LONG READ: Helmsdale author marks centenary of death of Sutherland MP who empowered ordinary men and women to fight for their rights
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A RETIRED broadcast journalist who has worked internationally but has now returned home to her native Helmsdale, has written an article to mark the centenary of the death on January 16, 1922, of an important Sutherland historical figure.
Audrey Munro has researched the life of Land League campaigner Angus Sutherland, who served as MP for the county from 1886-1894 and as chairman of the Scottish Fishery Board from 1894-1920.
Ms Munro said: “I grew up in West Helmsdale with stories of Angus Sutherland and what he did for his people, and I though this was a fitting anniversary to commemorate him.
“I hope that by publishing it, it may prompt people with Land League stories from other parts of Sutherland to get in touch with what they know. This is a part of our history which is sadly overlooked.”
Audrey has had a life-long interest in local history, in particular the Land League. Her ancestors are one of the original Gartymore families who were living in the township and working the land for generations before the Clearances.
Her great-grandfather, Donald Watson, was one of the four founders of the local Land Law Reform Association, which was the forerunner of the Highland Land League. He is commemorated on the Memorial Cairn in Gartymore.
Her great-great-uncle, Robert Gilchrist, discovered gold in Kildonan, sparking Scotland’s only gold rush. Audrey herself served on the Board that steered through the Garbh Allt community land buy-out.
Now that she has returned home permanently after working in England, France, Germany and Switzerland, she intends to spend more time researching and writing about the people and events that have shaped the parish.
Here is Ms Munro's commemorative article in full:
Angus Sutherland – Champion of the Highland People
MP for Sutherlandshire, 1886-1894, and chairman of the Scottish Fishery Board, 1894-1920, Angus Sutherland passed away at his home in Edinburgh on the 16th January 1922.
To commemorate the centenary of his death, this article is going to look at one of the talents – his skilled oratory – which Sutherland employed to such effect to empower ordinary men and women to fight for their rights.
We’re going to focus on three of Sutherland’s speeches which were key to the burgeoning Highland Land League – his address to a meeting in Helmsdale, which resulted in the formation of the first Land Law Reform Association in Sutherlandshire, his testimony to the Napier Commission and one of his first speeches after being asked to stand for parliament.
Angus Sutherland was born on a croft in the township of West Helmsdale in 1848. After attending teacher training college in Edinburgh, he gained his degree at Glasgow University.
As a student Sutherland had begun attending and addressing meetings in Glasgow of the Irish Land League and quickly gained a reputation as an able and eloquent speaker in both Gaelic and English.
His abilities were immediately apparent, both to the supporters of land reform, who quickly identified him as a future leader of the land movement, and to those opposed to crofters’ rights, who lost no time in singling him out and denouncing him as a dangerous radical.
Sutherland was a vital link between the developing land reform movement in Glasgow and the Sutherlandshire crofters. By 1882, he was a maths teacher at Glasgow Academy, but still returned home for two months every summer, so was well aware of what was happening to the crofters, and was able to inform them about the mood among exiled Highlanders and Irish immigrants in Glasgow.
In August of that year the crofters organised a meeting in Helmsdale and sent for Sutherland. He chaired the gathering of some four hundred people, which was described by the Irish pro-Land League press as the most important land meeting yet held in the Highlands.
Sutherland delivered an inspiring speech, calling on the crofters to organise, organise, organise! He told them that if they stood together, and maintained their constitutional rights, they would succeed.
He explained how they had been defrauded of their right to the land which their forefathers possessed as their unquestioned inheritance. He then spoke of the present system and its operation, and pointed out what the small farmers should do if they desired life and comfort in their own land.
“It must be considered whether in our social system there is room for a class of people, who do not labour, and yet live in luxury. Every factor who oppresses, everyone who evicts the people, is forcing this question on public attention: and if landlords were wise they would beware and pause.
"The time has now gone by when Highland crofters can be treated as they were sixty years ago in this unfortunate country, and any struggle they might enter into for their constitutional rights, they might depend upon it - the Highlanders in the towns will support them.”
Referring to the recent discussion in the House of Commons on the Crofter Question, Sutherland observed: “When this debate was going on in Parliament where were our northern members? Why, they were nowhere. They either sat silent like dumb dogs or were absent. But let the crofters remember.
