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After the Clearances: Evander McIver and the ‘Highland Question’, 1835–73

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 March 2012

ERIC RICHARDS  and
ANNIE TINDLEY
ERIC RICHARDS
Affiliation:
Department of History, Faculty of Social Sciences, Flinders University, GPO Box 2100, Adelaide, Australia5001Eric.Richards@flinders.edu.au
ANNIE TINDLEY
Affiliation:
Department of History, Glasgow Caledonian University, Cowcaddens Road Glasgow, G4 0BA, Scotland, UKAnnemarie.Tindley@gcu.ac.uk
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Abstract

This article explores how estates in the Scottish Highlands were managed after the clearances. The land system had been radically redrawn, creating consequences that those who inherited the post-clearance world endeavoured to manage. At the centre of the post-clearance Highlands were the estate managers, or factors, who were effectively responsible for the economic and social conditions on their employers’ estates. They controlled the levers of Highland life and faced the realities of the post-clearance order. Prominent among this group was Evander McIver. This article examines McIver's career up to 1873, framed by a discussion of the ‘Highland Question’ of how estates reacted to the continuing poverty and occasional destitution of their small tenants, or crofters. McIver held adamant views on this question, and the origins and expression of these views through his career are delineated in this article.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Rural History , Volume 23 , Issue 1 , April 2012 , pp. 41 - 57
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

I. Introduction

How were Highland estates managed after the clearances? It is well known that the entire framework of existence in the Scottish Highlands experienced long term structural changes during the century after Culloden.Footnote 1 They included the unprecedented growth of population, the introduction of commercial sheep farming and the creation of the crofting system. The land system and the deployment of resources in the region were radically redrawn, with consequences varying across the Highlands and Islands. The best known of these consequences were the convulsive changes associated with sudden and large scale removals of small occupiers who were generally resettled on the fringes of the region.Footnote 2

By the mid nineteenth century, most of the Highlands had emerged into the reshaped circumstances brought about by the changes often simplified into the phrase ‘the clearances’. It was now a deeply bifurcated society. One side was dominated by great landlords and their highly capitalised sheep farming and sporting tenants who paid much more than the lion's share of rents. On the other side were the concentrated settlements of crofters and cottars living in constricted circumstances and occupying marginal land.Footnote 3 In this new equilibrium, the sheep farmers were able to generate good returns for themselves and their landlords and incoming sporting tenants were also bidding up the value of the interior lands of the region.Footnote 4 But the small tenantry generally lived in continuing poverty and found few new sources of income to bolster the returns on their crofts.Footnote 5 Other possibilities such as kelp and fishing had proved false, and many local efforts to develop secure income had disappointed.Footnote 6 The dependence of crofters and cottars on local subsistence production left them vulnerable to near-famine conditions which continued to recur into the late nineteenth century.

The people of the Highlands who inherited the post-clearance world, the owners, farmers, crofters, cottars and later the government, faced not only the consequences of the clearances but severe vicissitudes in the economy. While the commercial sector of the Highland economy had emerged with high productivity, the smallholders oscillated close to desperation, despite interludes of relative ease.Footnote 7 The clearances had dislocated the population and various pressures conspired to extrude some of their numbers, but the central reality was that the population of the Highlands had continued to increase until the mid century and declined only slowly in the following decades.Footnote 8

The new economic structure was supporting a swollen population which had not participated in the increased output of the region. Meanwhile, the political and moral climate was shifting. After 1860, a new awareness emerged of conditions within and beyond the Highlands. The exposure and politicisation of the Highlands reached a watershed in 1883 with the instigation of a Royal Commission into conditions among the crofters.Footnote 9 Between the competing elements in the region there were radically different perceptions and diagnoses of the essential ‘Highland Question’. At the heart of the question was the search for the causes of and cures for Highland poverty, which remained a blot on the British landscape.Footnote 10 At the centre of the post-clearance Highlands were the estate managers, the factors and agents of the landlords. This class of men had borne much of the odium associated with the removals. They were effectively responsible for economic and social conditions on their employers’ estates, and particularly for maintaining social cohesion and general welfare among the crofting population. These were the men who controlled the levers of power in the Highlands and who faced the realities of the post-clearance order. Prominent among them was Evander McIver.

As an exemplar of Highland estate management and its challenges, the life of Evander McIver possesses several advantages. One was the sheer length of his career, from 1835 to 1903; second was the range of his connections across the region, from Lewis to Dingwall, from Cape Wrath to Gairloch, from the poorest of the cottar class, to the wealthiest of the aristocratic landowners. Moreover he was involved in the great public enquiries over these decades, from those which preceded the Great Famine through to the Crofter and Deer Forest Commissions at the end of the century.Footnote 11 But most of all McIver's life was supremely self-documented. Not only did he prepare a substantial self-justifying Memoir in his later years; for half a century he produced a dense flow of correspondence relating to his management of the Scourie district in north-west Sutherland. These were unbuttoned commentaries on the life and times of a great Highland estate.Footnote 12 From these writings emerge one man's fully articulated version of the Highland experience. As one reviewer of his Memoirs pointed out, ‘the reminiscences of such a man, whose strong mind was almost wholly devoted to the Highlands and Highland problems, obviously possesses much interest’.Footnote 13

Highland estate management in the nineteenth century was no sinecure. Factors were often caught in conflicts between the tenants and the landlords, and were the instruments of difficult and unpopular policies. Indeed it was part of their remit to act as shock absorbers for resentment and conflict, protecting their employers from such unpleasantness. They also faced the aftermath of the clearances and the consequences of other great changes which had been in train for many decades, not least the rapid accumulation of congested populations of small tenants. For fifty years McIver was in the cockpit in one of the most intractable and difficult terrains of the north-west Highlands.

By the mid nineteenth century, most Highland estate factors were not native to the region, as is exemplified by the immense Sutherland estate which was administered by commissioner James Loch, and his son George, for sixty years, and where many of the district factors were non-Highlanders. Evander McIver was of a different mould: a fully fledged Gaelic man who had unrivalled Highland experience.Footnote 14 In this article we delineate his managerial philosophy as well as his particular diagnosis of the ‘Highland problem’. We follow the passage of the West Highlands from 1835 to 1873, a time of crisis, through McIver's own eyes. It was in essence a career of managerial frustration, an experience which echoed through much of the rest of the Highlands. His career captures the quintessential dilemma of estate management in the Highlands, of the men who grappled with the intractable system which had been built on the contradictions inherited from the previous generation. His life spanned decades of painful adjustment in the northern Highlands, having particular responsibility for the management of the post clearance, densely populated parishes in the north west of the estate of Sutherland. In this position for more than fifty years, McIver confronted the classic Highland problems of famine, congestion, resistance and aristocratic inconsistency. He was, moreover, extraordinarily forthright and critical of all opinion around him. Here we set out McIver's career as an exemplar of changing views of Highland estate management, landlordism and the crofting community in the immediate post-clearance era.

