Tag Archives: Highland Clearances

Music in the Dark by Sally Magnusson

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Music in the Dark by Sally Magnusson begins in 1884, Rutherglen which is close to Glasgow. Jamesina Ross moved to Rutherglen from the city after all but one of her children had died because of the poor living conditions in Glasgow, her doctor had said it was the only hope for her last child. Jamesina had had dreams of a very different future for herself as she had had a classical education, but it wasn’t to be.

This book is about the Highland Clearances, particularly at Strathcarron in 1854 when the inhabitants were brutally forced out of their homes which were then set alight and pulled down so that there was no shelter at all. Jamesina was one of the women caught up in it and the beating she took from the police has affected her whole life, now as she gets older it’s more obvious that her brain has been impaired. She was left with a dent in her head and a mashed up jaw from a police baton.

I must admit that I found the first half of this book to be rather slow, but the second half was more interesting as Jamesina and her second husband, also a Strathcarron survivor travel back to the scene of the attack.

Music in the Dark is obviously very personal to the author as it’s based on the clearance experiences of her great-grandmother. I had to laugh when she wrote. – There was hardly a man’s name in the Highlands that someone had not had the bright idea of burdening a baby girl with by adding an – ina.

When I worked in libraries in the west of Scotland I obviously knew the names of the readers, there were women called Jamesina, Hughina, Andrewina and Donaldina and of course Williamina. I thought it was just a very local thing – but apparently not.

In the 17 and 1800s landowners in Scotland decided that they could make much more money from the land by filling the place with sheep. It meant that the crofters had to be removed, sometimes they were rounded up and put onto ships bound for America or the colonies, they didn’t have any say in the matter. Others made their way to Glasgow looking for work, presumably that’s how my own ancestors came to be in Glasgow. Going by the letters written home from the colonies, the Glaswegian Highlanders were the lucky ones.

I didn’t enjoy this book as much as the author’s previous ones. This book will be published in May 2023.

I was sent a digital copy of this book by the publisher John Murray Press via Netgalley for review. Thank you.

Consider the Lilies by Iain Crichton Smith

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Consider the Lilies cover

Consider the Lilies by Iain Crichton Smith was first published in 1968 and it appears in the list of Top 100 Scottish Books.

On the surface the book is about the Highland Clearances, a time when landowners (lairds) in Scotland decided that they could make much more money from their land from sheep farming rather than getting rents from crofters who were scraping an existence from the small patches of poor quality land which they were tending. The crofters were forcibly evicted from their cottages which were set fire to and pulled down so they couldn’t go back. Lots of them ended up emigrating to Canada, America, Australia and New Zealand, where they often ended up living equally harsh lives in an even more hostile environment. It’s often supposed that the landlords were English but that certainly wasn’t normally the case, although they may have been educated in England. Many clan chiefs were eager to make money in the very lucrative sheep/wool market and didn’t care who they damaged in the meantime. It was more of a class war than an English versus Scottish thing.

Anyway, back to the book, it’s really about the hard and unforgiving Calvinist Presbyterian religion which ruled the lives of the ordinary people. Their religious teaching and upbringing was so rigid and strict that all of the joy was sucked out of life. No singing, no dancing, just church and prayers and an almost masochistic attitude to life, Everything should be hard and cruel, or it wasn’t worth attaining. The minister was looked up to as being high above his parishioners who he berated as sinners despite the fact that they were all really innocent souls, certainly in comparison with most church ministers. Yet that background did seem to breed very imaginative writers. So many of the classics were written by Scots or those with Scottish parents. Such as J.M. Barrie, R.L. Stevenson. A.A. Milne, George MacDonald and lots more. A strict upbringing bred a fantastic imagination it would seem.

This is the sort of environment which old Mrs Scott had grown up in. Not long before she turned 30 she had married a man a few years younger than her, he had had a less rigid life and was more like some of the gipsies who wandered around the Highlands, so it was never going to be a match made in heaven. Alasdair had the spirit of adventure about him and after the birth of their son Iain he joined the army as a volunteer in the local duke’s regiment, who was of course the laird. Alasdair never came back from the Peninsular War, he died in battle in Spain, so Murdina (Mrs Scott) has to bring Iain up on her own with no help from anyone – despite being told by the Duke that she would receive a pension, she never did. She’s determined that Iain won’t turn out to be like his father and gives him a miserable and joyless childhood, just like her own and of course when he’s old enough he gets out as fast as he can, just as his father did. Still Murdina can see nothing wrong with her outlook on life, but when a man comes to visit her on a white horse and tells her that she will have to leave her house she can’t believe that the duke would do anything so awful to her.

She goes to see the minister to ask him for help but the minister isn’t interested in helping anyone, he’s on the side of the powerful and rich duke and Murdina at last begins to think for herself and realises what a hypocrite the man is. He doesn’t even know her name and she had held him in such high esteem all those years.

In the end it’s Donald MacLeod who helps Murdina when she needs it most, and she had always seen him as an emissary of the devil as he never went to church and would have nothing to do with the minister. He wrote political pamphlets and articles for newspapers which would be regarded as incendiary by the land owning class, but despite his supposed atheism it’s Donald who is the decent man. The experiences change Murdina’s attitude completely and instead of only seeing the bad in things she can at last see the good side. She’s cured of negative Presbyterianism.

This is a really good read, apart from telling of a hugely important part of Scotland’s history it also goes a long way to explaining the Calvinist atmosphere of Scotland which still exists today, where you can seriously say that even the Roman Catholics have a Presbyterian streak in them, you just can’t help being influenced by it.

There are some annoying anachronisms in this book as for some reason Crichton Smith didn’t think that it was important to be careful with the historical facts and so it is impossible that Mrs Scott’s husband would have been killed in the war which he was killed in. Also it is mentioned that she had food boiling in pots on Sunday and that just did not happen. No food was cooked on a Sunday, it was pre cooked on Saturday and it was just cold leftovers on Sunday. The Sabbath couldn’t be broken for anything and it was still like that in the 1970s on Skye. People who had to get water from a well always got their water on Saturday night, for washing/drinking purposes and for the animals as they wouldn’t even pull water from a well on a Sunday, it was for Bible reading only.

Jack’s review of this book is here.

It’s a weird thing, almost like that 3 buses coming along at the same time, but it often happens that completely unintentionally I end up reading a series of books which have similar themes – one after the other. I had read Annie S. Swan’s book Mistaken – which almost reads like a religious tract. Then I read this one with its Calvinist theme. So I thought to myself: I’m going to read something completely different – to get out of this religious atmosphere. So a couple of days ago I started reading Anthony Trollope’s Linda Tressel. If you’ve read it you’ll have realised that I didn’t escape religion as that book is about a young woman being completely ground down by her madly Calvinistic aunt, despite the Bavarian setting. I feel that somebody is out to get me!

I read this one for the Read Scotland 2015 Challenge.