Compton Mackenzie and the Barra years

Mackenzie’s legacy to the Hebrides has been considerable. More than anyone, he crafted the image of crafty islanders fighting against remote authority, notably through the lastingly brilliant book and Ealing comedy, ‘Whisky Galore’.

Below those stark, well-known facts lies a complex story of an extraordinary polymath; a serious literary figure remembered only for his whimsical comedies, a showman from a theatrical background who flitted effortlessly between roles; one day the scourge of the British establishment, the next a fully paid-up member.

In his foreword to ‘Tales of the Coddy’, Mackenzie wrote: “I met the Coddy first at the Inverness Mòd in 1928 and made up my mind immediately that I must lose no time in visiting Barra in order to enjoy more of as good company as I have ever known”. That was the start of a friendship which lasted until the death of John MacPherson of Northbay in 1955.

Long before that encounter at the Mòd, Mackenzie had become a collector of islands. He had lived in Capri, leased Jethou in the Channel Islands and bought the Shiants between Harris and Skye from John Macsween of Tarbert.

Many years later, Lady Lily Mackenzie recalled that first encounter in 1926 to Joni Buchanan: ‘He was very good looking, in Highland dress that day, from top to toe. But buying the Shiants was mad. He had no idea where the islands were or anything about them – he was going to build a house there, imagine… absolutely mad”.

It was to prove a fateful encounter. Lily was then aged eight and her sister Chrissie was 15 years her senior. Chrissie would become Mackenzie’s secretary and in the latter stages of his life, both the Macsween sisters would marry him, sequentially. The Shiants were sold to Nigel Nicolson by which time Mackenzie had moved on to Barra.

There he found the perfect match to his romantic images of how a Jacobite Scotland might have been. The people were courteous, intelligent and articulate. At least as important to Mackenzie, they were Catholic. He developed a friendship with John Lorne Campbell who was embedded in Barra to collect Gaelic songs and folklore. When Campbell edited ‘The Book of Barra’, Mackenzie’s chapter was ‘Catholic Barra’, a celebration of how the island avoided the Reformation.

Mackenzie did not hesitate to condemn whatever he perceived as a disruption of his idyll. “The privilege of enjoying the innocent freedom in which a Catholic community delights entails repayment of it with a sensitive respect for the customs and observances of such a community, however far they may seem to lag behind the spirit of the times”. The advance of the wireless (on which, in his other persona, he was a frequent broadcaster) and “the noise of a gramophone playing jazz while they are on their way to Mass” were among the threats he discerned.

At this distance in time, it is impossible to judge how universally Mackenzie’s own adoption of the island was welcomed on Barra, beyond the circle he gathered around him. Certainly, he was flexible in his interpretation of “innocent freedoms” when it came to his own presence and interests. By 1935, he had built Suidheachan, a very large house complete with billiard room close to the Traigh Mhòr at Eoligarry.

As Derek Cooper wrote in “The Road to Mingulay”: “Mackenzie was a great showman and publicist; he was conscious of the public honour he was conveying on the people of Barra by choosing to dwell among them and thus directly make their small community a part of his life and letters. When the time came for him to move into the house the event was the most prestigious flitting ever orchestrated in the west.

“He was hoping the Bishop of Argyll would personally attend on the day in question to celebrate mass in Suidheachan but a cataract operation kept him on the mainland. Compton had to settle for Father Dominic Mackellaig of Craigston and Father John Macqueen, parish priest of Castlebay, who said mass, while P.J. Martin, headmaster of Castlebay school and his pupils, provided the choir.

“‘There were’, wrote Compton, ‘about 200 crofters with their wives and children present. That they all squeezed themselves in was almost a miracle’.” Thereafter, Suideachan became, according to one description, the “Cliveden of the Isles” with a bewildering array of the titled and famous making the epic journey. As Cooper wrote: “Politicians, socialites, celebrities, journalists, aspirant writers, musicians and painters made Barra the most visited island in the west”.

Despite such diversions, Mackenzie’s literary output was awesome. Born in West Hartlepool, County Durham, he came from a theatrical family which used the stage name Compton. Long before he alighted on Barra, he had built a national reputation as an author of novels – admired by the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald and George Orwell – and also non-fiction, including four books based on his First World War experiences as an intelligence officer in the East Mediterranean.

