In the Shadow of the Laird by Judith Ross Napier review: 'a tremendous work of scholarship'
Telling the story of Scotland’s factors or land agents over a period of 400 years, Judith Ross Napier’s book is nuanced, well-written and comprehensive, writes David Robinson
I haven’t yet been to the Lismore Bar in Partick, but when I do I will make sure to go to the gents. There, above the urinal, is a history lesson of sorts: a plaque inviting patrons to “pay their respects” to three men blamed for the Highland Clearances.
Two of them - the Duke of Sutherland and Colonel Fell - were the owners of the large estates from which they evicted tenants, but Patrick Sellar is the one with whom Judith Napier is most concerned here on account of his job as factor, or land agent. Thanks to his brutality in the Strathnaver Clearances of 1814, Sellar has, she points out, become “shorthand for an entire profession”. But what were the rest like?
That is the subject of her latest book, a tremendous work of scholarship and narrative history covering some four centuries which, both in its sheer readability and occasional mentions of first-person memories, breaks free of the narrow constraints of the academy. That she has been able to do this for a group of people who, in their diaries, books and accounts, never gave anything away about their emotions, is all the more impressive.
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“If you want to cost fence wire,” she writes of the records they left behind, “look no further. If you want to find their views on their proprietor, or if they are lonely or hurt, you will be looking for a long time.” Even when giving evidence before the Napier (no relation) Commission, the factors remained buttoned-up and businesslike and, “as the evidence proceeded, there was a mounting sense of just what a truly dreary job factoring must sometimes have been: gathering rent paid in shillings, pence or the occasional hen, and navigating age-old hostilities between neighbours and townships.”
All of which might lead you – wrongly – to expect a worthy but boring book. Yet see how Napier gets round some of those blanks in the historical record. We don’t, for example, know much about the work of Kenneth Sutherland (1715-61) as a factor for Lord Reay’s estates in Balnakeil, near Durness. But Napier looks at his friendships - the local minister, for example, translated Pope into Gaelic; at the contents of his library; at the travellers from the south that the minister met and for whom the lord’s sons - trained by Sutherland - played music. Drawing on both her own researches and those of local historians, she pieces together a fascinating portrait of pre-Clearance life in a geographically remote (no roads, no bridges, all trade by sea) Gaelic-speaking part of Scotland, yet one where the lairds could still enjoy both the luxuries and culture of their southern equivalents.
At Balnakeil, Lord Reay employed as cowherd and then cattle keeper the poet Rob Donn (1714-78). Napier had known about him since childhood, because Donn was mentioned in the Rowena Farre’s 1957 bestselling Sutherland memoir Seal Morning and because her father had taken her to his grave and pointed out how the stonemason had taken a year off Donn’s life because he couldn’t manage a curved ‘8’. (Donn also joined the 1st Regiment of the Sutherland Highlanders as its official Bard - an officer-class rank surely due for reinstatement.)
When Kenneth Sutherland died, Donn wrote an elegy in his memory so fulsome in its praise that one can hardly imagine that he and Sellar had the same job. But times were changing: from the middle of the 18th century, Napier shows, it becomes easier to find examples of factors behaving badly. It is of course, no coincidence that by then the Cheviots were on their way.
Napier is neither an apologist for the factors nor a revisionist about their excesses. I would have liked an index, but that apart, her book is as nuanced, well-written and comprehensive as I could have wished – and infinitely more so than the Lismore’s pissoir.
In the Shadow of the Laird: Highland Factors Before and After Patrick Sellar, by Judith Ross Napier, Acair Books, £15.99
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