Homes for Highland Heroes Scotland: The Promised Land

The Highlands and Islands of Scotland

gave more of their men to The Great War

than any other part of Great Britain.

But as they fought,

the world they left behind was collapsing in debt and despair.

The great Victorian estates were going bankrupt.

Crofters were starved of land.

The Highlands, it seemed, were broken.

The wartime government promised action,

promised that its Highlands servicemen would return

to a better world.

A promise that was soon forgotten.

They came back to overcrowded housing,

lack of housing, lack of land,

lack of any ideas, basically,

as to how they were going to bring up their families.

What followed was the battle for the future

of Scotland's Highlands and Islands.

A battle between centuries-old tradition,

and one man's revolutionary vision.

He thought crofting was just an economic system,

he didn't realise that it was a whole way of life.

For many, the choice was stark.

To stay, and scrape a living from the land...

..or to leave that land for ever.

This is the story of Scotland's most remote communities,

in the turbulent decade after The Great War.

Scottish men and women in search of a future,

and their own, individual, promised land.

The connection with the land was critical,

because the connection with the land

was the connection with survival.

Agnes Rennie's grandfather was

one of the tens of thousands of servicemen

who returned to the Scottish Highlands and Islands

in the winter of 1918.

Angus Gillies had served four years in the Royal Navy.

His ship had been torpedoed.

A wake had been held in his name.

Angus returned from the dead to his family croft at South Dell

on the west coast of Lewis.

And, like many of his wartime comrades,

he returned to poverty and desperate overcrowding.

He lived here.

His five children at that time,

my father being the eldest...

..and his wife...

..his mother, and two of his mother's sisters,

and they all stayed in this old blackhouse that they lived in.

The animals would have stayed at one end,

that was the way blackhouses were built at that time.

The conditions that people had come back to,

the conditions that people were raising families in

were just so difficult.

It is really hard to imagine the poverty

that people were coping with at that time.

Nowadays, you can see the crofts behind us,

running to the sea, you know,

narrow crofts, because all of these crofts had, over the years,

been divided and subdivided...

..and had reached a stage where really, practically,

they couldn't be divided much further,

so something had to happen, something had to give.

Crofters like Angus Gillies would come to believe

that they had been cruelly deceived by their government.

Four years earlier,

they had signed up to fight for King and country...

..encouraged to believe that their service and sacrifice

would be honourably rewarded, with land enough to raise their families.

There were all sorts of arguments used, enticements,

if you will, to encourage men to sign up for the war,

and although there were no specific promises made,

there was a general theme in the rhetoric

at the beginning of the First World War,

that one of the things that people were fighting for voluntarily

was a better society,

and in the Highlands, that came to be very much associated with

the land question.

The notion that what was in these days called land settlement,

that new crofts would be created,

that previously clear land

would be taken over again,

often by the state, and divided into crofts,

that was a notion that had been...

pressed for and actually acted upon in the years running up to the war.

So, when these young folk got back,

these young men got back from the war, you know,

they said, you know, we've fought for this land, literally.

Our friends and neighbours and colleagues have died for this land.

And in large numbers.

And we are entitled to it.

From the narrow crofts of South Dell,

Angus Gillies and his neighbours would have looked south

to the rolling fields of the 2,000 acre Galson Farm.

Enough land for 50 crofts.

There would have been a resentment...

because at the same time as they were living

in these hugely overcrowded conditions,

just over that turf wall...

..were these acres of green.

And these acres of green

were all just one farm.

That farm had been created in the 1860s,

when the human population of Galson

had been cleared out beyond the boundary walls,

when the best land had been given over to livestock.

A process that was repeated all across Highland Scotland,

that created a world of great farms and sporting estates

with tiny crofting communities clinging to their edge.

As The Great War came to a close,

that world was in desperate crisis.

The Highland estates had been ruined by taxes and falling stock prices.

Crofters fared no better,

starved of the land they needed to sustain their families.

No-one seemed to know how to make money from the Highlands.

But in 1918,

a 66-year-old English millionaire industrialist

arrived in the town of Stornoway.

His name was William Hesketh Lever,

ennobled the year before as Baron Leverhulme,

the celebrated manufacturer of Sunlight Soap.

Leverhulme purchased the Lewis estate, the entire island,

for the knock-down price of £143,000,

convinced that crofts and estates were the past,

and industry could save the Highlands.

Leverhulme had an absolutely apocalyptic vision

for the whole of the island of Lewis.

