Tragedies, funerals and lessons from Barra ‘72

It was not, however, my journalistic reason for being there. While depopulation had accelerated throughout the islands in the 1960s, it was particularly acute in those which had come within the territory of Inverness County Council, from Harris southwards.

As Comhairle nan Eilean rapidly acknowledged when it came into existence in 1975 a huge gulf had developed between Lewis, as part of Ross & Cromarty, and the islands under the tight-fisted, landlord-dominated rule from Inverness which treated them like colonial outposts.

While Mackenzie found much to poke fun at in his books about these ‘Monarchs of the Glens’, with their kilted pretensions and patronising attitudes, the much darker legacy of Inverness County Council lay in the dearth of basic infrastructure, leading inexorably to further decline.

In 1972, Barra and Vatersay had, according to the previous year’s census, a population of barely a thousand. Fully a third were lost in the previous decade while the population was down by half from the days when Compton Mackenzie lived there in war-time. The island virtues in which he revelled were still to be found but the people were leaving fast.

At that time, the Highlands and Islands Development Board published a magazine called ‘North 7’ which commissioned me to travel to Vatersay in order to write about the grim challenges which were threatening the viability of that island. With the population down to 80, would it soon be another Scarp?

That in itself makes this a story from another age – a government body hiring a radical journalist to critically assess the failure of official policy towards a small community on the edge. There was once a time when Scotland had public agencies with the status and confidence to speak unwelcome truths to power.

I boarded the British European Airways ‘Heron’ at Glasgow and en route read a newspaper report that Sir Compton Mackenzie had asked to be buried on Barra. This would take place on the following Monday, December 4th 1972. I did not pay a lot of attention.

In these days, Scottish newspapers had huge readerships and staff to match. Reporters and photographers would have flocked to Barra for the “Whisky Galore author’s final send-off”.

There was only one problem. A great storm arose and the plane I arrived on was the last to land on Barra until after the interment, apart from a chartered flight that brought in the coffin.

However, the impending funeral of a writer who had not lived on Barra for nearly 30 years was not at the forefront of people’s thoughts on Barra and Vatersay that weekend. The islands were coming through the shock of a terrible tragedy which had engulfed Vatersay – the death of two small children, Patrick and Catherine Sinclair, in a house fire.

The circumstances of this awful event caused me to write: “There is the haunting knowledge that if there had been a water supply, the children might have lived. But there was no water supply – and the children died”. Precisely the parsimony towards a small community which I had come to write about had just manifested itself in the most dramatic possible way.

It was in this context that Father Calum Maclellan provided great words: “If we were to accept all the arguments about spending so much money for so few people, then we in the islands might as well pack up and go”.

It was good that when Paul Steele became leader of Comhairle nan Eilean Siar earlier this year, he recalled that quote – as relevant in 2022 as it was 50 years ago, wherever decline through neglect persists.

I stayed on that visit at the Castlebay Hotel, the only one then operating on Barra and enjoyed the knowledge and learning of the owner Calum Macleod.

He arranged for me to meet Hector Macleod, who operated the small open boat, ‘Island Monarch’, which provided the only link between the two islands. Hector recounted a story of decades-long neglect and unanswered pleas, from Inverness and beyond. But mostly Inverness.

A few years earlier, a national newspaper had highlighted the plight of Vatersay cattle en route to livestock sales in Oban being pulled through the water with ropes. “Scotland’s Wild West”, the headline screamed and a barge soon appeared to carry the animals in relative comfort, as well as coming in handy for freight.

Hector said: “Old women clambering up rocks, clutching their shopping-bags, doesn’t seem to have the same emotive appeal to the nation as the sight of helpless cows being dragged upside-down through the water”.

It would be 20 more years before Vatersay got its causeway and population decline could start to be reversed. The lessons of how so much was lost through sheer twentieth century neglect should not be lost to history.