"By the end of this parliament I hope many of the crofters will have votes, and no doubt these big men at the next general election will come to you with their hats in their hands, and promising you all manner of support, but let the crofters not forget the conduct of these members when the Crofter Question was before Parliament.”
Sutherland rejected the charge that Land Leaguers were engaging in a class war: “Who is really doing that? It’s not the agitators: it’s the authors of class legislation. This country, as everyone knows, has been governed for six hundred years by class legislators and they were the men who made classes and set class against class.”
Of the character of the Duke of Sutherland, he said: “People say it isn’t possible that this exalted member of our aristocracy, this entertainer of princes and potentates, could condescend to deprive the aged widow and helpless orphan of their solitary pet lamb!
"If the duke is content to have his name dragged through the dirt by factors and others in this way, that is his lookout. Froude, the historian, in an essay on the ‘Uses of the Aristocracy,’ says that one of their great uses is that they are patrons of art and literature. But the only piece of literature with which I have seen the Duke’s name connected is a summons of eviction against John Fraser, Gartymore.”
The laughter this last remark elicited would have been unthinkable even a few months earlier.
The meeting then unanimously adopted the following resolution:
1. That this meeting expresses unqualified disapproval of the action of the Duke of Sutherland and his factors in depriving the small tenants of Marrel, West Helmsdale, Gartymore and Portgower of the following privileges - First, of the summer grazing for their cattle and horses of Griamacharry; and second, of grazing a few sheep on the moor and common adjoining their buildings, and further, that in the opinion of the meeting, the hardship of the case is aggravated by the fact that such double deprivation took place at a time when the rents were being doubled, and in some cases trebled, on account of improvements made by the tenants themselves, and when the large sheep farmers on the estate were getting a reduction of rent equal to fifty per cent.
2. That an association be formed forthwith, the object of which shall be the maintenance and preservation, by all legal and constitutional means, of the rights and privileges of the crofters of the parishes of Kildonan and Loth, and remit to a committee to draw up rules and regulations, and report to a public meeting to be hereafter held.
With Sutherland’s guidance, the crofters then formed a Highland Land Law Reform Association, the first of the Sutherlandshire associations, adopting the slogan, “The Land for the People”.
The crofters’ battle lines were well and truly drawn!
The following year, 1883, saw the Napier Commission travelling throughout the Highlands and Islands, taking evidence on the condition of crofters and cottars.
In Helmsdale, Sutherland was one of four delegates selected by the crofters to represent them; he helped them prepare their testimony and draft their opening statement, which was finalised just hours before the hearing got under way in the village.
Sutherland testified first. He read out the statement, which brought into stark relief the situation in the crofting townships: “We have the smallest agricultural holdings in Scotland – from one to three acres – side by side with holdings of 44,000 acres… A man cannot now walk round his own house without trespassing on his neighbour’s land… and this in a parish which contains 67 acres for every man, woman and child, rural and urban, within its bounds… We, with our miserably small holdings of barren, rocky land, the greater part of which we have reclaimed ourselves, pay five times as much per acre as the sheep farmers pay for the best land in the parish… We have seven-eighths of the population living on one-thirtieth of the land… Any sign of independence or public spirit on our part is visited with the gravest displeasure by the estate management, and subserviency is the only road to success. Strangers are invariably preferred over natives.”
Sutherland then answered the questions put to him by the panel. He presented facts and figures to support the claims made in the statement, and, as he did in speech after speech, he skilfully used statistics to prove his assertions, attacking the system which allowed such abuses of power.
His performance must have been a tremendous confidence boost for those who followed, especially for those native Gaelic speakers giving their evidence in English. However, when the Commission sat in Golspie, Sir Arnold Kemball and Joseph Peacock, representing Sutherland Estate management, tried to cast doubt on the facts Sutherland had presented.
He responded in a letter to the Commission, using their own evidence against them: “… I… note the wonderful faculty of memory displayed. As to money spent or misspent on the estate for the last thirty years, everything was known and remembered; but when questioned as to the grievances of the people and the curtailment of their scanty privileges, memory was a blank, or it happened before their time.
"I offer no opinion as to the truthfulness or otherwise of the statements then made. My position is simply this: - I made certain statements; some related to matters of fact, others were matters of opinion. What I stated as matters of fact, I am prepared to substantiate in any reasonable manner; what I stated as a matter of opinion must of course be taken for what it is worth, like every other opinion submitted to the Commission.”
