In Our Time - The Highland Clearances

Episode Date: March 8, 2018

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss how and why Highlanders and Islanders were cleared from their homes in waves in C18th and C19th, following the break up of the Clans after the Battle of Culloden. Initially, landlords tried to keep people on their estates for money-making schemes, but the end of the Napoleonic Wars brought convulsive changes. Some of the evictions were notorious, with the sudden and fatal burning of townships, to make way for sheep and deer farming. For many, migration brought a new start elsewhere in Britain or in the British colonies, while for some it meant death from disease while in transit. After more than a century of upheaval, the Clearances left an indelible mark on the people and landscape of the Highlands and Western Isles.The image above is a detail from a print of 'Lochaber No More' by John Watson Nicol 1856-1926With Sir Tom Devine Professor Emeritus of Scottish History at the University of EdinburghMarjory Harper Professor of History at the University of Aberdeen and Visiting Professor at the University of the Highlands and IslandsAndMurray Pittock Bradley Professor of English Literature and Pro Vice Principal at the University of GlasgowProducer: Simon Tillotson.

This is the BBC. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programmes if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoyed the programmes. Hello, the Highland clearances were a notorious episode in British history that followed the failed Jacobite Rebellion of 1745 and lasted for over a century. In the Highlands and Western Islands of Scotland,

landlords cleared their estates to make room for sheep farming, demolishing the old inland townships and moving the people to the coast to fish, to webe or to farm kelp for the estate. When those businesses failed, there were more forced evictions or very hard choices where landlords would cancel rent arrears only if their tenants then migrated to Canada, Australia or New Zealand. A great part of the population was left with no land and a deep sense of betrayal. With me to discuss the Highland clearances are Marjorie Harper, Professor of History at the University of Aberdeen and visiting professor at the University of University of. of the Highlands and Islands, Murray Pittock, Bradley Professor of English Literature and Pro Vice Principal at the University of Glasgow,

and Sir Tom Devine, Professor Emeritus of Scottish History at the University of Edinburgh. Tom Devine, what were the first signs of what became known as the Highland Clearances? Well, you begin to see removals around about the 1760s onwards. It tends to move from the southern and eastern highlands north, and then you have the cycle

that you've just described in your introduction. First of all, the movement of people from the interior glens to the coastlands to work in the by-employments that you've described. But there's no attempt at all at this period by landlordism to expel people. In fact, they want to retain the labour force and are very anti-immigration during that particular period. And then those pursuits like kelping, fishing, military employment and a whole range of others stagnates or collapses

during the post-Napultant war period. That then results in the beginnings, first of all, the eviction, but also expulsion. And then the whole thing reaches almost a kind of crescendo, an intensity of clearance in the 1840s and 1850s, with the dreaded potato blight, which results in either through voluntary or cleared demigration, about a quarter to a third of the population

of the inner and outer hebris. leaving between the censuses of 1841 and the census of 1861. That's a terrific overview. Thank you very much for that. Now, what we have in the Highlands is the clan system. Unless we know something about the clan system, we're not going to get anywhere really important in this discussion. So can you tell us what it was and what it meant to the people who lived there? It's a subject that's been completely shrouded in myth and exaggeration for many, many years.

But modern scholarship is now trying to get to the hard. of it. It's not a social structure which dates from antiquity. It actually evolves in the Middle Ages and it's a method or at least a social system where people look to great men as protectors in return for them providing service, rental and the like. And over time that practical rationale then becomes embedded with loyalties traditions and so there's a strong bond builds up which ensures that the type of

that type of social organisation the clan which are already started to die out many many years before and the rest of Scotland survives into the mid-18th century and the basic reason why it does so is the state cannot for that over that period or for most of that period impose its will it's rule of law and order

and northern and western Scotland, partly because of geography. And so people continue to look to clan elites and clan gentry to play the role almost of semi-king, semi-monauts. Do you, are these clans in particular area? Is there a clan to the north-west? There's a clan up there around in sky.

How many clans are there? Are they geographically best? I mean, if you get to, you know, at the end of clanship, probably you would talk about in terms of major clans about 50 to 60 in the 1750s 1760s and then you have subdivisions and the whole thing about clanship is it was never frozen in ice it was always evolving so you begin to see some of the greater clans

the more imperialistic taking over confedrations well the classic example is in the medieval period macdonald clan donald especially clan donald south and in the more modern period, Clan Campbell, which is par excellence, the clan which becomes the dominant force in Highland history from about the late 17th century onwards. And these clans, you have the chieftain and you have the people around him, and the relationship between them is land. Yeah, I mean, there are two binding forces.