We're looking now from a turret

on the top of Lews Castle...

..over at the town of Stornoway.

It's maybe 10,000 people, a busy, relatively prosperous little place.

If William Hesketh Lever had had his way,

we'd be looking at a city of between 100,000 and 150,000 people.

There would have been railway lines running out of here

to all across the rest of Lewis,

and we'd have been looking at airstrips

for spotter planes to take off from,

to fly over the North Atlantic and the northern Minch,

to spot the shoals of fish,

which his enormous fishing fleet would then sail out

and harvest and catch,

and bring back here and be prepared in massive canneries

to be sent south and sold in a chain of fishery stores

called Mac Fisheries,

which he'd brought throughout the UK specifically for that purpose.

Just some extraordinary plans.

Extraordinary plans.

Leverhulme proposed to redesign Stornoway's town centre,

placing a huge war memorial in a new town square.

His factory workers would give up their crofts,

and live in these clean, modern houses.

Built in a style borrowed from his soap factory

at Port Sunlight, on the Mersey.

The English millionaire was devout in his faith

that Scotland's most remote communities could be industrialised.

And, in the summer of 1918,

he travelled to the north of his Protestant, Presbyterian island,

invited to attend a memorial service

in the ancient Episcopal church of St Mortlach.

..and forgive us our trespasses,

as we forgive those who trespass against us.

And lead us not into temptation,

but deliver us...

As he posed at the entrance to the church, at a new war memorial,

the soap manufacturer paid tribute to the dead,

and promised a bright future for the living.

"They've won the war.

"It's now for us to win the peace and to make our island fragrant

"with hopes and possibilities

"for a brighter and more glorious future."

Leverhulme's sermon was applauded by many on Lewis,

in particular, by the moneyed middle classes of Stornoway.

But his world of factory bells and weekly wages

was anathema to the local crofters...

..who were determined to continue with their own,

less than lucrative lifestyle.

He said to these crofters,

I will build you houses, new houses.

I will provide these houses with electricity,

I'll give you a garden.

Just abandon what you're doing now, come with me

and you'll have much, much better lives,

much more fruitful lives, you'll have much more money

in your pockets, so...

Isn't that common sense?

But the crofters still said no.

We're happy with our land, we want our land,

we are determined to croft our own land.

Thank you very much.

The battle of the crofters against the capitalists

would erupt the following year.

A year that would begin in desperate tragedy.

In the first hours of 1st January,

in heavy waters at the entrance to Stornoway harbour,

the Admiralty yacht Iolaire

struck these rocks.

181 returning servicemen lost their lives.

After four years of fighting abroad,

many drowned within sight of their homes.

Leverhulme was at his home in Bolton when the ship went down.

He returned to Stornoway and donated £1,000

to the disaster fund - the largest single sum.

The millionaire had a well-earned reputation for compassion.

Across his worldwide business empire,

he treated his workers with an unfashionable respect.

One part Victorian improver and philanthropist,

the other, a benevolent Highland laird.

He transformed Lews Castle into a private Brigadoon.

He got great entertainers of the day, like Harry Lauder,

to come and stay here.

And they, of course, would do a turn for his guests.

He had his own piper, of course, in the tradition of a Highland laird,

except when that piper insisted on going back to the croft

to do the harvest, much to Leverhulme's disgust.

Couldn't believe... He offered to pay the piper more to stay

than the piper would ever gain from a harvest of potatoes.

But the piper still went back and harvested his potatoes.

Leverhulme's piper embodied much of the spirit of the cottage crofter,

for whom profit took a poor second place

to the relationship with the land.

And 1919 saw a significant victory for the crofters.

Lloyd George's coalition government introduced new legislation

and £2,750,000 of public money to create new crofts.

The 1919 Land Settlement Act gave the State the power

to, essentially, nationalise land, to purchase land,

for the State, in the form of the Board -

later, Department Of Agriculture For Scotland -

to act as the landowner and rent it back.

It didn't only empower them,

it imposed obligations on the Board to do that.

And these obligations, legally, were very queer.

If there was a demand for land, particularly from

returning ex-servicemen in a locality,

if there was land that could be divided into crofts

or smallholdings in that locality,

then the Board was obliged to get on and do something about it.

For the crofters, this was a famous victory,

a partial reversal of the clearances.

Focused on Scotland's seven crofting counties,

from Argyll in the south to Shetland in the north,

the Scottish Board Of Agriculture

drew up plans to create thousands of new crofts.