In other words, Sutherland was not going to take any nonsense or be cowed into silence by Sutherland Estates or anybody else. With his usual thoroughness, he went on to refute Kemball and Peacock’s assertions in detail. They made no further comment.
Two years later, in May 1885, Sutherland effectively launched his parliamentary election campaign in Bonar Bridge. Although it was an evening of heavy rain, a crowd, cheering loudly, met the carriage carrying Sutherland on the bridge, unyoked the horses and, preceded by a piper, pulled the carriage to the Drill Hall.
On rising to address the meeting, Sutherland was again greeted with prolonged cheers. He thanked the audience for their enthusiastic reception of him as the representative of a great principle. “Great events have taken place since I was here in February. For centuries Sutherlandshire has been politicially asleep, but has at last wakened up and organisation is being carried forward hopefully.
"It had been tacitly assumed that I came here for a particular purpose; but that is scarcely correct. That depends on the people of Sutherland, and if you still insist on making me the conscript on whom you are to lay your hands, I will not shrink from doing my duty, let it cost what it might.
"Sutherland’s past cannot be separated from the present. I would be willing to bury the past, but it cannot be done. We have wandered in the desert of oppression for 200 years. Now the electorate is to be increased from 300 to 3,000, and as there is no middle class in Sutherlandshire – no class between the Tories and democracy – so there will be no confusion as to the issue before us.
"I want fair play on every side, and I have tried to say as little that is unpleasant as possible; but if an unpleasant duty has to be discharged in the public interest, I will not shrink from it. Every question at the present time, however, pales before the great land question – a question that affects not only the Highlands but the large cities, and is taken up even by that great political Saducee, the Scotsman.
"I’m sorry for the Scotsman, and would not refer to it, but there is a lesson to be learned from that great enemy – not to pin our faith to newspapers. A newspaper is first of all a commercial affair, and anything they like after.
"The Scotsman is now large on the crofters. A little while ago, he ridiculed the whole agitation, but now he’s turning round. The Scotsman was what they called in America sitting on the fence – that is, waiting to see which side is to win.
"When I remember the cruel things the Scotsman said; when I remember how it raked up the dirt and cast it at the people to whom I belong, and when I watch how it has changed since on this great question, I can only take it as a barometer that indicates a complete change of view in the country.
"The Lord Advocate’s Crofters Bill is lineally descended from the landlords’ meeting at Inverness. The Commissioners’ report [Napier Commission] didn’t give satisfaction; but this Bill is worse. The Bill makes no provision for more land, and if we have fixity of tenure it does no good, for what but misery can be expected of holdings no bigger than three acres or so?
"The cry of confiscation is a hobgoblin argument – a putting up of the red rag to try to frighten people. As to confiscation, it’s the people’s property that has been confiscated, not the landlords’. In the parish of Kildonan I have had estimates furnished to me which show that at the Clearances, property to the value of £200,000 was burned belonging to the people.
"I advocate the township proposal left out of the Bill, as in consonance with the traditions and ancient rights of the people. I criticise severely the proposal for the classification of parishes, such as Loth, where eleven twelfths of the land is under large farms, and eleven twelfths of the population crofters.
"In these circumstances, I don’t know if Loth would be looked on as a crofting parish. The Bill altogether is a thing of rags and tatters, odds and ends. It’s less than the Irish people got; and even if the Irish Bill were now applied to Scotland it would not suffice, as we want a redistribution of the land.”
He was loudly cheered throughout his speech. In somewhat of an understatement, the meeting then unanimously adopted the resolution that Sutherland was a fit and proper person to represent the county.
Sutherland always described himself as an agitator, someone whose task it was to enable others to take action, and during his time as an MP, he made speeches all over the UK, keeping the Land Question before the public and parliament. Inspired by him, Land Leaguers stood for election and took control of school boards, parish councils and county councils. No more were these the preserve of local landowners and their representatives.
After serving as an MP for eight years, a position which was unpaid at that time, Sutherland was appointed chairman of the Scottish Fishery Board, a post he held for more than twenty-five years. He also served on the Deer Commission, and the Congested District Boards for both Scotland and Ireland.
A lifetime of service to his people. Angus Sutherland – Champion of the Highland People.
Copyright: © Audrey Munro 2022
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner.