First of all, the nature of loyalty, and the fact, They follow the mythology that all Klansmen are, if you like, related to the chiefly family, which is wrong. I mean, there's been much more flux to allow that to happen in terms of blood, in terms of consanguinity. But therefore, the two binding forces are the belief in kindred. Because the word Klan means children, C-L-A-W-N-T-L-N children, okay? So it gives that profound impression of a close relationship. but the practical binding force is the allocation of land. In a subsistence-based society of the type we're talking about,

to be without land, even a patch was to court survival, to be really in extremis. And therefore, a whole variety of beliefs and the relationship between land, people and elites, builds up. Just to give you one final example, the almost untranslatable term from the Gaelic D-U-A-T-H-E-S, which really means the fact that the people feel, a variety of meanings, but one important strand is the people of the clan believe

the elites have a bounden duty to give them protection within the boundaries, if you like, the land boundaries of the clan. And of course, in the later period, when you get, expulsion when you get clearance, that is the greatest possible violation of Dukhas, which of course then causes very deep feelings

and passions. And they equally think they are bounden to give their loyalty to the chief when he demands it of them, particularly in military matters. The clan is essentially a martial society. Yeah. Excellent. Marjorie Harper, when, how

did the landlords try to sustain their estate in the first stage of experiences which coincided with all sorts of other things that were happening. The Jacobites had been repeated. And so on. So you tell us. Well, as Tom has said, it was never any part of the game plan of the landlords that they should lose tenants from the estate wholesale. What they were trying to do was move them around almost like pieces on a chessboard so that these tenants could engage in buy employments, kelping, commercial fishing, manufacturing. Helping is getting a lot of seaweed to produce something that's very useful in the

chemical and soap trade. Yes, very, very labour intensive. Something that could only be done, obviously, on the coasts, could only be done in dry weather. And of course, that was a big issue as well. So it involved concentrating a lot of people on the coastline of the estate. So moving them often from the inland straths to the shoreline and sheep then filling the inland straths. And of course, emigration was anathema to the landlords at that state. because they were operating in an age of mercantilism, the idea that the national wealth is vested in having as bigger population as possible. So any loss of population denotes a decrease in national wealth and in estate wealth.

So the landlords were trying to maintain people on their estates, and they opposed very vehemently the activities of recruiters. Can I be more precisely because the word landlord is going to achieve a different meaning as we go on. The landlords we're talking about are the cheeps. Almost exclusively at this stage, they have lived there as long as their tenants have and they're part of the whole setup. And in the period that we're looking at today, the terminology changes really from chieftain to landlord

because many of the estates passed out of the hands of the hereditary families, a lot of them in the period after the Napoleonic Wars, the end of the Napoleonic Wars, when the estates were still early on talking about chieftains who were part of the whole setup? Yes. Yes. And when we're talking about, about the landlord saying, sorry, when we're talking about the chieftains saying,

we will move you to a different part of the estate, we will push you to the coast. That's quite a big thing to do. We will move you 40 or 50 miles from why you and your ancestors have lived for three or four, a couple hundred years and just go west on the coast and start kelping. What was the reaction to that? Well, not least, it was a big thing, given what we've heard about the significance of land and mutual responsibility. So one reaction of the people who were being moved

was to use emigration as a bargaining tool and say if you don't give us what we want, we will emigrate. And of course, that was exactly what the landlords did not want. You mean emigrate out of the country? Immigrate out of the country across the Atlantic. So what did they want? They wanted to be left to pursue their traditional way of life

unhindered in the way that they had been accustomed to do for centuries. and one of the reasons that emigration was attractive was because on the other side of the Atlantic, they had the opportunity to reconstitute that way of life with replacement chieftains who were the former middle-ranking members of Highland Society, the so-called taxmen, who had been absolutely crucial as military organizers of the clan,

but who had lost their rationale in the demilitarization after the... Taxmen, sorry, is T-A-C-S-M-E-N. they took over the military function of organising it and under the chief making it work. So they were very, very important. They lived on peppercorn rents and important people. Yes, they liaised between the chieftains who were calling out the clan to war and the clansmen who were the ones who would go to war.

But of course, with demilitarisation, the taxmen was seen as uneconomic middlemen, as you say, because they paid a peppercorn rent and they were seen as surplus of requirements. How did the taxman react to this business of sending whole townships to the coast? Well, they were in dire straits themselves because they were suddenly being asked to pay rents at a level that had not been the case before. And some of them engaged in military service.

