The Uist egg scheme that blazed a trail

As in many respects, that raises questions about what “might have been” if leadership and ideas had been given the chance to flourish. Could the produce of the islands have been organised and marketed in a way that added value, spread economic benefits and retained population?

For a time in the 1950s, it seemed that one such initiative had turned the key on what co-operation could deliver. In ‘The Claim of Crofting’, James Hunter describes Outer Isles Crofters Limited, formed in South Uist in 1954 as “the first commercially successful crofting co-operative – to handle the marketing of eggs”.

There are diminishing numbers who now remember the Uist egg co-operative. The physical evidence of its existence, the packing and grading station, has been converted into social housing and industrial units while the shop that for long bore the Outer Isles Crofters name lies empty.

For a time, however, they were associated with a ground-breaking enterprise that created work and brought discipline to the marketing of a staple product which previously created no economic benefit for crofting households. And it all happened on a scale which is now unimaginable.

The name synonymous in Uist with that initiative is, to this day, that of Roderick MacFarquhar, the instigator and driving force who single-handedly sold the idea of co-operation to the crofters. Yet within a couple of years, he had departed in the face of hostility from an Edinburgh bureaucracy.

MacFarquhar had an interesting hinterland, long before he arrived in Uist as a field officer for the Scottish Agricultural Organisation Society, a long-established body which promoted co-operation among farmers. He joined the Communist Party in the 1930s, fought on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War, served with distinction in the Second World War and became active thereafter in Labour politics in the Highlands.

A native of Inverness, MacFarquhar had radical views on Highlands and Islands development but also a belief in practical action. When, in the spring of 1953, he was posted by the SAOS to Lochboisdale, he saw the opportunity to put theories into practice at the most basic level. By promoting the values of co-operation, he believed that political enlightenment and activism would follow.

But why eggs? MacFarquhar’s biographer, James McCrorie, wrote: “Given a long history of political passivity, he was convinced that the success or failure of a new co-operative venture would depend on selecting a target which was important, but not central, to the local economy.

“The crofters, he was certain, were not about to reorganise the principal mode of survival along new and untried lines. They might, however, be persuaded to modify their way of doing things if the experiment concerned a commodity less central to this means of livelihood. The egg was such a commodity”.

MacFarquhar’s view was that the crofters had been exploited by the local merchants through a system of barter whereby eggs were exchanged for goods, without giving them a monetary value. Accordingly, his plan was to by-pass the local merchants and export the eggs direct to the mainland.

This characterisation of the merchants may, as a generalisation, have been unfair and formed in part at least by ideology but the principle of cutting them out of the marketing chain was crucial to MacFarquhar’s plan. It also provided ammunition to those who viewed his activities with suspicion – including presumably the merchants themselves – and would eventually rebound on MacFarquhar.

Having secured support from the local clergy and the district clerk, John MacInnes, MacFarquhar launched an “education campaign” through a series of local meetings to which they accompanied him and where he outlined his plans and the rationale behind them. McCrorie wrote: “To MacFarquhar’s mind, the topic of egg production and quality control on the one hand, and strategies concerning the transformation of Highland life on the other, were not unrelated”. In this grander view, he might well have been alone.

From the outset, MacFarquhar faced scepticism bordering on hostility from SAOS headquarters in Edinburgh. The SAOS was far from radical and, as McCrorie pointed out, an organisation with the Duke of Buccleuch as its patron was unlikely to share MacFarquhar’s strategic political objectives. In particular, his determination to cut out local merchants became a touchstone issue for the SAOS’s long-established secretary, C.J.D. Cadzow.

By the end of 1953, crofters were being canvassed to join the planned co-operative and contribute to its initial capital. Colin Macdonald, the SAOS field officer in Lewis came down to help, and later recalled: “It was a difficult canvass. There was not much money about the island in these days. Many crofters did not fully understand what they were getting into but the crofters had come to trust Roderick. His utter honesty and conviction in the scheme won them over”.

By the end of the year £1000 (£22,000 in today’s money) had been raised – an extraordinary act of faith within a poor community - and modest grants were obtained via the SAOS.

The co-operative and egg packing station – under the auspices of the newly-formed co-operative, Outer Isles Crofters Ltd - opened on February 17th 1954. Its immediate success far exceeded MacFarquhar’s hopes. By the end of October, “21,557 thirty-dozen cases of eggs” had been delivered to Lochboisdale with a hard cash return to crofters of £13,6678 - £300,000 at today’s values, with 450 households participating – three times the original estimate.

Mary Steele (née Macintyre), who later worked in the egg-packing station and the co-op’s Lochboisdale shop, recalls how the system worked in her own native village of North Boisdale. “Lachie Mor Mackenzie came round with the lorry. There were designated places for gathering the eggs – two in North Boisdale; Dolly Mac-keggan at the north and Kate Paterson at the other end. My mother used to take the eggs there maybe once a week”.

She says: “It succeeded because it gave people money. Going back to these days, there wasn’t really any money coming in. There were no jobs, particularly for women, though they certainly worked hard. For a lot of houses in South Uist, the eggs created an income”.

