be no drink, only back-breaking work. Many of my friends would also work picking raspberries and strawberries in the summer, but I think I only did this for one morning when very young. When the school closed for the summer, we were off to Iona.

It was in Blairgowrie I first met somebody who made a living working in newspapers. This was Robert (R.D.) Low, who along with W.D. Watkins created ‘Oor Wullie’ and ‘The Broons’ for the Sunday Post. He was the father of my lifelong friend Duncan and lived across the wall from us. He once gave me a mention in ‘Oor Wullie’: ‘David Ross is getting to stay up for New Year and he is younger than me.’ And my father had his name above a shop in ‘The Broons’: ‘John Ross – Butcher’.

I had already embarked on my ultimately unsuccessful excursion into dental surgery when the family moved back to Argyll, to North Connel, where our new home looked eastwards up Loch Etive to Ben Cruachan. My father had retired and my mother had been appointed infants’ mistress in Dunbeg Primary School. Many hours were spent on the loch in my 12ft clinker-built boat with Seagull outboard engine, my 21st birthday present, later replaced by a 16ft version with inboard engine. I also bought a chainsaw and joined a team of wood cutters who had a contract to fell and extract conifers from the different woodlands managed by the Forestry Commission in the area.

I returned to the woods every university holiday to subsidise student life in Edinburgh, but in truth I loved the work. It was a welcome distraction from the growth of liberalism and radicalism between the reform acts or Anglo-Irish Relations 1918–22. There was something in it about the nobility of hard labour that appealed, the more so that it was done in the Highland landscape. Despite warnings from some, I was never treated badly or differently by my colleagues because I was a student. Some had endured tough lives, but they never seemed to resent my presence. I did, however, often disappoint them in not doing better in quizzes in newspapers. They expected more from me given I was at university. The length of the human intestine was one question which for some reason I always recall failing to answer.

We worked in forests from Ardnamurchan to Glendaruel, sometimes living in a caravan or digs, more often commuting daily and always to the sounds of country and western music, particularly Johnny Cash and Charley Pride. Some of us would socialise together at weekends. One summer we lived in a Forestry Commission house in the tiny settlement of Polloch near Loch Shiel, having been contracted to fell areas of the conifer plantation on the challengingly steep slopes of Glen Hurich. We had a new recruit in Polloch, another student. Ali MacKinnon was from Appin, where his father was farm manager/shepherd for Brigadier Stewart, one of the last of the Stewarts of Appin to live locally. It was decreed by the others that since Ali and I lived in flats in Glasgow and Edinburgh, we should do the cooking. A decision that was later regretted. Ali was studying physiotherapy at the time, but eventually was to become a successful businessman. We remained friends and I was to be best man at his wedding.

Around this time Donald Gillies moved to the area, with his father James taking up the post of postmaster in Oban. Donald was also studying history at Edinburgh University and was also about to go into his junior honours year. We became very close, as did our respective families. I shared a flat with him and his brother John, then a medical student who was later to chair the Scottish Council of the Royal College of General Practitioners. Donald introduced me to my future wife, Mary Maclean, the artist and the youngest daughter of Sorley MacLean. This was in the romantic setting of the bar of the West End Hotel in Edinburgh. They had both taken a course in oral literature and tradition offered by the university’s School of Scottish Studies, which Sorley’s brother Calum had helped establish. Donald had passed the course. Mary hadn’t, helping her decide to leave university and go to Edinburgh College of Art, where she should have gone in the first place, as her father had advised.

In his final year, just a few weeks before his final honours exams, Donald contracted meningitis. He graduated with an aegrotat, an unclassified degree granted to a student who has fulfilled all requirements for graduation but has been prevented by illness from attending the final examinations. He was to be the best man at my wedding. In November 2001 Donald died of an overwhelming meningococcal infection, the same condition he had already beaten more than 26 years earlier. It was almost unheard of, we learnt, to contract this illness twice. Tragically Donald, not for the first time, was to be an exception.

