The Silent Weaver

The Extraordinary Life and Work of Angus MacPhee

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• Publisher: Birlinn
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780857900890
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Arte generale

A "fascinating, poignant" biography of the WWII veteran who, while confined to an asylum, became one of the great outsider artists of modern times ( The Scotsman ). In September 1939, groups of horsemen in battledress cantered down a broad, grassy plain on the western edge of Europe. The young men of the Western Isles of Scotland were going to war again. They included a tall, shy twenty-four-year-old named Angus MacPhee. Angus returned from war alive but in chronic mental pain, and was referred to the asylum in Inverness, where he spent the next fifty years of his life. During his time at Craig Dunain Hospital, he retreated into his own silent world, and did not speak again until shortly before his death. But "the quiet big man, " as he was known, spent his time creating a huge number of objects out of woven grass, sheep's wool, and beach leaves—mostly clothes, caps, and hats—which he then let decay or deliberately burned. Only after an art therapist discovered his miraculous creations were some of them preserved for posterity. And only then did Angus MacPhee come home to South Uist, where he died a year later. The Silent Weaver is a rich, moving and enthralling exploration of mental health, the creative process, human frailty, and ancient traditions.

1

THE HORSE SOLDIERS

‘Here’s to . . . we never have to do it again.’

Early in September 1939, riders in battledress cantered down a broad, grassy plain on the western edge of Europe. The young men of Uist were going to war again.

They went in the high hundreds from islands whose populations numbered only a few thousand. Crofting families in the Scottish Hebrides were big families, with a surplus of men in their late teens and twenties to offer to the army and the navy.

Over sixty years later an elderly lady, a sister of one of the men of 1939, would gaze from one end of her small South Uist village to the other. In a still, calm voice she recalled how the girl she had been watched the youths depart from every single croft.

‘Two people from that house, somebody from that house,’ she said. ‘Angus from this house, Father MacQueen’s middle brother from that house, two boys from that house . . . They all went the day when war broke out. It was a great adventure for them. They all loved going.’

Some walked to muster, some sailed and some took their horses. The crofters and fishermen of the Outer Hebrides had been for decades willing recruits to the Territorial Army and the Royal Naval Reserve. Drill halls were established in North Uist, Benbecula and South Uist. Teenage boys with few other recreations joined up, learned to parade and do press-ups, and were rewarded by annual excursions to mainland summer camps.

‘It was the best way for getting a fortnight’s holiday away from the island and enjoying yourselves,’ said one Uist man. ‘I don’t think it was patriotism. For some it might have been, but not as far as I was concerned. The other boys went, and you all went for a fortnight to camp and had a good time.’

Most of those army reservists went from Uist early in September 1939 to be infantrymen in the Cameron Highlanders. But some, a self-consciously select minority, rode off to be horse soldiers with the Lovat Scouts. They were a military anachronism in 1939, but they could not be expected to recognise it. They and their animals were the last representatives of an equestrian culture which had flourished on the greensward of western Uist for millennia.

As they rode to war they skirted mile after mile of ground which their people had turned over for grains and root vegetables using horse-drawn ploughs. They passed over the arenas for popular horse races in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They led their mounts through communities which had not yet been colonised by the motor car, the lorry and the tractor.

They rode from all parts of the three distinct islands of North Uist, Benbecula and South Uist. Some districts contributed more horse soldiers than others, by virtue of their greater reliance on horses in everyday crofting life and consequently their superior horsemanship.

One such district was Iochdar at the north end of South Uist. ‘The horses in Iochdar were famous throughout the Uists,’ said a local priest. ‘The Iochdar people have always had the reputation of being “big farmers” and the horses were the most important farm animals. They had to be fed first – every type of croft or farm work depended on them.’

The young Lovat Scouts who rode out of Iochdar on 4 September 1939 included a tall, shy, quietly spoken 24-year-old named Angus Joseph MacPhee – the older brother of that girl who, decades later, would point out one by one the homes of the mobilised men.