But one man placed himself above the new legislation...

..Baron Leverhulme.

In an extraordinary arrangement, the Scottish Office -

Robert Munro, who was the secretary for Scotland -

agreed a deal with Leverhulme that he would give ten years' grace

and not pursue any land settlement schemes in Lewis

in order to give Leverhulme's schemes time to come to fruition.

And that added to the intensity of feeling about this

because as somebody said, as one of the land raider's said at the time,

"When the law was on the side of the landlords,

"the government was anxious enough to enforce it.

"Now the law is on our side, the law states clearly

"that we're entitled to that land,

"but the government is not enforcing that."

Leverhulme's investment had mesmerised the politicians.

The man who was already the mayor of Bolton

had become the great dictator of Lewis.

And in 1919, one project above all dominated his thinking.

In the fertile Back district, north of Stornoway,

Leverhulme announced that his existing farms

were to be rationalised

to become one, highly efficient dairy farm...

..to supply what Leverhulme hoped would be

the growing town of Stornoway.

Servicemen who had returned to the Back district

had hoped for a different outcome.

Most lived on tiny crofts, squeezed into the least fertile land.

They wanted Leverhulme's farms for themselves,

to be divided into new crofts.

Malcolm MacIver had come back from the war

to his home village of Coll in the Back district.

My grandfather was Malcolm MacIver.

At the end of the war, he came back to overcrowded housing,

lack of housing, lack of land...

lack of any ideas, basically, as to how they were going to

bring up their families.

If you go to the war memorial in Back,

you will see what they gave to the State.

And one of them was actually my grandfather's brother.

That's the price they paid and many families here paid.

When they came back, the promises that had been made,

in terms of land fit for heroes, or just land,

were totally forgotten.

All across Scotland's crofting communities,

returning servicemen became increasingly militant.

And not for the first time.

Older crofters would have remembered

frequent and sometimes violent land raids that began in the 1880s.

On several occasions, soldiers and marines had been despatched,

bayonets fixed, to extinguish the unrest.

Now, in the March of 1919,

Malcolm MacIver and the men of the Back district

took similar action.

They staged land raids on Leverhulme's farms.

Their protest was entirely peaceful.

They took possession of small pockets of land

and they planted potatoes.

They felt that they had to do this or they would starve.

There would be no food for their families,

there would be no future for their families.

And they saw this place with the tenant farmer

having all that land that he didn't really need

and they had no access to the land which they did need.

A tiny crop of potatoes posed little threat to Leverhulme's plans.

But the millionaire grew increasingly frustrated

at the repeated intrusions on HIS land.

He determined to confront the raiders,

and on 12th March 1919,

he was driven to the very centre of the disputed territory -

the bridge over the Gress River.

1,000 islanders turned out to hear the millionaire

they called the "Soap Man"

speak from the top of an upturned barrel.

He told them that it was the first sunny day in ten days

and that was a great...

..indicator of the future because he was bringing news

of a sunny future for Lewis.

Some of the islanders were enthusiastic.

But many could not share Leverhulme's vision.

One man, Alan Martin, shouted...

"This will not do!

"This honey mouthed man would have us believe

"that black is white and white is black!

"We are not concerned with his fancy dreams.

"What we want is the land.

"Will you give us the land?"

Leverhulme said he would not.

Another raider, John MacLeod was even more outspoken. He said...

"Lord Leverhulme, you have bought this island.

"You have not bought us.

"We refuse to be the bondslaves of any man."

A year after they had planted their illicit potatoes,

returning servicemen again raided the farms of the Back district.

Their protest escalated.

They began to build houses.

Leverhulme wrote to the raiders.

He accused them of wrecking their own island's future.

The policy you have selfishly adopted

will force other landless men to emigrate to Canada and elsewhere.

You're condemning them to be exiles from their own native lands.

Leverhulme would not compromise.

Crofting was the past.

He called it "a gross waste of public money".

Industry was the future.

Or so he thought.

Driving Leverhulme's plans for Lewis

were the profits made elsewhere in his business empire.

But, by the summer of 1920,

those businesses were in serious difficulty.

His plans for Lewis, including his plans for new roads

across the island, came to an abrupt halt.

The bridge is the end of the road.

It leads on to moorland and a rough track and nothing.

It's a bridge to nowhere.

As such, you could see it - and plenty do see it -

as a symbol of Leverhulme's few years in Lewis.

A bridge to nowhere.

His dreams of transforming Lewis

with millions made from fishing were over.