Like me, he also trained as a teacher at a time of few jobs. He spent a few years as a tourist information officer in Callander, St Andrews and Dundee, where he worked for the local council. He had, however, resolved to become a journalist and completed a Pitman’s shorthand course at night classes while in Dundee. He gave up the comparatively attractive conditions of local government to become the editor of the Lochgilphead-based Argyllshire Advertiser or ‘the Squeak’ as it has always been known. At the Squeak he was in charge of a staff of one – himself. He later claimed that it was during the Lochgilphead years that he first noticed leadership qualities in himself, although he did concede that discipline was not all it could be in the office. It was also at this time he met fellow journalist Catherine MacDonald, another Edinburgh graduate who was then working on the Campbeltown Courier. They were to marry and head to Orkney, where Donald became first chief reporter on The Orcadian and then the recognised National Union of Journalists freelance on the island group. It wasn’t long afterwards that he and his family were on the move again, back to Argyll, where he and Catherine established the freelance agency Reporting Argyll, working principally for BBC Radio Scotland and latterly the old Grampian Television. With two children, however, Donald thought perhaps it was time to go back to teaching and started working at Oban High School a few months before he died. We lost a dear friend.

2

The Herald’s Man in the North

MY PREDECESSOR AS the Herald’s man in the north was Stuart Lindsay, who somehow had managed to buy the Inverness Courier from its renowned owner and editor Miss Evelyn Barron in 1988. Numerous newspaper companies had coveted the twice-weekly title, which in 2017 celebrated its 200th anniversary. The paper had been in Miss Barron’s family since 1865, and it was her life. She was renowned for her forthright and at times eccentric editorials, which she would write in longhand after hearing the last edition of the BBC world news at 10 p.m. the night before publication. She wrote, for example, against the establishment of a university for the Highlands in Inverness, as she believed that young Highlanders should get away and experience life elsewhere. She did not have to worry, as in the 1960s the government chose Stirling over Inverness as the new seat of higher education, although the idea of a Highland university was to be resurrected and realised later. Miss Barron died aged 77 just two years after she retired. She had resisted attempts to buy the Courier building by those constructing the horrible concrete headquarters of the Highlands and Islands Development Board round about it in the 1960s.

The paper didn’t carry news or photographs on the front page until 1990, but it was an institution. Stuart had a desk in the Courier’s office overlooking the River Ness, which The Herald rented. That is where I began my tenure on 1 August 1988 (shortly after that I started to work from home). Stuart soon embarked on a modernisation programme, but before that the charming wood-panelled offices and open fires had the feel of another time. This was reinforced for me just around the corner on my first reporting job in Inverness’s fine Town House. Here the Courier journalists had covered town council meetings over generations, heading back to the office to write their reports. There are still carvings in the wooden surfaces in the press gallery expressing reporters’ boredom over many decades. It overlooks the same room where the first-ever meeting of the British cabinet outside London was held. Prime Minister David Lloyd George had called the senior ministers in his Tory–Liberal coalition cabinet to Inverness to discuss events in Ireland, when he was on holiday in Gairloch. The Cabinet was to agree the ‘Inverness Formula’, which created the basis for discussions with those hitherto in armed struggle against such as Sinn Fein, leading to the Anglo-Irish Treaty. Still on display at Inverness Town House is a facsimile of a sheet of paper passed around by council officer William Bain on 7 September 1921. It was signed by, among others, the future Prime Ministers Stanley Baldwin and Winston Churchill, as well as long-forgotten figures such as the Liberal Scottish Secretary Robert Munro and Sir Hamar Greenwood, the Chief Secretary for Ireland. It was the only time the cabinet was to meet outside London until Gordon Brown took his Labour cabinet to Birmingham in September 2008. When Alex Salmond had taken his Scottish cabinet to the Highland capital a month earlier, the Highland Council representatives got ministers to sign a paper just as their municipal forebears had done in 1921.

The Herald job

I had long held the Highland reporters’ posts on The Herald and The Scotsman to be the most appealing of any in Scottish print journalism. I had never been attracted to the broadcast media, not that I would have had any facility – with my natural tendency to speak too quickly and at times, I am told, rather unintelligibly I was never really radio or TV material. At any rate it was the written word that excited, as did the prospect of writing about the Highlands and Islands.

During my time as a student in Edinburgh in the early and mid 1970s something important was happening in Scotland, which I tried to examine in an article I wrote in The Herald on 28 August 1991 about the achievements and significance of the Gaelic rock band Runrig:

Runrig is now a force in Scotland, and not just a musical one. Its immediate roots are traceable to the first five or six years of the 1970s, when there was an extraordinary burst of intellectual and creative activity in Scotland that was caught between the political dynamics of Scottish nationalism and Labour’s claims on her heart and political tradition. This against the backcloth of Edward Heath’s government with its three-day week, UCS [Upper Clyde Shipbuilders work-in from 1971 to 1972 which thwarted the Tory government’s attempts to close the yards] and the miners’ strike. An integral part of it all was a new focus on the Highlands and Islands. When setting up the Highlands and Islands Development Board in 1965 Scottish Secretary Willie Ross had declared from Labour’s front bench that the man on everybody’s conscience, was the Highlander. But five, six, seven years afterwards there were still the burning issues of land ownership; of the Gaelic language; of continued depopulation. Others took up the cause.