McRorie wrote: “MacFarquhar was flooded with requests for pullets from families who heretofore had not kept hens. The fact that the co-operative was able to consistently improve the price of quality eggs stunned the islanders. The claim that the old barter system with the merchants resulted in exploitation was now a demonstrable fact”.

The strength - and ultimate vulnerability – of the structure MacFarquhar had created lay in the highly localised network of collection points and reliance on trusted local contacts who became known as “MacFarquhar’s agents”. Each crofter was paid cash in hand and he was convinced that it was the non-bureaucratic nature of this system that established trust and willingness to participate.

While all of that made complete sense from a co-operative point of view in South Uist of the 1950s, it made none at all to the accountancy standards expected by the SAOS. Whether or not it had to do with MacFarquhar’s political outlook, his stock was much lower in Edinburgh than in Uist and pressures were soon being applied to adopt a more conventional system of collection and payment, working through the local merchants.

At an early stage, Cadzow became MacFarquhar’s nemesis. In a report to headquarters after meeting the OICL management committee in late 1954, he wrote: “Criticism of these (distribution and payment) methods was not at all well received by the crofting members of the committee on the grounds that the packing station had given them access to a direct market for their eggs for cash and that crofters would never revert to sale through the merchants”.

Cadzow complained that the OICL committee and MacFarquhar were “flushed with success and could not be brought to face the facts”. Another front was opened when the OICL pressed ahead with establishing a shop and crofters’ stores in Lochboisdale which Cadzow opposed. He reported: “I found it impossible to talk the committee out of their plans … I could only play for time and so have an opportunity of discussing the affairs of the society with DOAS (Department of Agriculture for Scotland)”.

This was ominous. The DOAS controlled grants and so an Edinburgh pincer movement was closing in. By this time, word of the egg co-op’s success had spread and there were approaches to expand its operations to Harris, North Uist and Barra.

It was a prospect which enthused MacFarquhar but he increasingly found himself bogged down in the bureaucratic battles with Cadzow and his allies.

McRorie writes: “The conflict between Cadzow and MacFarquhar was more than a clash of personalities … Cadzow believed that co-operative development should blend in with the status quo, complementing the social and economic arrangements which prevailed in crofting and rural Scottish communities. MacFarquhar had a different end in mind, one which seized upon co-operative development as a means of shattering dependent, exploitative relationships and releasing the Highland population from the shackles of economic and political imprisonment. Cadzow had reason to view MacFarquhar’s work with alarm”.

There was a lot going on in Uist at that time. The first intimations of the rocket range entered the public domain in 1955 and MacFarquhar identified with opposition to it; scarcely surprising given his political views.

He also became friendly with Paul Strand, the renowned American photographer who had become a fugitive from the McCarthyite purges of Communists in the United States.

In an essay on Strand’s time in Uist, which resulted in the epic work of portraiture, Tir a Mhurain, the academic Fraser Macdonald wrote: “Strand euphemistically describes MacFarquhar as ‘a splendid man, a genuine progressive’, and ‘the one really developed mind on the island’ with ‘an excellent knowledge of the economic situation’.

“MacFarquhar was important to Tir a’Mhurain, advising both Strand and Basil Davidson (who wrote the text) on personal contacts, local politics and ultimately checking Davidson’s text for any inaccuracies”.

The extent to which MacFarquhar’s politics became a factor in the breakdown of relations can, at this distance in time, only be speculated on. The immediate issues chosen by Cadzow were more prosaic. He wanted payment to be by monthly cheques to the crofters. MacFarquhar argued that this would destroy the basis of relationships on which the co-operative’s success had been built.

There was probably a degree of intransigence on MacFarquhar’s part and a degree of validity in Cadzow’s concerns about management processes – enough to eventually cause doubts to grow within the OICL management committee.

All of this came to a head by the end of April 1956 when its chairman, Father Colin Macpherson, invited MacFarquhar to resign.

A week later he left his adopted home in Lochboisdale Hotel for the last time, his spirit temporarily broken.

The egg business carried on albeit on a reducing scale. Cathy Roberts (née Campbell) recalls working in the packing station between 1961 and 1966. She and a colleague were sent to Elgin to train but would spend only “two or three hours” a day on grading and packing the eggs while also working in the OICL shop in Lochboisdale which survived into the 1970s. Dreams of expanding the egg project into other islands never materialised and it eventually petered out.

Roderick MacFarquhar continued to pursue his belief in the potential of Highlands and Islands development, based on the innate qualities of the people.

After losing his job in Uist, he worked briefly on a hydro-electric scheme before being recruited to a new challenge as secretary of the Highland Fund, a precursor of the HIDB which became revered in the islands for the faith it placed in character-based loans, with MacFarquhar at its helm. He died in 1989 at the age of 81.

Co-operatives and community land ownership eventually found their place in the islands’ economic and social structures but it was the South Uist egg co-operative that paved the way and demonstrated both the possibilities and pitfalls that would arise. It deserves to be remembered.