II. Origins and early career

McIver entered the profession of Highland estate management after a substantial apprenticeship.Footnote 15 He was born in 1811, into a prosperous family based near Stornoway in Lewis. His father, Lewis McIver, was an ambitious merchant with an extensive business both in fishing and land management.Footnote 16 McIver later described his father as a leading man in Lewis, but he was also conscious of the family's earlier west coast origins, in Gairloch and Lochbroom. His mother was also relatively well born: the daughter of the Collector of Customs. McIver came from a rural and commercial background and his parents were prepared to push him along.

Lewis McIver was influential in Lewis but also disputatious. As an energetic improver, Lewis McIver added to the wealth of the island, but ‘did not let anyone stand in his way’.Footnote 17 Until the early 1840s he was regarded as an oppressor of the poor, and known as a clearance agent on his own tenancies, or tacks. He also ran into open conflict with the major local landowners, the Seaforths, and most sensationally with Donald Munro, the infamous factor for James Matheson, who bought Lewis from the Seaforths.Footnote 18 A man of considerable entrepreneurial flair, Lewis represented the old intermediary tacksman class and evidently harboured educational and professional ambitions for his sons. By the early nineteenth century, however, the tacksman class was on the wane, and the star of estate administrators, represented by Donald Munro, and later, Evander McIver, was in the ascendant.Footnote 19

Were McIver's views already formed before he arrived in Sutherland in 1845? He began with certain advantages: above all, he was a man of the north west and his first language was Gaelic.Footnote 20 The young McIver had travelled beyond the island: he knew Gairloch and Cumberland even before he was sent to live with grandparents in Edinburgh at the age of fourteen. He spent two years at the University with considerable success, and was then sent to learn practical farming and land valuing, pointing him towards estate management. His father paid the expenses for him to train with a factor employed by the Duke of Hamilton near Lanark in 1830. He then gained further experience in sheep and arable farming in Dumfriesshire though he was highly critical of his hosts whom he regarded as unintelligent.Footnote 21

In 1831 he returned to Lewis before accepting a position in the factor's office of the Duke of Buccleuch in Dalkeith. He remained somewhat unsettled and returned again to Lewis to work in his father's business from 1832 to 1834 but, as he recalled seventy years later, ‘I disliked the fishing trade and dealing with so many impecunious people’.Footnote 22 It was during this period that he met his future wife, a woman from Skeabost in Skye, but they waited seven years before they married.Footnote 23 It was also during this time that he thought of emigrating to Australia. This was a common idea among men of his circumstances, but he was emphatically opposed by his father who presumably refused to provide the capital that such a move would have entailed.Footnote 24

Instead the young McIver came to the attention of Duncan, Fourth Davidson of Tulloch, a substantial landowner in the northern Highlands and a man with a mercantile background whose family had accumulated property from east to west in the Highlands.Footnote 25 The backbone of the Davidsons’ wealth was West Indian trade and plantations. Duncan's father, Henry, had built up a significant fortune, becoming a director of the Bank of England for a period. His son, of whom McIver despaired, ran through his entire inheritance within thirty years, and was bankrupt by 1862 when the estates were sold off.Footnote 26

Long before this, in 1834, McIver, aged 23, was called to London to meet Davidson and became his factor at £200 per annum with responsibilities covering a large territory from Loch Broom to Dingwall, reached only by very poor transport connections.Footnote 27 McIver saw the estate administration as an Augean stable, and he was highly critical of Davidson's slack financial methods, not least because they threatened his other role, as agent for the Dingwall branch of the Caledonian Banking Company.Footnote 28 Although these responsibilities were in theory unconnected, in practice McIver made significant loans to the financially troubled Davidson, forcing the Bank to demand that he decide between his factory and his bank agency. ‘Much against my inclination’, McIver ceased to act for Davidson in 1845.Footnote 29

Despite his views in hindsight, McIver was obviously unhappy at Davidson's estate and was already seeking a change of employment when in 1837 he unsuccessfully applied for the post of Scourie factor in Sutherland. No records have survived of his Tulloch years, except in his own tendentious Memoirs and in his appearance before the Select Committee on Emigration (Scotland) in March 1841. His evidence shows his views ahead of his transfer to Sutherland. By this time he could claim close knowledge of conditions, not only in Lewis and Gairloch, but over the central northern Highlands, including the effects of famine and emigration, the two great themes which recurred across the rest of his career.Footnote 30

III. McIver and the 1841 Inquiry

The appointment of a Select Committee on Emigration in 1841 was prompted by the worsening condition of the labouring people in the West Highlands, especially by the return of famine conditions which had recently blighted the region.Footnote 31 McIver testified with precise local knowledge of Loch Broom which had a population of roughly 5,500, mainly of crofters but with many squatters too. On the Tulloch estate he had tried to minimise the population by ‘prohibiting subsetting and subdivisions,’ and by enlarging holdings, thereby reducing the number of holdings.Footnote 32 He had also refused to take in squatters, but commented, ‘there is a great many who we cannot remove’.Footnote 33 He had enforced this policy, ‘very rigidly’, and more so than in the past. Distress and crop failure had descended on the estate in 1836, he reported. There had been little improvement since then and great arrears of rent had accumulated.Footnote 34 The people lived on potatoes and also some herring fishing and when the potato crops had repeatedly failed, relief had been supplied by Davidson.Footnote 35

In his extensive evidence before the 1841 Inquiry, McIver declared that rapid population growth had resulted from the earlier minute subdivision of lots, which itself had arisen out of the herring fishing, which had subsequently failed.Footnote 36 The fishery had, ‘induced the landlords to allow crofters to come in far more numerously than the land was able to support’.Footnote 37 It had now totally failed and the people were without the means to improve their situation. He described them as poor people, often destitute, Gaelic speakers who were not much inclined to emigration.Footnote 38 He had arranged for some of the Loch Broom people to go to Lower Canada in 1837–8, paid for by Davidson, but also helped by a near relative of McIver, and he reported that they were now comfortable. He believed that it would certainly be a good thing if 2,000 of them left, as a benefit to everyone, and he retained this view throughout his career. A sheep farmer had taken over land vacated by the emigrants and he now paid the rent regularly, neatly demonstrating the financial incentives of commercial sheep farming over crofting.Footnote 39

