Issues of land and land ownership
Dr Ewen A. Cameron: The land question had been a key Scottish controversy throughout the second half of the 19th Century, and after the First World War that controversy continued. There were a series of protests on the land question, especially in the Highlands and especially in the island of Lewis where crofters used their war time experience to provide evidence for their demand for more land.
Professor Tom Devine: By 1914 to some extent the teeth of the crofting agitation had been drawn, because with the Crofters Holding Act of 1886 they had achieved, that is crofters had achieved security of tenure, and it also achieved what were regarded as fair rents. But the Highland problem was not solved, so partly because of the reputation and impact of the Highland regiments during World War One, the government has become - it already was sympathetic, but even more sympathetic, that there was a debt to be paid or repaid to Highland Scotland.
Dr Ewen A. Cameron: And it’s very clear in the rhetoric of people who were protesting on the land question in the aftermath of the First World War that their wartime experience was very crucial. One crofter protesting over the land question in the island of Lewis after the First World War said, “We fought for this land in France and we’ll win it here at home in Lewis.”
Professor Tom Devine: So what happens is legislation to allow for the reallocation of land, some of which had actually been associated with clearances of the early to mid-19th Century. So do you find, especially in some parts of the islands, demobbed soldiers actually being given a carved out croft or a carved out holding from earlier large scale sheep farms and deforests. And that tends to diffuse the beginnings of another agitation, because there was clear evidence of anger in those parts in the immediate aftermath of war and in the early 1920s. But in no sense does it solve the Highland problem.
Despite the land reform activity, both of the late 19th Century and of the early period after World War One, the problem doesn’t really seem to - well, it’s certainly still there, but it doesn’t seem even to be improved or even partially dealt with. It was a token, if you like, of appreciation for what had been done during the war, and it was also an attempt to stop further instability and land raids taking place, but to limited, to limited avail.
Dr Ewen A. Cameron: The second point about the land question is the effect that the First World War had on land owners. Scottish land ownership is very distinctive, the concentration of land in very few hands is a feature of Scottish society in the 19th Century, and that was something which fuelled protests on the land question. It’s very evident in the 1920s that we see a massive clearout, almost a clearance, if you like, of land owners. Many of the older land owning families put substantial acreages up for sale and many were wiped from the map completely to be replaced by newer, in many cases land owners with a capitalist business. They wartime continuing taxation of land and increasing taxation on land in the aftermath of the war helped to stimulate these sales, but the roots, the increasing weakness of land ownership after the First World War I think has its roots in the Edwardian period and even earlier.
Reasons for high emigration in the 1920s
Professor Tom Devine: To the ordinary Scot emigration was no big deal. Leaving the country for most Scots didn’t really have the threat of danger, of horror of the unknown that it had for other European or at least some other European societies. Now if you put together the terrible loss of young men during the war and the huge haemorrhage of the 1920s, it’s no coincidence that these two decades cracked the old - how would you put it? - the old ethnic arrogance of the Scot. And it’s from that period we begin to see the development of the ‘Scottish cringe,’ the lack of confidence, the sapping, the sense that we are a victim people, a secondary nation, whereas of course in the 19th Century the Scots had helped to run the greatest territorial empire the world has ever seen. So the factors in the 1920s were the disintegration, at least for a period, of heavy industrial employment, coinciding, especially in the mid-1920s, with buoyancy in the American labour market.
And one of the things you see when you look at the composition of the emigrant groups, it’s not the underclass who are moving out, it’s the semi-skilled and the skilled. And this is why the great Scottish man of letters, Edwin Muir, in his Scottish Journey in the early 1930s, does talk about the word ‘haemorrhage.’ He talks about it as a ‘silent clearance,’ which is the dissipation of the intellectual and skilled lifeblood of Scotland because of the skew in the emigration figures towards the skilled and the semi-skilled. Because these were people who remember had been trained, their trades had been formed, not in the universities but in the great university of industry in Clydeside. They were at a premium worldwide; these developing nations in North America and Australasia and South Africa had abundant land and natural resources, but what they lacked was skilled labour. Scotland was one of the key and main providers of that, and that’s why they were so easily upwardly mobile in these new territories.
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