AFTER BARRA…

COMPTON MACKENZIE left Barra more than a quarter century prior to his death and it said much about his affection for the island that, among all the places he inhabited, it became his final resting place. That connection still draws a trickle of researchers, film-buffs and admirers of his books in search of whatever remains of the images Mackenzie created.

According to his biographer, Andro Linklater, he returned only once to Barra after Suidheachan was sold – for his cameo role as captain of the ‘Cabinet Minister’ in the filming of Whisky Galore. By then, his centre of gravity had transferred to London where, wrote Linklater, “he succumbed to all the pleasures it had to offer” while still churning out his literary work at a prodigious rate.

Chrissie Macsween stayed behind on Barra to sell Suidheachan which was accomplished in October 1945. Linklater wrote: “In the same month he received an enquiry about writing a book that would have daunted anyone less accustomed to the composition of epic novels. The government of India wished him to write the history of the Indian Army in the Second World War, in fictional form”.

Having cleared his desk of other work – including the writing of Whisky Galore, another less hilarious volume on the history of the about to be nationalised gas industry and “official duties stemming from his chairmanship of the League of Democracy in Greece” – the Indian epic was underway the following October when he and Chrissie set sail for Bombay.

“Ahead of them” wrote Linklater, “lay an odyssey that took some ten months and covered over 50,000 miles by road, rail and air through Burmese jungle and Himalayan mountains. It was the great achievement of his old age”.

His declining years were spent in Edinburgh where, wrote Linklater, “he was by now the grand old man of letters and the sun king of Edinburgh society, holding court during the morning in a small four-poster bed where he received close friends and journalists. Later in the day, dressed in a light Donegal tweed jacket, he entertained other visitors who, especially during the Festival, would appear in hordes”.

While the Barra connection had receded, there was another bond with the islands which was much more permanent. Compton Mackenzie’s private life was as complex and contradictory as everything else about him. Indeed, it would have made the basis of a human interest drama in its own right, perhaps the great Hebridean movie that has never been made.

Mackenzie met the Macsween family in Harris through his purchase of the Shiants. In particular, he met Chrissie. Linklater quotes his recollection of this encounter. “As we came in, I saw in the doorway of the kitchen a girl in blue frock with a red belt. Her dark hair was parted in the middle and coiled over her ears in the fashion known at that date in the Highlands as ‘earphones’. Her eyes were so dark as to seem black above her red rose cheeks. In that moment of meeting, I knew that girl must become a part of my life”. She was 22, recently appointed school teacher on Scarp but soon became Mackenzie’s secretary.

For years, he had been in a sham marriage to Faith Stone but appearances had to be maintained. Linklater wrote: “He and Chrissie had become lovers in 1929 and soon she was his companion, his housekeeper and his wife in all but name. His more sophisticated friends were surprised that he should be content with someone who had so direct and simple a nature, but in Chrissie’s youth and devotion he found everything he wanted…

“Faith had a snobbish streak and never disguised her feelings of social superiority. She was equally sensitive to slights upon her status as wife. In her presence, the fiction had to be maintained that Chrissie was an employee; her employer was always referred to as ‘Mr Mackenzie’ and Faith was assumed to run the household”.

Lily Mackenzie told the story to Joni Buchanan: “Monty married his first wife, Faith Stone, when he was only 21 years of age, and they were married for a very long time. They had no family, no children, they lived together but they were separate. It is awfully difficult to explain but that was how it was, and of course we didn’t know that at the beginning, we had no idea.

“However, they never divorced. They were both opposed to divorce, and she lived a very long life. She was in her eighties when she died. I knew her very well. Chrissie and I both knew her, she was a very gifted woman, but they were not man and wife for many, many years. They were both Roman Catholic and neither believed in divorce.

“When Faith died Monty married Chrissie. The two of them used to go to the south of France, long before they married, to a little cottage they owned in Lot. In 1963, Chrissie returned earlier than usual, she wasn’t well. She came home in April and died in October. She was just 60 years of age and had only been married to Monty a little over two years.