Ended not by local protests,

but by two major world events,

to the West and to the East.

There's the October Revolution in St Petersburg,

which, in turn, led to a trade embargo,

which wiped out the massive Eastern European market overnight.

And then Prohibition was introduced in the United States

and in bars in the States they used to have

little pots of salted herring for people to pick at

and then have another whisky or another beer or something.

Prohibition came along, the bars closed down,

that demand disappeared.

And all contributed to this failure of his grand plans.

They no longer made economic sense.

Leverhulme's a complicated character

and a lot of what he was looking to do was visionary.

And I think he was, in many ways, extremely well intentioned.

But he was dealing with a situation

that economically, and in all sorts of other ways,

were out of his control.

In the end, there were no factories,

no railways,

no pot of gold.

Leverhulme's parting gesture was deep with irony.

He offered existing Lewis crofters their own land, free of charge,

to transform them from tenants to landowners.

They refused.

Ownership came with risks.

Tenancy was protected by law.

Leverhulme's departure untied the hands

of the Scottish Board of Agriculture.

Now freed to create crofts on Lewis

as they had been trying to do across Scotland.

But the process of finding suitable land,

negotiating its purchase,

then dividing it into crofts was painfully slow.

In the first three years of the Land Settlement Act,

the Scottish Board of Agriculture received 4,500 applications

to create new crofts

or extend existing crofts.

But by the end of 1920

less than 600 had been completed.

Even when land was made available,

the process of deciding who would get it could be random and cruel.

There was a priority system.

People who'd fought in the war

were the number one priority,

They were recognised to have a bigger claim on crofts

than anyone else.

But, even then, there might be a drawing of lots, as it were.

If your number came up, you got a croft

and if it didn't, you didn't.

Angus Gillies had come back from the dead

to an overcrowded croft in South Dell.

He and his neighbours had looked enviously

at the wide fields of Galson Farm.

But, in 1923,

five years after Angus came back from the war,

it was announced that Galson was to be divided.

They came with their rods and their chains

and boundary stones were put in.

And then they were allocated.

And the word that we use here, in Gaelic, for...

a croft... We don't refer to croich.

We refer to "lot".

SPEAKS GAELIC

Their croft.

And, literally, the lot was the lot

that they had been allocated, in a lottery.

Agnes's grandfather was one of the lucky ones.

He drew number 25,

the croft Agnes's family still occupy.

My maternal grandmother, Shona Marsden,

she gives a beautiful description

of when they had got their croft,

because they would only have ever seen it over the turf wall.

And she describes how they walked in the road,

where the road still is,

between the walls,

springtime...

and everything looked so green.

And everything looked so open.

It had taken five years,

but now Angus and his family had found their promised land.

A rented croft of their own.

Many were less fortunate.

Traditionally, the family croft would be passed down

to the eldest son.

His younger brothers and sisters

would have to look for a living elsewhere.

Many had moved south to the great industrial centres.

But, as Scotland's economy collapsed,

they were forced to look further afield.

There were huge numbers of people in Glasgow, for instance,

and in other centres, who were of Highland origin.

But now these places were no longer a Mecca either.

They were contracting economically and declining.

Scotland is a place that people are leaving from in huge numbers.

Particularly for the United States

and for the so-called dominions of that time - Canada, Australia, etc.

From the Lowlands to the Highlands,

critics called for imaginative new schemes

to stop people leaving.

Hydroelectrics, new roads,

perhaps a handful of Leverhulmes

to breathe life into Scottish communities.

In the end, the government offered little.

The Forestry Commission, established in 1919, was a rare success.

But growing trees would not replace building ships.

And forests would never prosper in Shetland or the Outer Hebrides.

And so, with much to encourage it,

and little in place to stop it,

1920s Scotland became a time of mass departures.

A decade when the country's recorded population

would decrease for the first time ever.

Emigration was nothing new.

For over a century, emigration agents had journeyed

across Scotland's communities, her islands, villages and cities.

The agents came from Australia, from New Zealand and the United States,

but most often, they came from Canada.

Your main Canadian federal agent

was based in Glasgow.

But he, and various sub agents who were attached to his office,

would go out on recruitment drives,

usually in the summer months.

And they would give public lectures, hold private meetings

with people who were interested.

So it was a big event, it was something to go out to,

if the agent was visiting your village.

In 1922, the task of emigration agents was made considerably easier.

A new Act of Parliament committed £3 million per year

to subsidise the cost of one-way tickets to the British dominions.