Angus and his comrades ignored the main arterial road which ran through the middle of the long island of South Uist. Instead they took their horses – invariably their best and favourite horses – southwards down the machair, along that broad, grassy, westernmost plain, with the Atlantic Ocean surging on their right and the high brown hills of Uist rising on their left, for almost 20 miles until they turned east to the ferry port of Lochboisdale.

Angus MacPhee and the other Lovat Scouts from Iochdar rode proud and erect, in their tunics and their Balmoral bonnets with a diced band, through the busy, familiar townships of the machair. They were almost the only ordinary soldiers from rural Britain to take their horses to the second industrial European war of the twentieth century. They were among the very last active, rather than ceremonial, British horse soldiers.

They were also the only members of the British Army whose horses’ bridles were traditionally hand-plaited from coastal marram grass.

The Lovat Scouts had first been raised 40 years earlier by the 14th Lord Lovat, Simon Joseph Fraser, whose extensive hereditary estate encircled Beaufort Castle and the towns of Kiltarlity and Beauly in the eastern Scottish Highlands.

In 1900 Simon Fraser was a 29-year-old former officer in the Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders. He decided to aid his country’s war against the Boers in South Africa by assembling a regiment which would utilise the unique rough-country field craft, mettle and clannishness of the Highland estate stalker and ghillie.

The Lovat Scouts had a good Boer War (‘half wolf and half jackrabbit’, said their American major, Frederick Burnham) and, a few years later, an even better First World War. On the Western Front in 1916 they turned their rifle sights from the stag to the Hun, and formed the British Army’s first company of snipers.

In the peace of 1922 the Lovat Scouts were re-formed as a Territorial Army unit with a complement of about 400 soldiers. They were divided into three squadrons. ‘A’ Squadron recruited from mainland Inverness-shire, and ‘C’ Squadron from the other northern Highland counties of Sutherland, Ross-shire and Caithness. There was overlap between their geographical constituencies, but the other detachment, ‘B’ Squadron, was chiefly the Hebridean island unit. ‘B’ Squadron took men specifically from North Uist, Benbecula, South Uist and Skye, reinforced by some other Gaelic speakers from the western mainland.

Between 1922 and 1939 the Lovat Scouts held 16 summer camps to which the Uist men took their own horses – all but one of them in the mainland Scottish Highlands at such places as Strathpeffer, Nairn and (heavy with folk-memory) Culloden.

Michael Leslie Melville, an officer with the Lovat Scouts between 1936 and 1951 and a historian of the regiment, remembered those pre-war camps with affection. ‘It was demanding work and seemed quite “up-to-date”,’ wrote Melville.

In some of the schemes Major Bill Whitbread, piloting his own aircraft, even represented the Luftwaffe, to the ponies’ occasional alarm.

One remembers Sports days with perpetual piping and sunshine, when the highlights were the V.C. race [wherein a horse and jockey would make the outward ride solo, but collect a pillion passenger for the return leg] and inter-Squadron tug-of-war and when old Scouts, some of them very old, came great distances to see the fun.

The officers were kindly invited to the annual Sergeants’ Mess Concert and Ceilidh at which the best musical talent in the Regiment was mustered – an evening of inspired fiddle music, piping, Gaelic song and the ‘mouth music’, with many good tales thrown in.

In 1935 and 1936 the War Office, motivated by ominous events in central Europe, reviewed its regimental functions. It was decided that the Lovat Scouts should be a fully mounted observer regiment of 580 men. Their job would not be that of traditional cavalry, but ‘to provide mobile troops for duties of reconnaissance and protection, probably in a minor theatre of war’.

They formed a link between the new world and the old. By the late 1930s the Lovat Scouts, which just 20 years earlier had become the first sharpshooter corps, was the last mounted reconnaissance troop attached to the British Army. The men of the far north and west, who had ridden with Calgacus, Bruce and Wellington, were the ultimate representatives of chivalric warfare from their islands.

In 1933 the 15-year-old Donald John MacPherson of Claddach Baleshare on the west coast machair of North Uist went along to Bayhead Drill Hall and joined the Cameron Highlander Territorials.