“She was married to him for only two years when she died although she spent her life with him as his secretary. It was a tragedy and I felt very sorry for them both. Chrissie had made him promise that he’d look after me, although I was doing fine on my own. However, we married early in 1964. He said we must get married and I will be responsible for you and your future will be secure. He was 35 years my senior and I was in my mid 40s when we married in 1965.

“The following April we went to France together and did the cottage up, as Chrissie had intended to. We had eight or nine happy summers there together, but I knew the summer of 1972 would be his last”.

THE FUNERALS…

AS THE DAY of Compton’s funeral approached, it was clear there was to be no let-up in the weather. However the news spread that the plane carrying the coffin and accompanied by his wife, Lily, would attempt a landing. A crowd of around 100 assembled on Traigh Mhòr to await this mission.

As the only journalist who, by pure chance, happened to be on Barra, it seemed only polite to report proceedings. As well as the written word, these circumstances gave me my debut in radio reporting, in the teeth of the gale. The plane eventually landed and was met by Compton Mackenzie’s old friend, Calum Johnston.

“In lashing rain and howling winds”, I wrote for the West Highland Free Press, “Mr Johnston, in his 82nd year, stepped forward to pipe the coffin from the plane. A tall and distinguished figure, he wore the kilt and no coat”.

Calum Johnston and his sister Annie were regarded as among the greatest tradition-bearers of Barra and of Gaelic heritage. He had spent much of his working life as a draughtsman on the mainland but returned to Eoligarry in 1956.

Both on Barra and in Edinburgh, where he was revered in School of Scottish Studies circles as a piper and singer, he was among Mackenzie’s circle of friends. There was to be no compromise with the weather at this last hurrah on Barra.

The assembled company followed the cortege up the steep slope to the burial place at Eoligarry cemetery. Calum Johnston “marched up the hill at a good pace” maintaining a wail on the pipes. Father Angus Macqueen and Father Robert Cameron dispatched the graveside rituals in under ten minutes and the mourners began to disperse.

“As he reached the bottom of the hill”, I wrote, “Mr Johnston collapsed. A car set off to take him to his home in Eoligarry but he died before the short journey was completed”. It was the last dramatic act in a poignant narrative that any writer of fiction might have found difficult to outbid.

Many years later, Lady Lily Mackenzie told Joni Buchanan her recollections of that day: “He was buried on Barra on a most dreadful, dreadful day, Oh! Don’t remind me of that day. Calum Johnston, an old and dear friend, who was piping the cortege up the steep hill to the graveyard, collapsed and died.

"I went to the house that night and I said to his widow ‘why did you let him do it?’. She said she couldn’t stop him, he insisted on doing it. John Campbell, Canna, was with me and it was he who told me Calum had died, and we said: ‘Well the two friends are now together’.

“The priest in Edinburgh told me not to travel to Barra with the body. He said the forecast was appalling but I said it had to be done as it was laid out in his will. He loved the island and its people. He had many close friends on Barra. John Campbell, Canna, came with me and we went by plane, oh! don’t remind me. It was terrible, it couldn’t land because of the damn wind! He had to circle round and round and I thought he’s going to run out of fuel. Then Calum died. Oh! It was a nightmare, the whole thing”.

It was a suitably dramatic conclusion to Compton Mackenzie’s relationship with Barra which had remained a spiritual home.

Maybe, in his prime, he could have used more of the influence he undoubtedly carried to better the lot of the islands. Maybe the Monarchs of the Glens he caricatured but did not wound could have been moved to action – a pier here, a water supply there. But throughout his life, Mackenzie straddled the two horses – Establishment and anti-establishment.

Andro Linklater’s last word was: “In the end it is clear that his true genius was theatrical but that instead of confining his talents to the stage, he created around him a stage on which he could represent himself.

"However wrong it may be to compare a man’s life to a work of art, the comparison is difficult to avoid in the case of Compton Mackenzie. In the quixotic, extravagant performance of his own life, he achieved his own masterpiece”.

And Barra, perhaps more than anywhere, provided not just the stage but also the script.