They fought as officers in the Seven Years' War and the American War of Independence. And as part of their reward for military service, officers could obtain grants of land in the colonies. So they themselves had this very attractive opportunity to reconstitute the old-style society. But they would be the chiefs. And of course, because they had the strong traditional links with the clans, they could easily call out clansmen

to come and join them. And they also had links very often in ports so they could organise ships to come up to perhaps remote highland locations to embark passengers. Murray Piddoch, we have the Napoleonic Wars, let's say, 17, 90s, 18. 15-15 and when the impact did they have on the economy of the Highlands?

Well, they had a very significant impact on the economy of the British as a whole. Prices more than double between the early 1790s and the peak in 1813. And as prices increase, and that levels maintained for some time slightly lower than 1813, but still higher than much higher than 1790s for some time after the Pellanet Wars, that actually puts enormous pressure on what's actually a very highly indebted landlord class which has got limited rental income and has got a lot of debts typically to meet

and is also taking on many more debts from bankers and lenders who are outside their immediate group. Why is you taking on all this debt? Well, because there's a long tradition of Highland landlords being indebted which goes back before the Union, but also the accelerated move to adapting to British society becoming part of British elites meant that they were expected to maintain a lifestyle

at a level comparable to English gentry and nobility, which their estates simply couldn't maintain them at nearly the same level. So that increase in prices than Napoleonic War was very significant. But the war was significant for another reason, which was that it maintained an artificial market, both in terms of Herring, for example, but particularly in terms of kelp, because imported Borilla wasn't available during the Napoleonic Wars.

so that actually the kelp market, which technical advances totally destroyed after the 1820s, was artificially valuable for the highland economy in the first phase of clearance because of the Napoleonic Wars, and that's one of the reasons that allowed landlords to hang on to, and to aspire to how on to their population. But the wars made a cultural impact on Scotland as well. And just as the Scottish Regiments impact in the Napoleonic Wars, It was led to them being welcomed back with Tartan and Edinburgh in 1815 and ultimately led to the big bonanza around George the Forth's visit in 1822. The tartanisation of Scotland has got a lot to do with the tartanisation of Scotland at war.

And so there's a sense of the Highlands becoming culturally central to what Scotland is at the same time as they're in the process of being put under extreme economic pressure and becoming increasingly marginal to the Scottish economy and their own internal economic structures on the verge of collapse. And so one more question, and then I'll come to you. So the fall of Napoleon, is that one when sheep farm is coming in in a big way? Because that's a big change.

It is coming in before the fall of Napoleon, but there's a very much more marked increase that comes in after that all the way through to the middle of the century. so that's the basic trajectory. When I'm trying to get out, and I suspect you were going to say something about this, tell me what you're going to say, and then say, is when did we move from that?

When do we move to there are from, we must hold on to every person we've got to, there are too many people we've got to decide getting rid of them or encouraging them to go? Well, that starts with the process that Morrie has been describing that is the end of the great age, so-called optimism. but I think there's two or three things we also need to underscore.

One is this movement to the coast meant a movement to small holdings or crofts. Now these were cut to a minimum size to force the people, not to give them full subsistence, but to force the people into fishing and kelping. So it was an incredibly precarious situation, especially if those by-employment sundered as they did do after 1815. The second thing which we haven't talked about so far but is the looming spectre behind a lot of this is the rise in population

which of course gets faster over time Marjorie's talked about the limitations of immigration and the irony is that population to a large extent despite the movements that are going on remained anchored to the land and that's very very important the third thing is the wars lead to landowners harvesting

men for the regiments. And the unfortunate thing in terms of what's going to happen later in terms of social tension is land is often given, to quote from a document in the Lord at McDonald archives and Sky, land is often given in return for sons. Now you can imagine if that bond was betrayed, which was a bond of blood through eviction,

you can imagine the consequences. Harvesting sons is a hell of a phrase, isn't it? Marjorie Harper. Some of the events at the time were starting to try to encourage people to leave the Highlands or get rid of them, whichever phrase you want to use. And there were some infamous moments here. We can't skate over those. Can you give us some examples?