Squatters constituted the most intractable problem. For McIver, along with many of his contemporaries, emigration was the solution: ‘the population must be got rid of, and that appears the most ready means,’ he declared.Footnote 40 The vacuum, made famous by Thomas Malthus, would not refill because landlords would prevent it, being ‘so sensible of the evils of a redundant population’.Footnote 41 This view of emigration represented a common consensus among Highland estate managers at that time, and persisted into the early twentieth century. As McIver put it, ‘I am quite certain that you cannot do better than help the west country people to emigrate – taking care that the land they leave is properly disposed of. It is wonderful the extent which Emigration is taking place from Ireland.’Footnote 42 A few years later, in 1848, McIver talked about the distressing scenes of emigrants leaving Laxford: ‘Nothing but the conviction that it was for the good of the people themselves carried me through it’, he declared at the time.Footnote 43

Even before he joined the Sutherland management, therefore, McIver identified crofter destitution and congestion in the western parishes as the central problem. His diagnosis was perfectly clear: landlords in the past had allowed reckless subdivision on the basis of the herring fishery and potatoes, both of which had failed; now they must reverse the process. Consolidation and sheep farming were the answer, together with emigration, which itself was constrained by the expense. His diagnosis made no connection with clearances as such and he disclaimed any personal knowledge of the pre-clearance times.

IV. McIver in Sutherland: inheriting the post-clearance world

From 1845 to 1895 McIver presided over the administrative district of Scourie in north-west Sutherland, a rugged corner of the Highlands which had experienced all the great changes seen in the region in the previous half century. Most notable had been the growth of population (from 4,808 in 1811 to 5,986 by 1841), a rise of twenty-five per cent in three decades in the constituent parishes of Durness, Assynt and Eddrachillis.Footnote 44 In 1829 the ownership of much of the district passed from the bankrupt Lord Reay to the extremely wealthy Lord Stafford, soon to become the first Duke of Sutherland.Footnote 45 The district experienced major clearances, with the creation of great sheep farms in the interior and the concentration of the crofting and cottar population along the western and northern coasts of the estate.Footnote 46 This was the classic arrangement adopted over much of the Highlands and Islands, and the model McIver inherited when he entered the Sutherland management in 1845. The abiding problem of this district was the dense and poor population of the crofters and cottars, the residual and confined communities left in the wake of the clearances. These circumstances were negatively associated with the clearers in the employ of the Reay and Sutherland families, notably James Loch and Patrick Sellar, who overlapped with McIver in the years 1845–55.Footnote 47 McIver was left to face the aftermath of the clearances and over the following half century the crofter ‘problem’ absorbed most of his energies and caused him the greatest heartache and frustration.

The singular nature of the structure, size and wealth of the Sutherland family and estate shaped the life and times of McIver. The Sutherland ducal family possessed great wealth, externally generated beyond the Highlands, but often applied liberally to that region.Footnote 48 Before McIver, the Sutherland administration under James Loch had sought to modernise the northern estates and render them self-sufficient in every way.Footnote 49 The removals and the development of income generating enterprise in the first half of the century and massive land reclamation schemes from the late 1860s were renewed attempts to achieve this.Footnote 50 While developing such large-scale enterprise, the local factors confronted daily managerial tasks which generated equal anxiety and turmoil. McIver's career, therefore, encompassed many of the generic problems, restrictions and contradictions faced by Highland estate managers.

The Scourie management contained classic Highland conditions after the clearances. The district had been entirely reshaped early in the century and most of the population was relocated along the coasts. Great commercial sheep farms took over the centre, controlling most of the pasture land from which very good profits were extracted.Footnote 51 The crofting population had never been affluent or even secure in its subsistence. It was buffeted by wayward fishing conditions, experienced little benefit from the kelp boom and lived in tight, remote places, repeatedly suffering famine. This position was exacerbated by two factors which became even more critical in the post-clearance years.Footnote 52 One was the continuing growth of population until the 1860s and the other was the great reliance on potatoes, a dependence which worsened as the decades wore on.Footnote 53 McIver faced these complications yet sustained a highly critical view of the system that he had inherited from his predecessors.

In 1845 McIver was appointed as factor of the Scourie management in the Sutherland estate at double his previous salary. The factor occupied a powerful position in Highland communities and McIver earned a reputation for local dominance, soon becoming known as the ‘King of Scourie’.Footnote 54 Evander McIver was evidently a formidable personality with ‘a most commanding presence’.Footnote 55 He ‘naturally had a hasty temper, but a right sense of anger is a necessary constituent of a good character’, said one of his posthumous admirers. In the encomia at the end of his Memoirs McIver was described as ‘a humble, patient, God-fearing man’, but also as a ‘man of true steel’.Footnote 56 He had been the ‘regenerator of this beautiful district, then sadly backward and isolated in its loneliness of primitive Highland seclusion’.Footnote 57 McIver presided over Scourie for half a century and arrived armed with rigid views on the Highland question.

McIver was six feet tall and strong in proportion. In his daily duties and particularly at the twice-yearly rent collections he walked or rode over 300,000 acres of remote and wild territory, along the most rudimentary roads or by boat around the coasts.Footnote 58 McIver also had a social and economic position to uphold. He was required to deal fairly with the poorest cottar and the richest shooting tenant, as well as with occasionally uncooperative or uncomprehending superiors. He also maintained his own household, office and sheep farm on £400 per year, with no holidays unless requested for special circumstances. The editor of McIver's Memoirs recalled that although he enjoyed reading Shakespeare, Macaulay and the Bible, McIver, ‘was no book-man; as consul of his province he was too busily employed in the details of administration for that’.Footnote 59