Towards the end of his life, he published ten autobiographical books. In a very Comptonesque touch, he did not call them volumes but “Octaves”. Octave Eight, covering the period from 1939-46, is a remarkable insight into life on war-time Barra, the bewildering diversity of Mackenzie’s activities and also propensity for firing off letters to people in high places. The remarkable point is that most of them replied personally, even in the depths of war.

By the time he got to Octave Eight, Mackenzie was well into his eighties and it has the feel of what might now be called a “cut and paste job” with letters, broadcasts and speeches published as written. However, it is none the worse for this as it creates the rawness of source material rather than the glossed over selectivity of a more formal autobiography.

Mackenzie did not by 1939 spend all or most of his time on Barra. He and his wife Faith had a home in Somerset and he flitted around the London offices of publishers and film-makers while dropping into the BBC to broadcast for radio. A dream offer – to write a film about the life of Prince Charles Edward Stuart – dissipated as war approached. Mackenzie was a supporter of conscription and we find him addressing a great rally in Bradford as the main speaker.

Sometimes Mackenzie’s Barra and London lives came together in unlikely ways. “In the December 1938 number of ‘The Billiards Player’ I had written an article about the special pool and slosh we played every Sunday evening at Suidheachan. I was astonished and gratified to receive a letter from the chairman of the Billiards Association inviting me to present the trophy to the winner of the World’s Professional Snooker Championship”. Having presented the trophy to Joe Davis, “the supreme snooker player of all time”, they all adjourned to the Savile Club. His next engagement was addressing the Literary Society at Eton – all a long way from Barra.

As the drumbeats of impending war grew louder, Mackenzie “received a letter from Princess Hermine to say that the Kaiser wanted to discuss the possibility of a biography by me”. By then the Kaiser was long exiled to Holland and off went Mackenzie, accompanied by Father John Macqueen from Castlebay “who was down in London”. Sadly, the Kaiser had gout and was unable to meet. By the time they got back to London, Poland had been invaded.

The following month, Mackenzie returned to Barra and promptly set about firing off letters to Ministers about various perceived idiocies of officialdom, both local and national, as well as promising himself to churn out 100,000 words of his novel by Christmas, which he duly did. By then, the bodies were starting to come ashore on Barra as the war at sea took its toll.

One gets the impression that Mackenzie could never resist a compliment, however dubious the source. In December, he wrote to Faith: “Did you hear Haw-Haw (the pro-Nazi propagandist, William Joyce) say it was a pity I wasn’t Prime Minister as I was one of the few well-known Englishmen who had the courage to speak the truth? This caused a great impression on Barra which listens with every wireless to Lord Haw-Haw…”.

In May 1940, shortly after the death of his own mother, Mackenzie learned that the mother of his secretary had died in Harris. He wrote: “Barabuil Macsween was the same age as myself. She was an infallible judge of human nature and when she agreed to let her elder daughter come to me as my secretary I counted it as a gesture of which I could always be proud”.

The ground for Mackenzie’s Barra novels really started to be laid when, on his return to Barra, he found the Local Defence Volunteers (later the Home Guard) to be in “embryonic condition”. He was immediately in touch with Sir Donald Cameron of Locheil, expressing willingness “to organise the LDV here”.

He wrote to Locheil: “It may be that the authorities do not regard the Western Isles as a potential danger spot in the scheme of defence, in which case they will bear the responsibility for any error of judgment; but if they do regard these islands as important it is high time that their defence was taken seriously and that the various section leaders were not supplied with instruction devised for the mainland and, so far as the islands are concerned, farcical.

“I am not writing this letter in any spirit of cantankerous criticism but in the hope that it will prompt a practical attempt to co-ordinate Local Defence in these islands to the benefit of the general scheme of defence. I had intended to write a personal letter to General Ironside with whom I discussed this subject lately but I shall now write nothing until I hear from you”. Locheil duly appointed Mackenzie as local commander, with the rank of Captain. The Home Guard had started turning!