‘But I was daft about horses,’ said Donald John. ‘Keen on horses. I loved horses – I used to ride bareback, with my hands waving free. And so four years after I joined I was referred from the Camerons to the Lovat Scouts – with the horses. I only did one camp with the Lovat Scouts, in 1938. There was an awful lot of horses with the Scouts. A lot of men from the islands with horses. We used to have competitions in the camp – horse races and the like.’

Angus MacPhee of Iochdar, who was also daft about horses, was enlisted in 1934 to the Lovat Scouts Territorial Army unit at Carnan Drill Hall, a couple of miles east of his home.

In peacetime, both men were accustomed to equipping their precious ponies with bridles and other accoutrements expertly woven from the thick, strong strands of marram grass which proliferated on the dunes of western Uist.

‘We used marram grass horses’ collars,’ said Donald John MacPherson. ‘We never made them, but we bought them from Neil MacVicar in Baleshare. He made horses’ collars for pulling the cart from marram grass. MacVicar’s family, his boys, used to make them and sell them in the district.’

In Iochdar, Angus MacPhee did not have to buy woven marram grass. He had known how to make it since boyhood. ‘In the ’30s and the ’20s they could weave with grass,’ said Angus’s sister Peigi, ‘they could weave with heather, and they could make the marram grass . . . that’s what the old houses were all thatched with, that’s what my father would thatch with.’

As August turned into September in 1939 the lives of Angus MacPhee and Donald John MacPherson, which had been connected hitherto by the same Gaelic language and culture, Hebridean lifestyle and military affiliation, but separated by two tidal strands and the small island of Benbecula, converged beneath the clouds of a late summer war.

On Thursday 31 August the British fleet mobilised and the men of the Royal Naval Reserve were called up. The next day, Friday 1 September, Nazi Germany invaded Poland, to whom the United Kingdom was bound by treaty.

‘That Friday night,’ said Donald John MacPherson, ‘I was as usual in my bed, reading a book, and a knock came to the door at one o’clock in the morning. It was them calling us out, to be at Bayhead Drill Hall the next day, Saturday morning at eleven o’ clock. We were told then that on Monday we were going away. We got our uniforms from the drill hall, went back and got the horse.’

On Saturday 2 September, as Donald John MacPherson and Angus MacPhee were collecting their uniforms and instructions from Bayhead and Carnan drill halls in North Uist and South Uist respectively, compulsory military service for all British men between the ages of 18 and 41 was announced.

On Sunday 3 September 1939, as the two Uist men were attending their last church services at home for a very long time, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain declared war on Germany.

Donald John MacPherson’s courageous Second World War lasted until 1945 and would take him across two continents. Angus MacPhee was beginning an uncharted journey which would occupy the remainder of his long life. Donald John went to North America and southern Europe, and returned alive to tell the tales. Angus went to unmapped places, in which he had to create his own means of expression and realise a lonely, simple and precious form of solace. He would never properly return.

Over 100 Lovat Scouts left North Uist, Benbecula and South Uist on Monday 4 September. Donald John MacPherson put on his uniform and mounted his ‘lovely’ mare Jessie. A few hundred yards up the track from their family house his sister Morag took his photograph. Then he rode east to the North Uist pier at Lochmaddy, took a steamer with the other 30 North Uist members of ‘B’ Company to the mainland railhead at Kyle of Lochalsh, and both Jessie and Donald John were transported by train from Kyle to the Lovat Scouts’ muster at Beauly, a small market town north-west of Inverness.

Further south in Benbecula somebody had the bright idea of mustering the local unit in the back yard of a celebrated howff called the Creagorry Inn. Lieutenant Simon MacDonald had been sent from the mainland by way of Skye on a fishing boat to shepherd the Uist section of ‘B’ Company safely to Beauly. The young officer arrived at Creagorry and ‘spent what seemed like hours exhorting, pleading and eventually driving troopers out of the ever-open bar . . . Then the minister [probably, in that island at that time, a Roman Catholic priest] had a word with each man and finally we got separated from the weeping female attachments, and rode forth bravely into the waters of the ford [to South Uist] . . . The scene was not unmoving, the pipes playing, relatives waving from the shore and the horses splashing through the water.’