When McIver joined the Sutherland management in 1845, the core elements of the ‘Highland Problem’ were already in place. The sheep farms had been consolidated and required relatively little management apart from the renegotiation of leases, which was sometimes fractious. The sheep farmers yielded the bulk of the estate revenue and, as McIver said, ‘a great deal of money was made all over Scotland by sheepfarmers’, in the years 1840 to 1875.Footnote 60 During McIver's tenure, sheep rents were increasingly supplemented by sporting tenants whose needs were often more demanding. As for the poverty and congestion of the people of Assynt, McIver concurred with James Loch, who asserted that the problem predated the clearances to a time when the old tacksman class in Assynt had encouraged hundreds of squatters to settle, ‘adding to the poverty as well as the number of the population’. The failure of the fishing and the kelp caused them to fall into ‘a deplorable state of poverty and indolence’. This he termed ‘their original poverty’.Footnote 61

Most Highland estate management, in reality, was focussed on the residual consequences of the remodelling entailed in the clearances. The original Sutherland plan from the 1810s, under the direction of commissioner James Loch, had been the creation of a parallel economy for the crofters and cottars, in individual lots, deriving their living from fishing and new secondary industries established in their midst.Footnote 62 This had been an extraordinarily ambitious plan but by the 1840s, the assumptions upon which it had been based were threadbare.Footnote 63 McIver inherited this system but adamantly rejected any responsibility for its failure. His task was to manage it and diminish its associated adversities. But the break with the past was not total; the crofters’ lots were highly irregular and still semi-communal in arrangement and there were numerous families with no land at all.Footnote 64 McIver spent much of his time tidying up the last elements in the clearance system.

He also administered the Scourie district through the famine years of the late 1840s when the potato crop failed completely and the people were extensively relieved by the Second Duke of Sutherland. During that time emigration increased and relief systems operated effectively enough to prevent any increased mortality.Footnote 65 For McIver the famine simply reinforced his view that the system itself was unsustainable and the population, increased through subdivision, was much too large for its own good. He viewed the coming prospect with alarm: the changes to the Poor Law in 1845 would mean landlords would be compelled to relieve all able-bodied people, which he predicted would ‘annihilate Highland proprietors’.Footnote 66 At that moment McIver feared for a future based on such fragile economic foundations.Footnote 67 A recurring quest throughout his tenure was the rationalisation of crofts into larger and more viable holdings, and the elimination of non-paying tenants and cottars. It was always an uphill battle against the inertia of poverty.

McIver's philosophy and practical policy in managing arrears, poverty and emigration as a cure for the problems of the crofting system were best exemplified in his dealings with the townships of Knockan and Elphin in the early 1850s. Here his methods aroused crofter unrest which quickly escalated into outright physical resistance. These townships had remained uncleared and McIver determined that the Elphin people should be removed. His first act in early 1851 was to annex Altnachy, a parcel of grazing, from the Elphin tenants and add it to the neighbouring Cromault sheep farm.Footnote 68 His reasoning was that the township carried chronic arrears and the threat to deprive the inhabitants of this grazing would ‘stimulate the tenants of these townships to pay more punctually’.Footnote 69 He later reported that the tenants of Elphin had paid their rents ‘wonderfully well since they were threatened to be removed. Some are so poor and so deeply in arrear that I must deprive them of their lands’.Footnote 70 His list of twenty-three people in arrears included widows, a blind person, a drover, a weaver and a teacher. When the Duke asked, ‘what will become of the dispossessed tenants?’ McIver had no answer.Footnote 71

About the prevailing poverty he declared in February 1851: ‘There is not a Township of small Tenants in the District in which there are not some Cottars or Squatters – Widows, old maids – and decayed Tenants occupying Houses who possess no lands and pay no rent – and it is from this class our Paupers come.’Footnote 72 These continuing changes generated mounting turmoil among the people and resistance was brewing. McIver was bent on a process of dislodging cottars, regularising, consolidating and increasing the size of crofts and preventing all subletting. These actions were predicated on his philosophy of control, which was based on the proposition that if the number of crofters got out of hand they would become ungovernable and the system would simply spread its desolation. The crofters did not see the situation in this light and when, in March 1851, they were served with removal summonses, the Sheriff Officer was deforced and the law resisted.Footnote 73 It was one of many recurrent bouts of low level conflict which flared up even in the relatively quiet decades before the 1870s.Footnote 74

The commissioner, or head factor, James Loch, was horrified by this episode. He knew that the Duke would be displeased and unwilling to take the matter further in the way McIver wished. Both the Duke and Loch intervened to restrain McIver since they feared the public reaction.Footnote 75 Since the furore surrounding the enormous Sutherland clearances of 1809 to 1821, and in particular the trial of Patrick Sellar in 1816, the ducal family was deeply averse to any further public criticism and would adjust estate policy to avoid it.Footnote 76 McIver was consumed with fury and threatened to resign.Footnote 77 It was clear that McIver was consistently more rigorous in his attitude to the crofters than the Duke, and was not prepared to take a larger view of matters. The Duke argued that crofter antagonism must be avoided and that the factors must prevent trouble before it occurred. As Loch wrote to McIver, ‘there can be no doubt that the people must not be permitted perpetually to violate the law, but it requires us on the other hand to be very careful not to unite them in a common interest to oppose it’.Footnote 78

McIver was less concerned about the effect of adverse publicity on the estate that an echo of the clearances might bring, and much more concerned about the maintenance of his authority over the crofters.Footnote 79 He wanted to use the threat of removal to impose discipline and he was also convinced that the condition of the paupers and their houses offered further justification for their removal. He diagnosed the cottar problem and the associated poverty as reasons for greater control in every sense. In his view, as the man on the ground in a remote and poverty-stricken area in which legal officials had been resisted with violence, the estate had no alternative but to act decisively to maintain control:

When I think of the very awkward position in which we are placed, with the law set at defiance and the people who did so glorying in it, and wholly disregarding our authority and wishes, and when I reflect on the dangerous tendency which allowing the people to have the upper hand and no legal notice taken of them I cannot but look to the future with doubt and apprehension. It is a state of matters which cannot last – we must vindicate our authority or cease to attempt to exercise it.Footnote 80

For McIver, control was vital: otherwise, the crofting problem would simply get worse and breed yet more poverty. He was not concerned about the usefulness and fairness of the policy, and the methods by which control was maintained.Footnote 81 In the meantime the small tenantry in the interior remained, if not triumphant, then at least unremoved. This was one manifestation of McIver's determination to reduce the crofter sector in the estate economy and it was an unresolved contest with the small tenantry which would continue for the rest of his career.