Well, to some extent, whether incidents became notorious or not, it was fortuitous. It depended on whether they were witnessed. So, for example, jumping ahead to the 1850s in 1853, the clearance of the townships of Borregg and Sushnish in Skarmes, We might not have known about that clearance if there hadn't been a geologist, Sir Archbald-Gicke, working up in the hills,

and he witnessed and heard the wailing of the people as they were evicted and watched them take their last leave of the Minister of Kilbride. Going back to... What numbers were involved? I think it was 33 families, though multiplied by the number of people per family. If you go back to the earlier period,

one of the most notorious names in the history of the Highland Clearances is that of Patrick Seller. and he was the factor for the Duke of Sutherland, but he also was a sheep farmer in his own right. And as a result of an action he took in 1814, he was brought to trial for arson and culpable homicide, in other words, manslaughter, because it was common at that stage to use fire

after people had been evicted, destroy the building so that people, it could not be reoccupied. And as a result of one of the actions of Seller up in Strathnava in Sutherland, an elderly woman died and he was brought to trial. He was actually acquitted. And of course that's been a running sore in that part of Scotland ever since. There must have been lightened jay.

Some of the chiefs must have said we don't want to do this. And some of those who were convicted said, we're not going to put up with this. So what happened there? Well, many of the recorded instances of clearance, the reason we know about them is because there was resistance. Another example would be, again, from the East Coast place called Greenyards near Bono Bridge in 1854, when eviction orders were served on the tenants, they were resisted.

The sheriff officers were defourced. In other words, their papers were burnt, they were stripped naked, and they were sent packing. They returned with 30 constables, faced a crowd of 300, mainly women, and there was a skirmish, and there were a number of injuries to the protesters. So we know about some of the instances of resistance. We also know about them because of retrospective writings by people like Alexander McKenzie, whose history of the Highland Clearances published in 1883,

rapidly went into several editions. He spoke about, for example, John Gordon of Clooney, led of a kelping estate in South Eust and Barra. He talked about the transporting season when people were dragged down to the ships to be sent to Canada. And we also know about them from the other side, from the comments of Canadian immigration agents and commentators who had to pick up these people literally at the other end

and forward them to their ultimate destinations. And there's more about it, especially on the Sutherland Estate. Murray Piddick, as I understand it, the physical hardship was bad enough, but let's introduce this idea of the sense of betrayal, which preys apart right through and is still there, as I understand it, from reading what you three have written. How did it manifest itself in its early days, the idea of sense of betrayal?

Well, I think actually one of the three things I'd say about the sense of betrayal, as that it was always throughout the 19th century imperfectly realized, and there is confusion and there is resentment and there is guilt. Some of the confusion comes from the, the, the very assumption or belief that of Dukhas, that Tom has brought forward, which was central, the idea that there is a common purpose and a common right of some kind in the land, and also there is a protector who is the landlord.

And that concept seems to have survived, albeit imperfectly, some of the changes of landlord and indeed some of the treatment of tenants by native landlords. So people actually didn't have. the full and precise sense in every case that they sometimes did that landlord was absolutely betraying them and needed to be resisted. There was resistance and that goes right back to the late 18th century, the 1770s and 80s right on to something with the Battle of the Braves and the disturbances in Lewis and Sky in the 1880s and 1890s. But it is much more piecemeal than in, for example, Ireland, although the Irish, when the Highland

and Irish land leagues get together. There's the use of the Irish rent strike tactic in the 1880s. But unlike Ireland, the landlord is not seen as an alien. The landlord is actually one of us, and that's how Dukhas works. And that's what makes the, which limits the scope for resentment. But the last thing I say is guilt, and the evidence, and maybe there's more recent research, this, the evidence really suggests that even economic emigrants

from Ireland in North America say that they were cleared, but that descendants of Scottish immigrants who were cleared say that they left voluntarily. And that is the guilt of Presbyterianism, I would say, which does survive even the move to the free church after the 1840s, where people believe somehow, and it's sometimes told, that it's for their sins that they've been so unfortunate.

And this collective punishment to their township, to their crafts, this collective punishment to themselves is something that somehow has been brought upon them by their own short-fallen sinfulness. And that is critical in actually itself limiting the scope for resentment and increasing level of confusion which is already there through the assumptions underpinning Dukhas. Would you like to say a few things about betrayal, Tom, before I go on to the next point? Well, ironically enough, the picture that Murray has drawn is one of complexity, and that's the case. The curiosity is the sense of betrayal, either exaggerated or real, is actually more important post-clearance.

That is, it's the descendants. And this goes on to the present day. We were just talking before we came in, Melvin, the... the great concerted campaign to tear down the monument to the First Duke of Sutherland outside Galsby, known locally as the Mani, 100 foot high. And that was left, if you like, innocent of any assault for most of the period. But from about the 1960s, 1970s, the clearances seem to have become a much more important aspect. not simply of Scottish history,

but it's become almost a kind of Scottish cultural phenomenon, which has actually got political implications as well since the rise of nationalism in the later part of the 20th century. This is not to say that the people were not aggrieved, but because of the fact of the centuries-old connection to the landed or the clan elites, they were almost disorientated. It was very difficult for.

them to respond collectively in terms of a, if you like, a regional assault. So most of the protests of the later to mid-19th century, apart from the great final one, the so-called Crofter's War of the 1880s, were fragmentary and usually insubstantial and faded away as soon as the police or the army arrived. Yeah, I mean, I agree very much of what Tom says. I think one of the, but I think one of the, interesting, one of the cusps is actually a British cusp to the clearance issue.