There then occurred an episode which has gone down in infamy and about which I have written previously – the sinking of the ‘Arandora Star’.* Mackenzie described it as “the culmination of the despicable hysteria about Fifth Columnists”. Most of those who drowned when the ship was torpedoed were long-settled Italian café owners and the like, many of them deeply anti-Fascist, but rounded up to be shipped off for interment.

Mackenzie was first alerted by a letter from the Italian Internees Aid Committee which noted that bodies from the ‘Arandora Star’ had been washed up on Barra. “This little committee is trying to help the relatives of the internees and we are in close touch with the relatives of the ‘Arandora Star’ victims … The distress is very great and it is not easy to gain much support for Italians today, but I know you will sympathise and if you would send me a word about the dead, it would indeed be a great kindness…”.

Mackenzie responded: “Your task must be a poignant one indeed but I am thankful to hear of something being done that may mitigate in the eyes of Almighty God this detestable crime which burdens the nation’s soul”. One body, he mentioned, had been “of a Catholic boy from Benbecula of the Lovat Scouts, who drifted almost to his home”. While intensely remembered within the Italian community, it was only much later that the story of the ‘Arandora Star’ became more widely known, other than through Mackenzie’s account.

While angered by the outrages of war, Mackenzie never stopped taking note of the absurdities it brought to Barra – the basis of his books in the making. “I have had the curious experience when writing my comic books”, he observed, “of inventing a preposterous situation or speech and then finding it happening in fact or being uttered by somebody”.

Having been asked to write a broadcast appealing to the nation to collect scrap, he thought it his patriotic duty to ask the people of Barra to comply. “After the pier at Castlebay had been made almost impassable by bedsteads and rusty cars, I wrote urgently to the Ministry to know when a ship was coming to cart them away …”. Mackenzie being Mackenzie, he received a personal reply from Herbert Morrison, the Minister of Supply, apologising for the delay and assuring him a ship would be sent. “Two or three days later, a ship really did come and clear Castlebay Pier of scrap”.

One classic piece of real life farce was prompted by “the Vicar of St Ives in Cornwall seeing the fishing fleet arriving from the west instead of from the east” which he interpreted as meaning that the Germans had arrived. Church bells were rung all the way up the west coast as the signal CROMWELL was sent out, meaning INVASION STARTED.

“Up in Harris, the gallant LDV under Colonel Walker stood by with their 30 American rifles. In North Uist, Macdonald of Balranald was resolved to do or die … In South Uist, Finlay Mackenzie, owner of the famous Lochboisdale Hotel, led his warriors to the beaches. Only the LDV of Barra slept tranquilly through that anxious weekend… The telegram sent to me was suspected by someone in the Inverness Censor Office of giving information to the enemy and therefore not sent to Barra. On Monday morning, I received the code word for ‘all over’ or ‘relax’.” With real-live events like these, turning them into post-war comic writing was not too hard.

‘Monarch of the Glen’, ‘Keep the Home Guard Turning’ and of course ‘Whisky Galore’ are still Mackenzie’s best remembered works, which is probably unfair to the rest. In 1944, Mackenzie’s agent wrote to him: “I have always liked the sound of ‘Whisky Galore’ and your Scottish public will like it too. They positively eat ‘Monarch’ and ‘Keep the Home Guard Turning’ and can’t think why you haven’t been more Scottish in the past”.

Monarch of the Glen (allegedly) live on through a television series of that name which bore little resemblance to Mackenzie’s work and carried none of its gentle satire about how Inverness County Council at that time was run. Much more certainly, the Home Guard books have an eternal afterlife in ‘Dad’s Army’ with the Captain Mainwaring figure based on Mackenzie’s Captain Waggett (in itself, according to some recollections, an unfair lampoon of the figure on which he was based).

In Octave Eight of his memoirs, Mackenzie wrote in 1967: “Barra had been as important to my life as Burford, Cornwall, Capri, Greece and the Channel Islands had been. Yet when the irrevocable moment has come to quit a beloved place I have no sentimental regrets. That place passes into the background of my memory from which I can summon it to be as vivid to me as if I were really living in that place once more”.

Compton Mackenzie had one more drama to bequeath to Barra – his funeral but that’s a story for next week.

*…https://www.stornowaygazette.co.uk/heritage-and-retro/heritage/arandora-star-and-the-lessons-that-live-on-3413799