One who did was the playwright John McGrath, who was born in Birkenhead into an Irish Catholic family. After national service, in 1955 he went to Oxford. As an undergraduate he made his mark both as playwright and director. He went on to work at the Royal Court Theatre in London and then to write and direct many of the early episodes of BBC TV’s Z Cars. His Random Happenings in the Hebrides of 1970 was the first of many plays he wrote about Scotland’s troubled history and struggles. A man of the left, McGrath wanted to go further, and in 1971 he set up the 7:84 Theatre Company. Its title was taken from a figure in an article in a 1966 edition of the Economist which reported a mere 7 per cent of the UK population owned 84 per cent of the country’s wealth (now it is estimated that the globe’s richest 1 per cent own half the world’s wealth). The new theatre company’s strategy was to deliver the socialist message through popular, political theatre in shows at venues normally shunned by established companies.

Its most famous production was McGrath’s brilliantly written The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil, which started touring in 1973. It told the story of Scotland’s exploitation, from the Highland Clearances to the oil boom, through Gaelic song, fiddle music and comedy: a ceilidh punctuated by satirical sketches. Some of the original cast were to have highly successful careers in Scotland and far beyond: Bill Paterson, Alex Norton, John Bett, Dolina MacLennan (whose native Gaelic singing was much admired), David MacLennan and his sister Elizabeth MacLennan, who was John McGrath’s wife. It opened in Aberdeen but went on to play in communities throughout the Highlands and Islands, many where there were still folk memories of the Clearances. My wife Mary saw it in Dornie village, where it was later filmed, but for me it was the more traditional thespian territory of the Royal Lyceum in Edinburgh. It was deemed a huge success artistically, and politically. It stimulated much debate. More than 40 years later Dundee Repertory Theatre Company saw the work as sufficiently relevant to return to it, and Neil Cooper, the Herald’s theatre critic wrote: ‘In the 42 years since, John McGrath and his 7:84 Theatre Company’s melding of music hall and political commentary has become an iconic benchmark of how theatre can fuse radical intent with populist heart in a way that has trickled down to the National Theatre of Scotland’s equally seminal production of Black Watch and beyond. The show more or less invented Scotland’s small-scale touring theatre circuit . . .’ His counterpart on The Scotsman, Joyce McMillan, described it as a ‘glorious revival of what’s arguably the single most important show in the whole history of Scottish theatre’.

The arrival of the Free Press

The year before the play opened for the first time, the West Highland Free Press was launched on Skye by four young men who had met at Dundee University: Brian Wilson, Jim Innes, Jim Wilkie and Dave Scott. Their mission was summarised in the Gaelic slogan on its masthead: ‘An Tir, an Canan ’S na Daoine – The Land, the Language, the People’, previously the motto of the 19th-century Highland Land League in its fight against the excesses of Highland landlords’ evictions. The new paper lived up to the words. With local councils often under the sway of councillors who were also landowners and saw keeping the rates down as their most solemn duty, there were plenty causes to champion right across the region.

At that time, before the local government re-organisation of 1975, Lewis was part of Ross-shire while the remaining Outer Isles, from Harris south, came under Inverness-shire. One story which was particularly celebrated was the paper’s pursuit of Sir Hereward Wake, an English landowner who could trace his family back 1,000 years to the ancestor of the same name who had rebelled against the Normans of William the Conqueror. The 20th-century Hereward owned 64,000 acres of Harris and Amhuinnsuidhe Castle on the north-west of the island. The winding single-track B887 public road to the township of Hushinish passes right in front of the castle. The West Highland Free Press uncovered a plan whereby Inverness County Council would build a bypass round the castle so that Sir Hereward would have greater privacy when he happened to visit. The public purse and Sir Hereward would split the projected £80,000 bill. It also established that Sir Hereward, like the chairman of Inverness County Council roads committee, Lord Burton of Dochfour, was an old Etonian and member of Brooks’s, a club for gentlemen in London. The idea of the two chatting about their road plan over brandy and cigars at the socially prestigious St James’s Street establishment gained currency. Whether it happened that way or not, there was such a furore that the road was never built. That the idea was ever mooted on an island with some of the poorest roads in the country did little for the image of the many Highland landowners, whether absentees or councillors.