And that is that the Napier Commission built on the view of Celtic landholding, in traditional Celtic landholding advanced in Skeen's Celtic Scotland of 1879. So when the Napier Commission sat and reported in 1884-5 in what led to the Crofting Act of 1886, and the preservation of existing remaining crofter's rights. They did so on the basis, and Gladstone and Parliament supported this. He did so on the basis of really a slightly mythologised view of immemorial rights to landholding,

which themselves had been the consequence of relatively recent historical developments. And so that mythology, which became enshrined in the expectations surrounding the Crofting Commission and its associated bodies, that mythology actually underpinned the way the clearances then presented themselves in the cultural memory of Scotland in the 20th century. I think it's fascinating that the if you like, the polemical literature on clearance really only starts in a systematic way around about the 1870s, 1880s. After the potato family.

Sorry, too interesting. Is that the big bridge? I'll certainly talk about that just in a second, Melvin. The point I was going to make was that the exaggeration thing is very important because certainly in terms of any work I've done in this, the vast majority of the people left the Highlands because of difficulties of circumstance and opportunities elsewhere, not because of eviction.

But from about the 1850s 1860s onwards, in Britain as a whole, anti-landlordism becomes a popular movement. movement, especially in the Liberal Party, but among other radical groups. And we've got to bear that in mind when we judge how the clearances came to become, if you like, representative, even in the writings of Carol Marx of the abuse, the gross abuse of proprietorial power. But as you indicate or imply just a few seconds ago, in my view at least, one of the great divides in Highland history is the onset of the potato blight in 1846.

which unlike Ireland endured for a further eight or nine years it was a longer period and it's the same disease for top friend festands which kills for most of the highlands and especially the western highlands and islands this main subsistence

source of the people and of course that potentially creates a massive tragedy of mortality which did not happen it happened terribly and tragically in Ireland but in Scotland in Scotland, the people were saved by a combination of massive charitable intervention.

Ironically enough, in the first two years of the disaster, the intervention of landlords, British officials talked about the fact that there was a steep contrast, a stark contrast between the misbehaviour of Irish landowners during the Irish famine, and at least in the first two years of the Highland famine, the relief organizations mounted by landowners. But because of the continued threat to life, because rentals had more or less ceased to be paid, and because of the ideological fact

that the potato famine seemed to crystallize the fact that the crofting system was dead and the people had to be moved. And that then begins the era that Marjorie talked about earlier. the era of what some critics called compulsory emigration, the bleak choice between eviction or eviction plus cancellation of arrears and transportation across the seas, mainly to Canada but laterally also to Australia.

And that's therefore the age of expulsion, no longer the age of resettlement or relocation. Can I ask you to develop that, Marjorie, about the emigris. the bleak choice that Tom has pointed out to people were given it and how it worked in practice. Well, we've, as Tom says, we've moved, there was a move from the second half of the second half of the, or from the end of the Napoleonic Wars onwards, because the first laird to actively assist emigration was McLean of Cole in 1825, when he dipped into his own pocket to pay for the relocation of all but 50 of his tenants from the island of

to Cape Breton and then he leased the island to a single sheep farmer. So what you had for on the whole... That's across Canada. That's on the eastern seaboard of Canada. What you had for most of the emigration of the 19th century was landlords paying or cutting their losses by paying for their tenants to emigrate. Tom's mentioned Australia.

Australia came into the picture in a very prominent way in the late 1830s and again in the 1850s. The 1850s is probably the most significant in terms of the famine because a body called the Highland and Island Emigration Society was set up a quasi-government organisation and it assisted around 5,000 immigrants to go, particularly from Sky, out to Australia. And what the government had in mind there was to ensure there was replacement pastoral workforce for the parts of Australia

from which people had fled to the gold fields because gold had just been discovered in New South Wales and Victoria. But slightly earlier than that, back in the 1830s, Australia was never going to be able to compete on a level playing field unless there was some sort of subsidy. And that dates from the beginnings of free settlement right up until the end of the £10 passage in the 1970s. And a scheme called the Bounty Emigration Scheme was introduced where people who were deemed to be eligible in various ways were given varying degrees of assistance to get out to Australia. And the extension of that scheme to Scotland came at a particularly fortuitous time for that. Highlands because there had been an initial outbreak of potato famine in the middle of the 1830s. So that bounty scheme kicked in at the appropriate time there and numbers were assisted out to New South Wales.