Behind this recurring rancour was McIver's self-proclaimed ambition to improve the situation he inherited. To this end he repeatedly lobbied the Duke in the late 1840s and early 1850s to pay for and organise the emigration of large numbers of Scourie people, principally to Australia.Footnote 82 In January 1849 he remarked, ‘I am quite satisfied that Emigration is the greatest boon a Proprietor can confer on small tenants . . . and that with the prospect of the Poor Law for the relief of the able-bodied it is true policy to get as many away as possible before it comes into operation.’Footnote 83 This assumed, of course, that the landlord and the small tenantry would have a common interest in reducing the population. In reality, the people did not accept this view of their predicament. Indeed, they were diametrically opposed to his philosophy. His efforts to reorganise the farms and crofter townships in the Scourie management, and to promote emigration, were actions which agitated communities already made perennially insecure by the memories of the clearances of the recent past.Footnote 84

This became a recurring pattern in McIver's administration. He implemented new policies, without anticipating the crofting community's negative response. As well as resistance, crofters frequently wrote petitions to the ducal family, in the hope that they would intervene and prevent the further change McIver wished to impose.Footnote 85 Their resentment and resistance repeatedly aroused McIver's anger and on several occasions, as in 1851, 1873, and 1888, he was driven to the point of resignation. Part of the difficulty for McIver was a growing knowledge that his superiors in the upper management, and in particular the ducal family, had no stomach for harsh measures against the crofting community.Footnote 86 If the crofters agitated against estate policy in a violent way, the upper management would not support their factor, despite his writing in the strongest terms about the dire implications for his own authority and control. This essential immovability would haunt him for the rest of his career.

V. The clearances and the crofter problem

At the end of his long life, McIver worked at his Memoirs, in which he provided his personal retrospect on the Highland question and his final diagnosis of the changes experienced during fifty years of estate management. He made few remarks about the clearances as such. Instead, he restricted his opinions on the issue to the legacy of ill-will rather than the substance of the crofters’ complaints. He said that the introduction of sheep into Strathnaver, ‘in the early years of the century’, had been carried out ‘in a harsh and ruthless manner by some of the parties who acted for the Sutherland estate’.Footnote 87 It had ‘generated a strong rebellious tendency in the minds of the lower classes in Sutherland against their superiors’. This antagonism, he claimed, was already deeply entrenched in the minds of the people when he arrived in Sutherland in 1845.Footnote 88 Any notion of returning to pre-clearance arrangements, however, or of the reallocation of land to the small tenantry, never entered his mind. Emigration, he stressed throughout his entire career, was the best solution for the poverty of the people, as they were only demoralised by easy relief.Footnote 89 There were also the cottars, ‘numerous families without land’, whom he regarded as an entirely submerged stratum, engulfed in hopeless and self-perpetuating poverty.

In essence, therefore, McIver regarded the whole structure of crofting as redundant and an absurdity which he had to administer against the odds. Crofters were inefficient, incompetent and had no future. The system was a patent failure. Their stock could not match that produced by professional sheep farmers as their lots were too small and inferior: ‘in short, the system is bad at the core’.Footnote 90 He was therefore, faute de mieux, required to manage a system for which he had only contempt and for which the only solution was the education and emigration of the people. The irony was that crofting persisted against all the problems which McIver had brought into focus and both the crofting community and system prevailed.Footnote 91

These views had formed in the course of McIver's long experience of a Highland factorship during the difficult economic periods that descended upon the region with worrying frequency during the nineteenth century. One of these was 1861–9, a period of economic atrophy which led to general destitution in the Scourie management.Footnote 92 For eight years, McIver reported with weary regularity on the poverty and destitution prevalent in his management, which he regarded as equally bad or worse than the Famine of the 1840s.Footnote 93 Of grave concern to McIver, and to the upper management at large, throughout this protracted crisis, was what the estate should do, if anything, to alleviate the suffering of the tenantry. McIver, in agreement with George Loch, was opposed to charitable relief on principle.Footnote 94 He regarded such charitable aid as demoralising and he feared that the small tenants would become dependent on handouts from the landlord. He saw only a depressing repetition of the old problem: aid had been granted to the crofters and cottars in the late 1840s, yet in the 1860s the same situation had arisen as poor weather, fishing and crop disease had visited upon the population, ‘not only destitution but actual starvation’.Footnote 95

For McIver personally, the persistent destitution of the community in the 1860s was an anxious time. As he outlined to Loch in 1863, ‘It is really difficult to keep cheerful or in good humour. I could not muster courage to even think of going to the Dunrobin Ball!’Footnote 96 In addition to the burdens of his factory, McIver faced extreme adversity within his own family. Seven out of eleven of his siblings died before him and many of his own children dispersed. One became an agent to Lord Falmouth in Cornwall and others went to Hong Kong, China and India.Footnote 97 But there were further personal tragedies which put severe strain on his mental health and outlook. No less than four of his eleven children died in the 1860s.Footnote 98 These deaths, unsurprisingly, made a deep impact on McIver, despite his assertion that ‘my constant occupation in the performance of my several duties rendered it necessary to keep up my spirits, and not to yield too much to my trials or brood over them’.Footnote 99 While these personal tragedies were occurring, he struggled to deal with the avalanche of applications for immediate economic assistance, and he sometimes responded from his own purse.Footnote 100 As a general rule, however, McIver supported the reluctance of the estate to organise aid, but it was clearly a difficult position to maintain in the face of a helpless population facing, ‘actual pinching and suffering’.Footnote 101

These periodic economic crises confirmed McIver's conviction that the crofting system had failed and that the crofters were not capable of pulling themselves out of the mire of poverty and destitution in which they periodically found themselves. To McIver, the landlord would always have to carry the burden of the crofting community, and he therefore considered it imperative that emigration should be encouraged and sub-division rigorously enforced, to reduce the population of his district. Instead, congestion continued and from the 1880s, crofting would become protected in law, presenting McIver with a bitter pill to swallow.Footnote 102

VI. Clashmore and the future

In 1873, at a time of relatively good prices and income even for the crofters, there erupted a crisis in the Scourie management which, in its outcome, augured a much larger conflict which eventually enveloped not only Scourie but much of the West Highlands and Islands.Footnote 103 Three years earlier, the third Duke of Sutherland had determined to intervene and demonstrate the improvability of marginal land at Clashmore, a small township in the densely populated and remote Stoer peninsula in Assynt, by employing the most advanced agricultural methods.Footnote 104 The destitution of the late 1860s was a further spur to the experiment, which was yet another attempt to make the crofting community in this heavily congested parish self-sufficient. It would become a model farm of forty to fifty acres and a benefit to the entire community, generating employment and demonstrating the viability of crofting agriculture. It required, however, very heavy investment by the Duke and the removal of a group of crofters to establish the new Clashmore Farm.Footnote 105

Such experiments had been tried elsewhere in the Highlands, and McIver, despite misgivings, was required to supervise the start of the Clashmore plan. There was immediate trouble once the project began and the removals were announced. The crofters at Clashmore mounted serious resistance and were evidently determined to obstruct any disturbance to their traditional occupations. McIver was caught in the middle, facing both the frustrations of his superiors and the violent reactions of the Clashmore people. In the course of a series of skirmishes against the work parties, estate employees were humiliated and McIver himself was manhandled, to his unbridled fury.Footnote 106 He was outraged by the episode. It concentrated all the frustrations which he believed characterised the ‘Highland problem’, but Clashmore was merely a prelude to much greater challenges faced by McIver in the 1880s.