The Free Press was decidedly pro-Labour, and of course Brian Wilson was to become one of the party’s MPs and a government minister. But when the Labour government adopted plans to give crofters the right to buy their own crofts, becoming owner-occupiers, the paper campaigned against the move despite many of its readers standing to benefit. The paper argued it was against the whole spirit and legal basis of crofting tenure, and that community ownership was the way ahead. The great fear was that it could have led to significant areas of crofting land being sold off, not least for holiday houses. The provision was incorporated in the Crofting Reform (Scotland) Act 1976, but the worst fears were not realised. The Free Press can claim some of the credit for that. At the time of writing this book, out of a total of 20,566 crofts, only 5,668 were owner-occupied.

Dancing through history

In the same year as the Crofting Reform Act, James Hunter’s book The Making of the Crofting Community was first published by John Donald. Based on Hunter’s PhD thesis, it was a conscious attempt to present, in an academically reputable way, the history of his people, which he had first begun to learn from his maternal grandfather from Strontian. His work directly challenged those established historians who variously argued that the Highland Clearances never happened; that they had been grossly overstated in oral tradition; or that they were an economic necessity. My father-in-law, Sorley MacLean, reviewed it for the Times Literary Supplement, hailing it as ‘magnificent, marvellously comprehensive, just and profound’. Hunter had also seen The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil when he was working on his original thesis and said it strengthened his belief he was on the right line. It is a book I still refer to frequently, as I do its author’s other works. We will return to Hunter later, but one of his subsequent books on the Gaelic diaspora was to take as its title A Dance Called America. It was best known as the title of a song by Runrig, who had referenced it from James Boswell’s The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides about his trip in 1773 with the celebrated man of letters Samuel Johnson. On 2 October of that year, Boswell, staying at the minister’s house at Ostaig, recorded: ‘In the evening the company danced as usual. We performed with much activity, a dance which, I suppose, the emigration from Sky [sic] has occasioned. They call it “America’’.’ That such a journal entry on the subject of emigration was written at Ostaig on the Sleat peninusla on Skye is perhaps fitting because this was where, a year short of two centuries later, one of the most important modern developments was launched which has given a reason for so many not to leave, but to live and work in Sleat, along with those who have arrived from elsewhere.

Gaelic’s big barn

Merchant banker the late Sir Iain Noble arrived to live on Skye in 1972. He was the nephew of the former Tory Secretary of State Michael Noble. Their family owned the Ardkinglas Estate on the shores of Loch Fyne across from Inveraray. It had been home to Sir Colin Campbell, Sheriff of Argyll, to whom MacIain, chief of the Glencoe MacDonalds, tried to make his oath of allegiance to William III in the last days of 1691 and first few of 1692. Sir Colin was at home and didn’t return to Inveraray till 5 January, when he finally received MacIain’s oath. The government decided, however, that the old MacDonald had missed the deadline and his people would have to pay a price, which they did in the following month’s massacre in Glencoe. Two hundred and eighty years later the man from Ardkinglas had a different mission on Skye. Sir Iain was a Gaelic enthusiast and he embarked on a fund-raising campaign to convert a farm steading at Ostaig, which was amongst the properties and land he had acquired. He wanted to build ‘the first Gaelic establishment of further education in Scotland since the Vikings burned down Columba’s abbey on Iona’. The Norsemen no longer posed a threat, but there were others who presented a problem. One of the first people Sir Iain wrote to was the chairman of a distilling company he had dealt with at the bank, but the proposal was not well received: ‘He turned down our request for financial support on the grounds that his board believed no advantage would come to the people of Skye from a project designed to resuscitate the Gaelic tongue. He said it was well known that the education of the people of Ireland was greatly held back by a similar policy there.’

Sir Iain loved retelling that story down the years as Skye’s Gaelic college, Sabhal Mòr Ostaig (literally ‘the big barn of Ostaig’), progressed on its remarkable journey from farm buildings to becoming an integral degree-awarding part of the University of the Highlands and Islands. I recall attending an early conference there, when the estimable Gaelic poet Aonghas MacNeacail (then known to everyone as ‘Black Angus’) decided to hold the session he was chairing outside. The future of Gaelic education was discussed with hens picking away at the ground beneath our chairs. The college became the major economic driver in the south of Skye and is currently pursuing the development of a new village in partnership with the Clan Donald Lands Trust. It is designed to help reverse the centuries-old trend of emigration, something Skye has been particularly successful at in the last three decades. One of the main foundations of Sabhal Mòr Ostaig’s success was the work done by its former director, Norman Gillies, who was possessed of great organisational skills, principal amongst which was the ability to persuade different bodies to invest money, not least the public agencies. Runrig’s lead singer emeritus, Donnie Munro, has been Director of Development at the college for many years.