Instead of paying £16 for a passage to Canada,

the poorest migrants would pay only £4.

The 1922 Empire Settlement Act saw Britain pay her people...

to leave.

The thinking behind the Empire Settlement Act was

that it would bolster an empire that seemed to be

threatening to fall apart

by sending out loyal British subjects.

But, taking it from the domestic perspective,

they were beginning to be worried that some of these subjects

were not loyal, they were potentially disaffected.

There were fears of Bolshevism.

So they thought they could export the potentially troublesome

and disillusioned to the other side of the Atlantic.

To send her people to the dominions,

the British government committed £3 million per year for 15 years.

A total sum equivalent to £2.5 billion today.

This was a profoundly controversial piece of legislation.

It drew ferocious criticism from all corners of Scottish society.

There was opposition from the left,

who felt that it was the government essentially giving up

on the working class, those voices were heard.

There was opposition from the nascent Nationalist Movement in Scotland.

And there was additionally, however,

somewhat maybe counter-intuitively, opposition from the right as well.

On the right, you had Sir Alfred Yarrow,

of Yarrow Shipbuilders, complaining about the expense

of educating people in Scotland,

only to see them use that education as a springboard to emigrate.

BELL TOLLS Some went even further.

In Parliament, the radical Glasgow socialist David Kirkwood,

likened Scotland's losses to emigration

to the losses of the war.

When there is a war on, it is the best blood of the country

that is taken away.

It is the same with emigration.

It is our young men, the best asset that any country ever had,

the finest raw material in the world -

the British working class.

The protests did little to stem the tide of Scottish migrants.

The 1920s would become

the peak period for Scottish outward emigration.

In ten years, almost half a million people left the country.

A tenth of the population.

No other European country lost such a large proportion

of its post-war population.

The year 1923 saw the most departures,

when almost 85,000 Scots emigrated overseas.

The vast majority came from Scotland's towns and cities.

But the much smaller number,

who left from Scotland's Highlands and Islands,

had a massive impact on the tiny communities they left behind.

In the Hebrides, 1923 would long be remembered

as the year two migrant ships departed in one single week.

SEAGULL CRIES

100 miles from Stornoway, the island of Barra lies

at the southern edge of the Outer Hebrides.

A traditionally Roman Catholic community,

in 1923, the local priest was Father Donald MacIntyre,

who was also an agent for a Catholic emigration charity.

In a village hall, MacIntyre hosted a magic lantern show.

He projected pictures of fertile prairies,

told stories of a country where hard work was well rewarded.

Every family was promised a farm of their own.

In the audience were the MacNeils

from the village of Tangasdale.

The father, 55-year-old Alexander, or Atoll MacNeil,

was a fisherman, fallen on hard times.

His youngest son, Lachlan,

would never forget the night the family decided to leave.

-RECORDING:

-I can remember the showing of pictures

and listening to speeches.

How well off they would be if they went to Canada.

The promised land.

A few more made up their minds to emigrate,

including my own family from Tangasdale.

He didn't want to leave here and none of them wanted to go.

But they had to go for a better future.

They thought they were going for better land.

Land around here, as you can see, is quite scarce

and it's not easy to plough much of it.

Their hope was to get land they could have

and land was the big issue.

In the Western Isles, emigration had long been a fearful word.

The legacy of the clearances hung heavily.

But Government money for new crofts had dried up.

Harvests were failing.

By 1923, a subsidised ticket to a new life abroad

seemed an increasingly attractive option.

There was a sense of...

ambition, opportunity,

a sense that there was a better future to be had

across the Atlantic.

Partly, that was a consequence of disillusionment about

being let down, in terms of promises of homes fit for heroes.

But it was also a consequence of better publicity.

What the agents were saying, the impact of the new legislation,

the fact that many of the guys who were leaving had served in the war

and had heard about these opportunities elsewhere.

The MacNeil family - Atoll, Annie and their two children -

were to depart on a Canadian Pacific liner, the Marloch.

The youngest son, 11-year-old Lachlan,

remembered a sombre mood in the family croft,

as his father said goodbye to family and friends.

-RECORDING:

-I remember the night.

Donald McLean "Borve"

and my father sitting by the fireside

drinking a bottle of whisky

and both were crying their eyes out.

I do like the story Lachlan put on a tape he made in the '80s

about my great-grandfather, Donald McLean, "Borve",

coming to see his father, Atoll, with a bottle of whisky,

and they're at the fireside, crying their eyes out,

cos they knew that was the last time they'd see each other.