In Iochdar that morning, Angus MacPhee sat in uniform, his kit slung over his saddle and a cigarette hanging rakishly from the corner of his mouth, astride what he would later describe as ‘a fine gelding’. One of his sisters took his photograph. Then he rode south with his friends, up the South Uist machair to Lochboisdale. Those who could do so took their own mounts. Those who could not borrowed horses from other crofters and then sold them to the army, posting the money back to the original owners.

The late summer weather had been deteriorating ever since the declaration of war. Low cloud obscured the hills, and the watercourses which ran from the east into the western ocean were swollen by heavy rain. Seven miles south of Iochdar the horses and riders had trouble crossing the burn which ran at full spate through the township of Howmore. They were regaled on their journey by a veteran of the First World War, Farrier Sergeant MacRury of Benbecula, telling his fellow Scouts of a telegram he had supposedly received that very morning. ‘How much to remain neutral?’ Sergeant MacRury’s message had read. ‘Signed, Hitler.’ MacRury’s reply was uncompromising. ‘Nothing doing,’ he signalled Berlin. ‘We’ll fight it out same as last time! Signed, MacRury.’

South of Howmore, the high walls of Stoneybridge School rose out of the mist like a fortress. They gathered their ponies inside the school’s stone walls, lit a fire in the schoolroom, were given ‘a splendid evening meal’ by Stoneybridge women, and settled down for the night.

At about 9.30 p.m. a terrific thunderstorm erupted and many of the 70 ponies broke loose. The Scouts dashed outside and spent ‘a couple of soggy hours catching them and re-wiring them by the light of the lightning’. The storm passed and gave way to black night. At a dawn parade all the ponies were miraculously discovered still to be present at Stoneybridge School, but one was dead. A Court of Inquiry later determined that it had been struck by lightning. Lieutenant Simon MacDonald notified the police and asked them to dispose of the body. He took the horse’s blanket, headcollar and surcingle on south, with his surviving ‘damp but cheerful band’ augmented by Lovat Scouts Territorials from the villages of the middle and south of Uist, to Lochboisdale.

At Lochboisdale pier, while Simon MacDonald was signing receipts for some 80 ponies, his soldiers repaired to the adjacent Lochboisdale Hotel for a final dram. To the lieutenant’s great relief the hotel’s proprietor, a future captain of the local Home Guard named Finlay Mackenzie, voluntarily closed his own bar until the soldiers’ boat sailed. It left the deep sheltered harbour of Loch Boisdale with bagpipes wailing from the decks and darkness falling, and immediately ran into another tremendous storm.

They were embarked on a MacBrayne’s passenger and goods steamer which had been requisitioned for their sea crossing to Kyle of Lochalsh. On that second full night of the Second World War the ship sailed with no lights showing, across the Minch through a strong, gusting wind and driving rain. She steered westerly past the Small Isles of Canna, Rum and Eigg, up the Sound of Sleat and through the Kylerhea narrows. From Kyle, they too were taken by train to join the MacRaes and MacKenzies and Frasers of the Highland glens at the great muster in Beauly.

In the first week of the war almost 500 Lovat Scouts congregated in Beauly from all corners of the north of Scotland. The islanders of ‘B’ Squadron were quartered at the Beaufort Home Farm, in what Donald John MacPherson described as ‘a big shed’. Another member of ‘B’ Squadron, Donald John MacKenzie from Kintail, said that on the farm ‘chaos ruled mainly’.

We slept in the byre on the concrete floor with three blankets, straw palliasse and pillow and boy was it cold and hard. We had some soup and stew to eat out of tin bowls and plates which when washed were stacked on the trestle tables in the open. When you went for breakfast in the morning they were stuck together by rust ha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. The Horse Soldiers
• 2. Tir a’ Mhurain
• 3. The Rocky Hill of the Bird
• 4. Self-medicating
• 5. A Rare State of Purity
• 6. The Reluctant Exhibitor
• 7. Another Age
• Notes
• Bibliography