Canada was the preferred place, wasn't it? And blocks of people went to Canada. We told still in parts of Canada that Gallic is spoken and bagpacks are played and the full Highland dress ceremony goes on. Canada was the preferred place for a number of reasons. partly because there was already a nucleus, a strong nucleus of Highland settlement there. So people felt that they were going to an area that was familiar. But also from the point of view of those who were sponsoring the emigrants, it was the nearest and the cheapest place to reach.

But it also has a significance in terms of the historiography that we've just been looking at. We were thinking about the mythologisation of the clearances. And part of that, as Murray was saying, was going back to the Napier Commission and the way that witnesses to the Napier Commission were tutored in giving evidence in a very articulate way. Each township was allowed to elect two delegates to give evidence orally or also as well as those who gave written evidence. And that, again, links with something Murray was saying about religion, because there was a religious revival in the Highlands in the middle of the 19th century. These guys who were doing the speaking to the Napier Commission had often cut their teeth as lay preachers.

so they knew how to speak. So the historiography of victimhood and betrayal and deprivation goes back, as we said, to the 1870s and carries on. Sheep farming cleared great tracts Scotland. Then we come to deer farming, which at one stage claimed a million acres of Scottish land. Can you say something about that, Murray? Yeah, well, one of very interesting things is that, is that, Deere is the first place, the first sweet spot, if you like, where the cultural and economic drivers of Highlanders and meat.

Prince Albert loves, he's not really good at shooting them, but he loves shooting at Deere. And when Balmoral is, first of all, leased in 1848 and then bought in 1852, and a period which is encapsulated, I guess, in Lancier's iconic monarch of the Glen painting, in which the National Gardens of Scotland have just acquired, painted in 1851, deer becomes really socially prestigious.

What impact does it have? Well, at that stage, it's an impact which is relatively low-key, but as the price for wool begins to fall, and by 1990, which was after peak deer, Maxwell of Pollock suggested you can get three times as much rental for land under deer as land under sheep. then Deer Forest becomes massively expanded,

becomes a big economic impact. It doesn't employ people in particular large numbers and it is a landlord-friendly use of land. Tom, in your note, you talk about, you'll allude two or three times to what's happening in the lowlands. Was there any notion about why this increasing affection for as well as interest in the Highlands was taking place among the English liberal establishment and the upper glasses. I know that. I mean the experience of the people who lost land in the lowlands was completely forgotten and marginalised.

If there was attention given to the lowland experience, it was because of the extraordinary capacities of agrarian capitalism. I mean, Scotland became a centre of visitor tourism, when the part of experts from Europe and North America, to see how a small country with tough land had managed to achieve this excellence and agronomy. And so the actual experience of the people who had existed on the land in not dissimilar circumstances, though of course better off than in the highlands was completely forgotten. The excavation of their experience has been the role of modern historians.

You could argue that the attention given to the highlands, dare I say it, quote, the glamour of the clearances. The attention given to the Highlands in film, in fiction, in polemical, historical writings, and the rest, and feeding in, if you like, to the politics of land reform

in the current century, has further meant the marginalisation and the amnesia surrounding the lowland rural experience, including the border experience and not simply that of the central lowland, and the eastern coastal strip. And of course, one of the deep ironies, Melvin,

is that that is where the vast majority of the Scottish population lived. Marjorie, excuse me, Majoam, moves have there been towards land reform? Or were there towards land reform? We're talking in the late 19th century. In the late 19th century. Well, I think there was a confluence of circumstances from about 1870

that turned the spotlight on the importance of land reform and of course there'd been a cumulative public awareness of the clearances and a perceived sense of injustice as the decades had gone on. But if you want a one-liner, I think the key factor was what the Croft has got the vote under the 1884 Reform Act. But there were a whole lot of other circumstances that contributed to the land reform actually happening as a result of the Napier Commission and the 1884 Reform. 1986 Act that followed, including an economic downturn after a period of relative recovery. So hopes had been raised and then dashed.