They at least knew that.

The next morning, Sunday 15th April 1923,

13 families left Barra for the short crossing to Lochboisdale.

There, they met fellow travellers from Benbecula and South Uist.

And, under a cloudless sky,

a total of 291 islanders

were transferred to their waiting ship -

the Belfast-built liner, the Marloch.

The islanders joined 177 other Scottish migrants

who had boarded in Glasgow the day before,

accompanied by journalists from the mainland,

who had travelled to witness the Hebridean departures.

BAGPIPES PLAY

The correspondent from the Herald described...

"A spirit of hope and buoyant expectancy,

"as the Marloch slipped anchor to the tune of the bagpipes."

Just six days later, another Canadian Pacific liner,

the Metagama, arrived in the waters off Stornoway.

She carried 1,100 emigrants who had boarded at Glasgow

to be joined by another 315

from all across Lewis...

..including one passenger from the tiny village of Brue

20 miles north-west of Stornoway.

Home to the Finlayson family.

The father, Donald, had served in the navy.

He fought at the Battle of Jutland.

His son, Norman, had elected to leave the family croft

to travel alone to Canada.

Forced to sacrifice his future to support his family

with the money he'd make abroad.

My father won a scholarship.

Certain young people were earmarked to go to the high school,

the Nicholson Institute in Stornoway,

and my father was one of those.

He turned it down, because he felt he was needed at home.

And then, in 1923, my father was 18 years old,

he and several friends walked from Brue,

the village they were born in,

into Stornoway to take the ship to Canada.

There is a photograph that shows all the people lined up

at the end of the road, if you like,

to say goodbye to these young men who were all leaving home.

I think there was probably a feeling of adventure,

along with the feeling that they were leaving behind

and maybe never seeing their families again

and that would have been an extremely difficult thing

for them to do.

On the afternoon of 21st April,

Norman Finlayson and 300 Lewis migrants

were ferried out to the waiting Metagama.

There was dancing, then prayers.

Every traveller was given a Gaelic Bible.

Like Norman, most of the migrants were single young men,

described in the optimistic prose of the Herald's correspondent as...

"Youth, pulsating with hope,

"setting out with confidence to conquer worlds."

As Norman, and the mostly Protestant passengers

of the Metagama left Stornoway,

the predominantly Catholic migrants from Barra and Lochboisdale

were already mid-ocean.

On board their ship, the Marloch,

fisherman Alexander, or Atoll, MacNeil was advised,

by his emigration agent,

to exaggerate the amount of money he held.

-LACHLAN MACNEIL:

-He told them that if you tell me that you have

more than you actually have,

it will be to your credit.

Atoll agreed,

a decision that he would come to bitterly regret.

On 28th April 1923,

13 days after leaving Lochboisdale,

their ship, the Marloch, made landfall in St John, New Brunswick.

The Metagama, from Stornoway,

arrived in the same port four days later.

Together, the two ships

had brought over 600 Scottish men, women and children

from the Hebrides to Canada.

That one year, 1923,

29,000 Scots would make that same journey.

Local newspapers welcomed the Hebridean arrivals,

described them as, "alert, rugged

"and experienced in farming and fishing".

They were also said to be rich.

TRAIN HOOTS

After almost two weeks at sea,

the MacNeil family, from Barra,

took another week to reach Alberta by rail.

A journey of almost 3,000 miles

across the Canadian prairies.

This photograph shows the passengers of the Marloch

arriving in the town of Red Deer,

where they were trained in the ways of Canadian farming.

The emigrants had been assured, time and again,

that they'd each be given their own farm.

But, after three months unpaid work,

there was no word of any farm.

Atoll MacNeil wrote to the emigration agents,

The Scottish Immigrant Aid Society, and asked

when he would receive his own promised land.

The reply...was devastating.

-LACHLAN MACNEIL:

-We received a letter back telling us

there was no such promise and called my father a liar.

And that we were quite capable of getting our own place

without his help.

The MacNeils had been caught in a web of duplicity and incompetence,

spun by the agents who'd inspired their journey to Canada.

The Scottish Immigrant Aid Society

was managed by a former Benedictine priest, Father Andrew MacDonnell.

There is a whiff of scandal that surrounds Andrew MacDonnell.

He had told his sub-agents in Scotland, he said,

"I want you to recruit 18 families

"and they must all have 750 to their name,

"so that they can make a start in farming on their own account."