During the 1970s there were other events important to the Highlands and Islands. The new Comhairle nan Eilean Siar (Western Isles Council), established in 1975, joined all the Outer Isles from Lewis to Vatersay as one administrative unit for the first time since the Lordship of the Isles and it quickly adopted a bilingual policy. There was the publication of the retired forester John McEwan’s Who Owns Scotlandin 1977, and the founding of Fir Chlis, the first Scottish Gaelic repertory theatre company. These were all important symbols of a new Highland Scotland being shaped.

A view of the river

When I started work in the old Inverness Courier building looking over the River Ness, I was determined to have nothing to do with the sometimes patronising approach adopted by some media in the south poking fun at the Highlands and Islands and what people got up to, in frequent ‘Aren’t they quaint?’ stories. I have heard a journalist from the south argue that crofters are paid a lot of money so they can enjoy a ‘quaint’ existence. He didn’t think to equate this to the considerably greater amounts of public money which goes to farmers, some of whom over years didn’t have to take their slippers off to earn it. I recall quotes rendered in almost music hall broad Scots attributed to a crofter I knew well, whose English was at least the equal of the writer’s, but obviously Scots sounded more peasant-like. When John Smith, the late Labour Party leader, was buried on Iona, one article highlighted that he was put to rest near a man who was styled as being the stammering crofter who collected the bins. The man in question I had known well over many years as one of my uncle’s best friends. It was true he had a serious speech impediment and that he collected the island’s bins, but this was just one of the many contracts this man of great entrepreneurial drive had won. ‘A highly successful island businessman’ was not a description that would have fitted the caricature of the Hebridean.

Laughing at the people of the Highlands and Islands was not part of my plan. On my first day in the job, however, I got a story on the front page doing just that. A report came in from the Inverness Harbour Trust that the Highland branch of CND had marked Hiroshima Day by floating lit candles on tiny rafts down the River Ness. The fire brigade was called as a ship was loading fuel at Inverness Harbour, and there were fears Hiroshima Day might have been marked by a more spectacular light show than planned.

The Highland press corps

The men and women of the Highland press corps do not generally patronise the people who are their readers and sources. Most journalists based in the Highlands and Islands assume they have a dual function. They act like others elsewhere, reporting what is newsworthy and holding power local and national to account. In addition, however, they can’t help but often see themselves as advocates for their area, particularly when government displays a lack of understanding of the reality of life in the Highlands and Islands. There is a sense of commitment to the communities they serve. This sense has long been strengthened by Gaelic radio, whose journalists have not only served local people but also their culture and tradition. All those covering the whole area need to be trusted in the local communities, in the certain knowledge that there could be some story in the future which requires local assistance. One telephone number can mean the difference between an article’s success or failure. Knowing who to phone is the key. There can be a similar reliance on local newspapers. There are around 20 circulating in the Highlands and Islands from Shetland to Kintyre, if those in Moray – the Forres Gazette and the Northern Scot – are included. Moray was part of the old Grampian Region, which for most of my working life was covered by my friend and Herald colleague Graeme Smith in Aberdeen. The Nairnshire Telegraph of course served the needs of that county which was abolished in 1975, when it came under Highland Regional Council. Nairnshire is now only really recalled in the title of its weekly newspaper and its Highland League football team, Nairn County.

At times there has been something of a debate within Highland media circles as where the boundaries for the Highlands lie. I have always taken exception to references being made to the Highlands and Argyll, as though the former is quite distinct from the latter. The BBC sometimes says it in its road reports, and you can hear the occasional MSP repeating it along with others who should know better. In reality, they are referring to modern local authority boundaries, but in doing so they distort a couple of millennia of history – a distortion that has been worryingly gaining currency in Scotland. ‘The Highlands’ in Gaelic is pretty meaningless. The relevant linguistic equivalent is the Gàidhealtachd, ‘the land of the Gael’, which also embraces the Hebrides. It is still used. The Highland Council’s official logo has Comhairle na Gàidhealtachd just below its English title. If ‘the Highlands’ distinguish anything today, it must surely still be the area that developed from