An interest in the Highlands in other parts of Scotland, Federation of Celtic Societies, formed as a sort of loose federation to promote the interests of the Highlands. The role of people like John Murdoch and Alexander McKenzie, author of History of the Highland Clearance, is editor of the Celtic magazine, in using their newspapers as platforms for publicising the Highland grievances and these men also going around and tutoring the people in giving evidence to the Napier Commission and much else. To take up Tom and Marjorie's points, I think we have to see these things very much in the round. I mean the disappointment following the Crofting Commission legislation 1886

is partly due to this being a period of major agricultural. depression, which also affects land ownership in Ireland that also affects the economic development in England at the same time is a major period of agricultural depression. I think we also got to be, I mean, while agreeing very much with Tom about the importance of the lowland clearances, we also have to be aware that the population shift in Scotland was enormous between the early modern period and now. So in 1755, to take Webster's figures, which is still largely accepted, 51% of the population live north of the Tay, and you're really talking about a third of the population living in the

highlands, depending on how you want to define the exact boundary of the highlands, and that falls to a low of round about 4% at its baseline in the 20th century. So although the actual numbers of people are relatively stable, there is a major demographic shift from the highlands being centrally important to the national life of Scotland in terms of population and institutions to being marginal and that's one of the things that really drives the high-land clearances in popular memory. Tom, you want to come in. I was just going to say that there's a tremendous irony about the Deer Forest development and then into the Crofter's War and finally the, if you like, the sympathetic legislation

of the Crofter's Holding Act, and known until quite recently as the Magna Carta of the Highland people. And that is this, that partly because men of influence from government were now visiting the Highlands' regularly. They saw the extent of destitution, which was an element in the political decisions made in 1886 by Gladstone's government. But the other thing is as well, it gave further fuel to the radical position, to the radical camp, that here was this region which had been despoiled during the high point of agrarian sheep capitalism, which was now being used for leisure, for leisure purposes by the wealthy. It was no coincidence that in the 1870s, 1880s, 1890s,

that you're beginning to see the swelling chorus of support and criticism, support and a sense of the Highland people had had a very hard time. It's time to do something about it. The Highlander is on the conscience of all Scots. Correct, and still is to this. Yes, that was in 1993 53, wasn't it, in Commons? Yeah, I mean, it's the position. That kind of factor is not only helped to continue to keep the clearance issue in the forefront,

but actually the word clearance has become almost a national term for any economic tragedy. Deindustrialisation was described as a new, Cleans. Marjorie. The comment was made by Willie Ross when he was Secretary of State for Scotland introducing into the Westminster Parliament in 1965 the bill

that led to the creation of the Highlands and Islands Development Board. And he said for 200 years the Highlander has been the man on Scotland's conscience. Thank you very much, Sir Tom Devine, Mary Piddick and Marjor Harper. Next week we'll be discussing St. Augustine's Confessions his account of his conversion to Christianity. Thank you very much for listening.

And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. So what did we miss out? Well, I think there are a couple of things. I'd say we missed out the echoes, not just the echoes, but the memory of the clearances as enshrined in legislation of the Scottish Parliament. The land reform bill, the two major land reform bills, I think the first 2003, the second 27th,

2016-17 and the establishment of the Scottish Land Commission in 2017, which is actually the direct descendant ultimately of the Crofton Commission 1886. So the continuity, the sense of parliamentary and legislative continuity, which is also parallels the period of cultural memorialisation. And the second is, I guess, the literary or imaginative response to the clearances, which we might start with Scots Guy Manoring and the clearances of his oblique reference to the clearances and the clearance of the gypses

and take that through the Canadian Boats Song in Blackwoods magazine in 1829 through the actual development of a nostalgic, sentimentally jacobitical view of the Highlands as a place of mystique and loss largely cultivated by Highland Emigres in British cities rather than those who've gone abroad and usually those in the professional classes

or even wealthier than that in the late, in the late, mid and late 19th century. And then the 20th century response from Neil Gunn's great novels of the clearances, Butcher's Broome in 1934 and the Silver Darling's, the success of the fishing industry overcoming the clearances through the recapitulation of the diasporic experience in Ian Crighton Smith's collection exiles.