But what his sub-agents in Scotland actually did

was to recruit 50 families,

almost half of whom were penniless,

and MacDonnell didn't know that they were arriving until they were there.

With hopes of getting their own promised farm now on hold,

the MacNeil family rented rooms in the town of Calgary.

Meanwhile, back on the coast,

the emigrants from Stornoway had encountered their own problems.

Norman Finlayson, the young man who had turned down a scholarship,

was one of almost 1,500 Scots

whose arrival in Canada surprised everyone.

When they got to New Brunswick, there was no-one there to meet them,

so this whole ship of young emigrant people

were left on the quay and...

no-one to meet them and they didn't know where they were going.

They were cold, they were tired, they were hungry.

Ultimately, a company representative came

and they were sent by train to Toronto.

My father was sent to a farm in Southern Ontario

and he went to work there, near Orillia.

For four years, Anna's father worked his way through the farms

and mines of western Canada,

sending money home to his parents in Lewis.

He arrived in the city of Vancouver in 1928

and married another Lewis emigrant, Anne MacIver.

They were engaged for five years,

because my father insisted on having a house built,

and furnished, and a car before he got married.

And he was that way all his life. He never owed a cent.

The man whose family had been too poor to send him to school

found great success in Canada.

He started the first charter flights to Scotland.

There were enough Scottish people here that wanted to go back home

and visit, so he set up a charter

with a company called Ward Air, in those years.

And they flew from Vancouver to Prestwick.

He loved Canada, but he never forgot home.

And they always referred to Lewis as home, yeah.

And he passed away in Vancouver on 21st April 1983.

Exactly 60 years to the day he left home.

His one big wish was that we would all go to school

and finish our education and have an opportunity

that he didn't have and...

we did that, more for him than for anybody, I think, you know?

I think he was given more opportunity here

than he would have had in Scotland in those days.

And I think he made the most of those opportunities

and he lived a very happy, very productive life.

Just six days before Norman had left Stornoway,

the MacNeil family had left Barra.

They'd been convinced to emigrate by their local priest.

They'd been cruelly let down.

But, in 1926,

they once again put their faith in Father MacDonnell

and his Scottish Immigrant Aid Society.

That year, MacDonnell had taken out a mortgage of 100,000

and bought 32,000 acres of land

from the Canadian Pacific Railway

and established the Scottish Catholic immigrant colony

of Clandonald.

What I'm holding here

is the walking stick that my great-uncle,

the Reverend MacDonnell, used when he came to Clandonald.

MacDonnell's new settlement was more than twice the size of Barra,

the island the MacNeils had left behind.

They chose 100 farm sites,

that are shown on this map for the Clandonald colony.

The farm sites were originally just a number.

The MacNeil family were located on

what was referred to as farm number 81.

The land that they had there was quite rolling land.

There were some nice, level spots for fields.

There was a large water body that went through the middle of it

and does to this day.

In this photograph,

mother and father Annie and Atoll MacNeil

stand outside the flimsy prefabricated home

they shared with their sons, Lachlan and John.

These homes were supplied by the Stavelock Lumber Company.

There were 100 of them in total

and all used in this colony area.

The MacNeil home has long gone,

but this identical cabin

has hardly been touched since the last settler departed.

These homes were built with no insulation in the wall whatsoever.

It's the boards and just one sheet of tar paper.

And that was all that was between you and the weather.

In the wintertime it does get very cold here.

Some years, some winters are up to -40 Fahrenheit.

And the cold was not the only hardship.

The settlers were obliged to pay their share

of Father MacDonnell's 100,000 mortgage.

Many struggled to cope.

This was not the land they had been promised in the magic lantern shows.

Many of those families didn't do it for themselves personally,

although they did benefit.

It was for their family and grandchildren

that they went through what they did to come to Canada.

It was not an easy life

and it wasn't what some of the people thought it was.

Some, I think, had been painted a picture of much better.

Six years after their arrival at Clandonald,

Lachlan MacNeil's elder brother,

24-year-old John, fell critically ill.

-LACHLAN MACNEIL:

-1932 - my brother John died

and my father wasn't in the best of health either.

I was beginning to see the light.

In the Fall of '40 we sold out

and moved to Vancouver.

Lachlan MacNeil would always insist that the Clandonald settlers

had been unfairly treated.

He blamed the emigration agents

who had brought his family from Scotland.

And, in particular, he blamed Father Andrew MacDonnell.