At the centre of the trouble at Clashmore was a collision of three rival perceptions of the crofting question. McIver himself believed that the crofting system was fundamentally redundant and possessed no capacity for progress for either the crofters or the landlord. His superiors, notably the third Duke, entertained the idea that crofting could be rationalised and improved by investment in larger holdings. This was effectively a gamble on the strongest of the crofters, elevating them into substantial farmers.Footnote 107 The third attitude to the situation was that of the crofters, who felt threatened by any kind of alteration in their remaining attachment to the land. With any change they clung the more tenaciously to their tenuous rights and their holdings: their very poverty increasing their immobility. Their tenacity was soon to be reinforced by a new political consciousness which evolved into the Crofters’ War.Footnote 108

It was ultimately a contest for land, symbolised by Clashmore itself. McIver consistently asserted, through the decades of his career, that to give more land to the crofters would simply expand the fundamental problem, increasing poverty and dependence.Footnote 109 Twenty-five years later, when the return of Clashmore to the people was contemplated, he remarked, ‘these tenants would soon form a nursery for Paupers to be put on the Poor Roll . . . There are too many small tenants already in Assynt.’Footnote 110 This was the essence of McIver's philosophy, and it was to be assailed on all sides in the 1880s.

The ultimate reality in Scourie was that McIver was consumed by his own adamantine disbelief in the system he had inherited and was required to administer. His only conviction was to rationalise it, to terminate the old system altogether, but the people were determined to survive and to prevail. This was the opposition that he faced in the second half of his long career, presaged by the start of the long-running confrontation at Clashmore. In 1873, however, McIver was able effectively to close down the crofters’ resistance to discipline. To do so he used the classic tools in the factor's armoury: summonses of removal and his own personal authority reinforced by the law. It would be the last time he would be able to exert personal discipline successfully in the face of crofter protest, as, in common with estate managers across the Highlands, the crofters’ movement had gained such momentum by the early 1880s that they could no longer maintain or manage the post-clearance inheritance.Footnote 111

References

Notes

1. For overviews of this process see Devine, T. M., Clanship to Crofters War: The Social Transformation of the Scottish Highlands (Manchester, 1994)Google Scholar; Richards, E., The Highland Clearances: People, Landlords and Rural Turmoil (Edinburgh, new edn. 2008)Google Scholar; Macinnes, A., Clanship, Commerce and the House of Stuart, 1603–1788 (East Linton, 1996)Google Scholar.

2. Richards, Highland Clearances; Richards, E., Debating the Highland Clearances (Edinburgh, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3. Hunter, J., The Making of the Crofting Community (Edinburgh, 1976), pp. 33, 42–3Google Scholar; Richards, E., The Leviathan of Wealth: The Sutherland Fortune in the Industrial Revolution (London, 1973), pp. 244, 247–8Google Scholar.

4. Orr, W., Deer Forests, Landlords and Crofters: The Western Highlands in Victorian and Edwardian Times (Edinburgh, 1982), pp. 3–4, 12–14Google Scholar.

5. Richards, Leviathan of Wealth, pp. 254–6; Hunter, Crofting Community, pp. 31–9.

6. Hunter, Crofting Community, pp. 50–1; Gray, M., The Highland Economy, 1750–1850 (London, 1953)Google Scholar.

7. Hunter, Crofting Community, pp. 110, 119–120; Tindley, A., The Sutherland Estate, 1850–1920: Aristocratic Decline, Estate Management and Land Reform (Edinburgh, 2010), pp. 59–60Google Scholar. The processes and changes on English estates were far less problematic in this period; see Mingay, G. E., Land and Society in England, 1750–1980 (London, 1994), pp. 195–6Google Scholar; Chambers, J. D. and Mingay, G. E., The Agricultural Revolution, 1750–1880 (London, 1966), pp. 170–95Google Scholar.

8. Tindley, The Sutherland Estate, p. 5.

9. PP 1884 XXXII-XXXVI Commission of Inquiry into the Condition of the Crofters and Cottars of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland [hereafter Napier Commission Evidence].

10. Similar difficulties in rural economics, poverty and discontent could be found on Irish estates; see Vaughan, W. E., Landlord and Tenant in mid-Victorian Ireland (Oxford, 1994), 104, 112CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Donnelly, J. S., The Land and the People of Nineteenth Century Cork: The Rural Economy and the Land Question (London, 1975), pp. 173–8, 184Google Scholar.

11. Principally the enquiries surrounding the Highland famine of the 1840s and in the later nineteenth century, the Napier Commission (1883) and the Deer Forest Commission (1892–5): Parliamentary Papers [PP] 1841, First Report from the Committee on Emigration, Scotland (1841) [hereafter Emigration Committee]; Parliamentary Papers [PP] 1884 XXXIII-XXXVI, Evidence and Report of the Commissioners of Inquiry into the Condition of the Crofters and Cottars in the Highlands and Island of Scotland; Parliamentary Papers [PP] 1895 XXXVIII-XXXIX, Royal Commission (Highlands and Islands, 1892), Report of Evidence, 1895 [hereafter Deer Forest Commission].

12. McIver, E., Memoirs of a Highland Gentleman: Being the Reminiscences of Evander MacIver of Scourie, ed. by Henderson, Reverend G. (Edinburgh, 1905)Google Scholar.