And of course, John McGrath's pivotal for modern, you'd say nationalism, but actually John McGrath, the Shiav at the Stag and the Black Black Oil, premiered for the Aberdeen Arts Century in 1973, was very much a non-nationalist text, even though that was part of the period of the first SMP surge, it actually stood apart from the SMP and explicitly rejected a nationalist reading. It was effectively a Marxist reading of the, exploitation and the continuing exploitation, hence the black, black oil of the Highlands and

Northern Scotland. But it stood in that imaginative pantheon, which Thomas alluded to in the sense of the use of clearance as a metaphor for anything that happens to go wrong in industrial commercial policy or social deprivation. It is one of the classic emotive words that describes the Scottish experience and that is how it is par excellence in that very period play of John McGrath which of course was to a large extent based on if you like the prebleean motif

It was as much Preble as Watkins was Watkins Colloden was Preble's Colodon So there's a descent from Mackenzie in the 1880s through Preble and his imitators and then on to these kind of semi-fictive works of the type you've described There's the Watkins film on Collodon

which caused a big stir I think it was a fantastic work of filmic innovation. But what did you think of it as a piece of... Yeah, I mean, I thought, especially the way it seemed to capture those who are nameless. That is the front line of the clan regiments right down to the lower ranks. I thought that was brilliant. It's not true, though, Tom. Yeah, I know, but it was brilliantly done in the sense that, you know,

mythology and exaggeration are always more interesting and technicaler than real complex history. That was made of black and white. But there's one other aspect I want to pick up in relation to what Murray Pittaker has just said. I get sorry. No, no, I'm not going to criticise you until later. No, the point I'm making is to get across to listeners, you know, the potency of this, and I think the potency especially among the Scottish people, people and especially among Scots

descendants in the USA where of course in the last 20 to 30 to 40 years there's been a huge expansion of tartary Highlandism not least propelled by the recent television series from the Diana Gabaldon

novels which uh whose name I have forgotten outlander outlander right now sorry I was just going to say there is a belief in many of those communities whether or not they came from industrial lowland Scotland or not, that their epic experience across the Atlantic has been triggered by the clearances.

I just give you one example of this. A lady, fifth generation Texan lady, asks an Edinburgh genealogy company to research her family. She finds out that instead of coming from a cleared township in sky, she comes from the industrial town of Motherville, my own place of birth. She refuses to pay the genealogy company with the wrong information.

I could pick up on that as well I would fully endorse the idea of potency and there's an anthropologist Paul Basu who has written a book called Highland Homecomings which involved interviewing many people from across the Atlantic and further afield who felt they had Scottish ancestry and what they did was be very selective

in their choice of Scottish ancestry so that if the nearest ancestor was somebody from the urban industrial lowlands, they were not regarded. They were set aside in favour of the supposedly cleared Highlander who came from several generations earlier and probably hadn't been cleared anyway. The thing is, Melvin, this is now actually crossed into Europe. There are groups of people from Moscow to Stockholm

who play Highlanders, who dress up in military tartary. and one of my former students has done a written a doctoral thesis which is now a book on this topic and I remember when we considered who to supervise this gentleman whether we should naturally need a psychologist as well as an historian as part of the team. I have to say I don't take such a negative view as you told because Highlandism has actually been part of Scottish identity

and Scottish self-representation back to indeed beyond the 18th or 19th centuries back into. the 17th and it's the defeat of Jacobitism. I know this is one of your Edie feces, no, it's not an Editheke's. There's a great deal of, there's a great deal of evidence supporting it, Tom, not least the uniforming of all Jacobite armies

in tartan, irrespective of place of origin. Well, just to bring us to a little, I have a tiny, tiny, almost insignificant, but just before you depart to blows, or coffee, whichever, everything. And I go to Edinburgh Festival, One festival was out, oh goodness, no, it was 10 years ago. And for one reason, they were mixed up in this,

like the other, make a film. And they brought over an enormous number of American students. Not, I'm talking, 60, 70, playing the pipes and the drums, they were going to march. And this chap, this American fellow, before they marched, it was wonderful. It brought to you to them the Scottish this was the most important thing they were ever going to do in their lives.

And terrifying the light of it. I thought they couldn't blow into the book. And it was enormous. They meant so much. And they marched down Princess Street. And that was terrific, actually. That's part of that identity, Melvin. Yeah, yeah.

You were asking about what's been missed out. I think one of the other things that we may be missed out was the ongoing legacy in terms of haemorrhage. And if you look at, say, the 1920s, there was almost a rerun or potential for a rerun of post-Napolian crisis, particularly in the Outer Hebrides. but the sense of emigration and depart, or not necessarily emigration,

moving out of the Highlands, as something that was put upon the Highlanders. The Highland is being perceived as passive rather than active agents in their own history. I think it's something that lingered until... Well, thank you very much. It was fascinating. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson.

Hello, I'm Viv Jones, and I wanted to tell you about the Civilisations podcast. Each week, we delve deep, into the ideas and stories raised in the Civilizations TV series, which is going out now on BBC 2 and up on IPlayer. And this week, we have a behind-the-scenes interview with presenter Mary Beard. That's the Civilizations podcast, and you can find it wherever you found this. Thanks.