Working People: A Family Through Three Centuries by James Hunter review: 'fresh, precise, immersive'
By tracing his family history as far back as he can go, James Hunter shows that ‘ordinary’ people often lead extraordinary lives, writes David Robinson
It’s 50 years since James Hunter’s The Making of the Crofting Community upended Highland historiography by writing about folk most histories had left out. In his latest book, those folk are his own: all four of his grandparents’ families traced as far back as he can go.
It opens on a sunny morning in the late 1950s. Young Jim is accompanying his father, a Forestry Commission gamekeeper in Glen Duror, to the head of the glen, and watches as he shoots a stag. The writing is exquisite: fresh, precise, immersive.
Later on, he says that he was trying to copy the way his maternal grandfather John Cameron would tell stories, taking maybe half an hour over them, bringing in as many details as possible. So mentioning the .303 rifle his father used to shoot the deer leads into stories of the Second World War, and their path through the woods is a reminder that back then trees were “brashed” (had their branches removed up to ten feet from the ground) so forests weren’t as impassable as they are now. Descriptions are meticulously connective: the red flashes on the head forester’s collar, the small brass weights on the scales of the post office his mother runs, the wax stamp sealing the string-tied post bags ready for the steam train to Oban.
If EP Thompson’s “history from below” is one reason Hunter’s studies took the path they did, John Cameron is another. Born in 1872, he was a living link with a time that fascinated his grandson, when the cause of land reform spread throughout the Highlands in the mid-1880s.
In hindsight, Hunter regrets not asking his grandfather more about those days but he has learnt enough from him about how to tell a story all the same. Because if you or I plunged into similar centuries-dense thickets of genealogy, I doubt whether anyone would follow us.
With Hunter, it’s hard not to. Yes, his publishers could have made it easier by putting dates on his four family trees, and a map would certainly have been handy for those of us who have had to look up many of the hamlets and glens he mentions. Against that, a social historian of his calibre can put everyone and everything into context, making his family’s story Scotland’s too.
In it, we see small lives caught in the rolling waves of change: tenant farmers losing their land to sheep, prices collapsing with wool imports, estates switching to deer (deerstalker numbers tripled in the 50 years to 1911) and forestry. War comes and goes and leaves widows but life is equally unfair on the home front. His wife’s great-grandfather, a Glasgow tinsmith, loses two of his wives (typhus and peritonitis), leaving four children to be brought up by others. When he dies seven weeks after marrying for a third time in 1888, his new bride kicks his three young sons out of the house.
As they always do, ordinary people turn out to be extraordinary - few more so than his grandmother, who assiduously pursued a career as a fully qualified teacher despite being a) married, b) a mother and c) teaching right up to the day before she gave birth to his father in 1920. She took four days off “sick” and resumed work. She then passed further exams, had two more children, and moved the family to Duror in 1928.
At Duror, John Cameron would tell the young Hunter tales about his wife’s grandfather, David Dempster, who died in 1901 but was old enough to remember news of Waterloo. Whether he really did slide across a frozen loch on his tackety boots using his plaid as a sail I don’t know, but he certainly spent at least a week crossing Scotland with his dog and family in the 1830s to take up a job as a shepherd in Glen Hurich and did that for 60 years. In 1893 the Oban Times had an article about him headlined “Nearly One Hundred Years old and Cutting Hay”.
Working People: A Family Through Three Centuries, by James Hunter, Birlinn, £25
Bottom’s Dream is at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, 20-24 October. Thrice is at the Anatomy Rooms, Aberdeen, 19 October; Dundee Rep, 21 October; and the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, 23-24 October.
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