My great-uncle firmly believed that what he was doing

was the right thing.

And, I think, for the most part, he did do the right thing.

Some people may disagree, but I think, for the most part,

they would all agree that they were all better for what he did

to bring the people out here.

Lachlan's mother and father, Annie and Atoll,

died a few years after the family moved to Vancouver.

Lachlan had three children of his own.

Still in Vancouver,

they understand the hardships their father faced

at the hands of the emigration agents.

Every family that went there,

many of them encountered the same problems.

So it wasn't just, you know, something that he thought happened.

It definitely did happen.

And they were promised things that never came through.

THEY CHATTER

Why did he emigrate? I remember Dad talking about the weather.

-The weather or something.

-Yeah.

-And coming to a better life.

-And, yeah, just coming to a better life.

Lachlan worked for the Canadian Steel Company

and three times he returned to the island of his birth.

Somebody once said to me, when I was there 11 years ago,

that, when all of those people left,

a lot of the dreams left with them -

they were the dreamers that left.

They were the ones that wanted to...

er...kind of do more.

This picture here. This would be dad's last trip to Barra.

-Oh, yeah?

-Yeah.

It wasn't all easy for them and he was a very proud man

and he...he made a very good life for his family.

PHONE KEYS BEEP

One positive from the great exodus of the 1920s

is that it helped create a Scotland

where almost every family has a relative abroad.

DIALLING TONE

Hello, Angus.

Hello, Ann!

It's lovely to talk to you.

Lovely talking to you too. It's been quite a while.

Lachlan died in 1991.

Almost a lifetime before, here in Tangasdale,

he had watched his father, Atoll,

share a tearful whisky with Angus's great-grandfather, Donald,

the night before the family had boarded the emigrant ship,

the Marloch.

Their descendants would come to prosper in Canada,

but, across the Hebrides, across Scotland,

there remains an anger...

..that, in the years after the Great War,

emigration seemed the only option.

I think it would have been better if they tried to keep them here

and there are other areas of northern Europe

where this didn't happen at all.

I suppose Britain felt it had an empire to fill.

And who'd be better than the Scots Highlanders and Islanders

to go along to the toughest parts, and they were Canada.

So I think they were used in many ways, the people,

and that's annoying and it's sad.

The Scottish exodus of the 1920s had been fuelled by poor housing,

a stalling economy

and by men and women who wanted a better future

for their children.

Most controversially, it had also been fuelled

by false promises and government money.

The £3 million a year that had been made available

for Empire Settlement Funding seemed to be

a counsel of despair for some people.

And the argument was, why can't this money be used

in Scotland on forestry, commercial fishing,

hydroelectric schemes, industrial investment?

Why spend money sending people away?

That money could be invested at home

in making the population productive.

A lack of investment and a lack of imagination

had paralysed post-war Scotland.

Nowhere more so than the Highlands and Islands,

where the failure to provide land

had led impoverished families to seek it out overseas.

Young people are denied opportunity,

even in their own country

and they have to go elsewhere to find it.

And that's a pretty awful state of affairs.

And the kind of psychological, cultural impact of that,

I think on Scotland, overall,

and certainly on the Highlands and Islands, was pretty devastating.

For Scotland's most remote communities,

the 1920s would be remembered as a time of missed opportunities,

when the questions of who owns Scotland's land

and to what purpose were left to another generation.

In 1918, Angus Gillies had come back from the dead

and won a lottery to secure the tenancy on his promised land -

the family croft at Galson.

Baron Leverhulme had offered Angus and his fellow crofters

outright ownership of their land -

a risk they'd lacked the confidence to take.

But 90 years after Angus came back from the war,

his granddaughter was at the centre

of a government-assisted community buyout

that finally put Galson in the hands

of the people who live and work there.

Here we are now

and this community owns this land.

And, for me, that is a circle

that's very, very important to have closed.

And, I must say, I wonder how

my grandfather and that generation

would have thought about that,

how they would have responded to that.

I think they would have felt good about it.

Galson is just one of the many schemes that has placed land

in the control of the people who live on it.

The buyout cost the Scottish government £600,000 -

a considerable sum,

but a mere fraction of the public money spent in the 1920s

sending Scottish men and women overseas.

In the next and final film...

a cultural revolution, a Scottish renaissance.

A band of revolutionary writers and artists

mount an explosive rearguard action

to portray their country in a language

free from sentiment, free from tired music hall parody.

A battle for a noble cause

to find the voice of Scotland's people.