13. Scotsman, 30th January 1905.

14. McIver, Memoirs of a Highland Gentleman, pp. 123–7.

15. This was a common training for estate management, before greater professionalisation in the early twentieth century: Adams, I. H., ‘The Agents of Agricultural Change’, in Parry, M. L. and Slater, T. R., eds, The Making of the Scottish Countryside (London, 1980), pp. 159–60, 165, 167–9Google Scholar; Adam, R. J., ed., John Home's Survey of Assynt, Scottish History Society, third series, vol. LII (Edinburgh, 1960), 36–40Google Scholar; Adams, I. H., ed., Papers of Peter May, Land Surveyor, 1749–1793, Scottish History Society (Edinburgh, 1979), pp. 15–17Google Scholar.

16. McIver, Memoirs of a Highland Gentleman, p. 106; Napier Commission Evidence, 1700; Macleod, J., None Dare Oppose: The Laird, the Beast and the People of Lewis (Edinburgh, 2010), pp. 58–60Google Scholar.

17. Grant, J. Shaw, A Shilling for your Scowl: The History of a Scottish Legal Mafia (Stornoway, 1992), pp. 44–5Google Scholar.

18. Grant, A Shilling for your Scowl, pp. 39–49; Macleod, None Dare Oppose, pp. 78–9, 88–91.

19. Hunter, Crofting Community, pp. 13–14.

20. Napier Commission, 1700: ‘I could speak Gaelic before I could speak English’.

21. McIver, Memoirs of a Highland Gentleman, p. 28; Napier Commission Evidence, 1700.

22. McIver, Memoirs of a Highland Gentleman, p. 32.

23. McIver, Memoirs of a Highland Gentleman, p. 31.

24. Tindley, The Sutherland Estate, p. 139; McIver, Memoirs of a Highland Gentleman, p. 32.

25. From Tulloch (bought in 1762 by his grandfather for £10,500), to Ardross, Morefield, Leckmelm, Brealangwell, Balone, Strath-anshalag and Fisherfield. In general see, The Historical Committee of the Clan Davidson Association, UK, The Davidsons: The Clan, its History and its People (Dingwall, 2004), pp. 53–5.

26. Historical Committee, The Davidsons, pp. 60–7; the story is also in McIver, Memoirs of a Highland Gentleman, pp. 33–6, 55–6.

27. McIver, Memoirs of a Highland Gentleman, p. 36.

28. McIver, Memoirs of a Highland Gentleman, p. 55.

29. McIver, Memoirs of a Highland Gentleman, pp. 53–5; Historical Committee, The Davidsons, pp. 72–3.

30. He later said, ‘I have had to do with crofters from my youngest days’, Napier Commission Evidence, 1700.

31. PP (1841), First Report from the Committee on Emigration, Scotland (1841) [hereafter Emigration Committee]; Grimble, I., The Trial of Patrick Sellar (Saltire Society, Edinburgh, 1993; first edition, 1962), p. 143Google Scholar.

32. Emigration Committee, p. 120.

33. Emigration Committee, p. 120.

34. Emigration Committee, p. 120; McIver, Memoirs of a Highland Gentleman, pp. 76–7.

35. Emigration Committee, p. 121; Devine, T. M., The Great Highland Famine: Hunger, Emigration and the Scottish Highlands in the Nineteenth Century (Edinburgh, 1980), p. 11Google Scholar.

36. Emigration Committee, p. 121; that is, a landlord policy was at least partly to blame.

37. Emigration Committee, pp. 122, 124.

38. Emigration Committee, p. 124.

39. Emigration Committee, pp. 124–5; Devine, Great Highland Famine, pp. 21–4.

40. Emigration Committee, p. 126; Devine, Great Highland Famine, pp. 8–9.

41. Emigration Committee, p. 126; Richards, E., ‘Malthus and the Uses of British Emigration’, in Thompson, A. S. and Fedorowich, K., eds, Empire, Identity and Migration in the British World (Manchester, 2012)Google Scholar; Richards, E., ‘Highland Emigration in the Age of Malthus: Scourie, 1841–55’, Northern Scotland, 2 (2011), 60–2, 70CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

42. Staffordshire County Record Office [hereafter SCRO], Sutherland estates papers, D593, K/1/3/38 James Loch to the Duke, 6th April 1851.

43. SCRO, D593/P/22/1/22, McIver to Duke of Sutherland, 1st December 1848.

44. By the early twentieth century this process had reversed and Assynt saw a 44.2% decrease in population between 1891 and 1911; Census of Scotland, 1911 (Edinburgh, 1912), 2233; R. N. Hildebrandt, ‘Migration and Economic Change in the Northern Highlands in the Nineteenth Century, with Particular Reference to 1851–1891’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Glasgow, 1980), pp. 336–7.

45. McIver, Memoirs of a Highland Gentleman, pp. 65–6; Richards, Leviathan of Wealth, p. 236.

46. Bangor-Jones, M., The Assynt Clearances (Dundee, 2001), pp. 1, 14–16, 22–5Google Scholar.

47. Richards, E., Patrick Sellar and the Highland Clearances: Homicide, Eviction and the Price of Progress (Edinburgh, 1999)Google Scholar.

48. For example, during the clearances (c.1800–1820), the famine periods and the great land reclamation schemes of the 1870s and 1880s: see Tindley, A., ‘The Iron Duke: Land Reclamation and Public Relations in Sutherland, 1868–95’, Historical Research, 82 (2009), 305–6Google Scholar; Loch, J., An Account of the Improvement on the Estates of the Marquis of Stafford in the counties of Stafford and Salop and on the estate of Sutherland (London, 1820), pp. 60, 168Google Scholar.

49. Loch, An Account, p. 60.

50. Tindley, The Sutherland Estate, pp. 3–4.

51. Bangor-Jones, Assynt Clearances, pp. 45–6.

52. Hunter, Crofting Community, pp. 119–20.

53. Devine, Great Highland Famine, pp. xxx, 2.

54. Tindley, The Sutherland Estate, p.139; this was never meant as a compliment.

55. McIver, Memoirs of a Highland Gentleman, p. 332.

56. McIver, Memoirs of a Highland Gentleman, p. 332.

57. McIver, Memoirs of a Highland Gentleman, p. 330.

58. McIver, Memoirs of a Highland Gentleman, p. 40.

59. McIver, Memoirs of a Highland Gentleman, p. 328; National Library of Scotland [hereafter NLS], Sutherland estates papers, Acc 10225, Factor's Correspondence, 813, McIver to Peacock, 10th March 1885.

60. McIver, Memoirs of a Highland Gentleman, p. 66; Orr, Deer Forests, Landlords and Crofters, pp. 12–15.

61. SCRO D593, K/1/3/37, J. Loch to the Duke of Argyll, 16th September 1849.

62. Loch, An Account, p. xxx.

63. Bangor-Jones, Assynt Clearances, pp. 17, 31.

64. McIver, Memoirs of a Highland Gentleman, p. 68.

65. Richards, Leviathan of Wealth, pp. 266–8.

66. SCRO, D593, P/22/1/22, McIver to Duke of Sutherland, 17th March 1848.

67. SCRO, D593, K/1/3/38, McIver to Loch, 5th May 1850.

68. NLS, Dep. 313, 1181, McIver to Loch, 3rd January 1851.

69. NLS, Dep. 313, 1181, McIver to Loch, 3rd January 1851.

70. SCRO, D593, K/1/3/39, McIver to Loch, 3rd January 1851.

71. SCRO, D593, K/1/3/39, McIver to Loch, 4th February 1851.

72. SCRO, D593, K/1/3/39, McIver to Loch, 11th February 1851. A similar conflict between McIver and truculent crofters occurred in October 1845, very early in McIver's factory; the episode is documented by M. Bangor-Jones, ‘History File’, Am Bratach (March 2011), 13.

73. NLS, Dep. 313, 1516, McIver to Loch, 28th March 1851 and 25th April 1851.

74. Tindley, The Sutherland Estate, pp. 10 ff.

75. Tindley, The Sutherland Estate, pp. 10–11, 171–2.

76. NLS, Dep. 313, 1524, McIver to Loch, 16th September 1859; Richards, Leviathan of Wealth, pp. 261, 274–8; Richards, Patrick Sellar, p. 355.

77. NLS, Dep. 313, 1181, McIver to Loch, 20th June 1851; Tindley, The Sutherland Estate, p. 11.

78. NLS, Dep. 313, 1181, Loch to McIver, 24th June 1851.

79. NLS, Dep. 313, 1181, McIver to Loch, 20th June 1851.

80. NLS, Dep. 313, 1516, McIver to Loch, 25th April 1851.

81. NLS, Dep. 313, 1516, McIver to Loch, 20th June 1851.

82. Richards, ‘Highland Emigration’, 65–8.

83. SCRO, D593, P/22/1/22, McIver to Duke, 5th January 1849.

84. In the teeth of an angry and resistant people, McIver was determined to individualise the lots in Stoer and to destroy the traditional communality of the pre-clearance world. The severity of these changes was described by his close friend, Reverend Dr Donald T. Masson, quoted in McIver, Memoirs of a Highland Gentleman, pp. 291–2.

85. In 1851, for example, the crofters of Clashmore wrote to the Duke to ‘lay their distressed case before him’ and beg that ‘they never would be desired to change their houses or make any further lots as long as they were able to pay their rent’: NLS, Dep. 313, 1397, Clashmore crofters to Duke, 1851.

86. Tindley, The Sutherland Estate, p. 10.

87. McIver, Memoirs of a Highland Gentleman, p. 79.

88. McIver, Memoirs of a Highland Gentleman, p. 330.

89. McIver, Memoirs of a Highland Gentleman, p. 67. He remarked, however, that, ‘The Highland people are not, as a rule, disposed to migrate or emigrate’, but in an emergency it was the only solution; Memoirs of the Highland Gentleman, p. 133; Richards, ‘Highland Emigration,’ 64–6, 71.

90. McIver, Memoirs of a Highland Gentleman, p. 77.

91. McIver, Memoirs of a Highland Gentleman, p. 280; Tindley, The Sutherland Estate, p. 20. He was not alone among the Sutherland factors in his dismissal of the crofting system: Tindley, p. 17.

92. NLS, Acc. 10225, Policy Papers, 211, McIver to Loch, 27th December 1861; Tindley, , ‘“Actual Pinching and Suffering”: Estate Responses to Poverty in Sutherland, 1845–1886’, Scottish Historical Review 230, 90:2 (2011), 239–42Google Scholar; Donnelly, J. S., ‘The Irish Agricultural Depression of 1859–64’, Irish Economic and Social History, 3 (1976), 33, 46–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

93. NLS, Acc. 10225, Policy Papers, 211, McIver to Loch, 20th October 1863.

94. George Loch had taken the position of commissioner on his father's death in 1855; Tindley, The Sutherland Estate, p. 14.

95. NLS, Acc. 10225, Policy Papers, 211, McIver to Loch, 8th December 1862.

96. NLS, Acc. 10225, Policy Papers, 211, McIver to Loch, 2nd October 1863.

97. McIver, Memoirs of a Highland Gentleman, p. 269.

98. In 1864 his twenty-one year old daughter Catherine died, followed by sixteen year old Donald in 1865; another son, Evander, died aged twenty in 1868 and lastly James, aged twenty-eight, died in India in 1869. McIver, Memoirs of a Highland Gentleman, p. 100.

99. McIver, Memoirs of a Highland Gentleman, p. 98.

100. NLS, Acc. 10225, Policy Papers, 211, McIver to Loch, 29th March 1869.

101. NLS, Acc. 10225, Policy Papers, 211, McIver to Loch, 17th March 1869.

102. Tindley, The Sutherland Estate, pp. 92, 95, 97.

103. Hunter, Crofting Community, pp. 128–30.

104. Tindley, The Sutherland Estate, pp. 138–40.

105. The total cost to reclaim Clashmore farm was £4964.9s.2d. for ninety-two acres; Tindley, The Sutherland Estate, p. 140.

106. SCRO, D593, K/1/3/62, McIver to Loch, 26th March 1873; 13th October 1873.

107. A distant anticipation of the philosophy that would inform the reforms of Stolypin in the last years of Tsarist Russia.

108. For an excellent synoptic account of the currents running through the region in the nineteenth century see, Newby, A. G., ‘Land and the “Crofter Question” in Nineteenth-Century Scotland’, International Review of Scottish Studies, 35 (2010), 7–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

109. Quoted in Tindley, The Sutherland Estate, p. 30.

110. Quoted in Tindley, The Sutherland Estate, pp. 30, 123, 147.

111. McIver's career beyond 1873, and the context of the furious crofter agitation and government intervention in the Highlands, is explored in our forthcoming paper, ‘Turmoil amongst the Crofters: Evander McIver and the “Highland Question”, 1873–1903’.