John Murdoch's Scottish Cause
A selection of excerpts highlighting the principles of John Murdoch, a forgotten Scottish nationalist and Highland activist from Nairn.
John Murdoch was born in Nairn in January 1818 to a family of crofters, moving to the island of Islay when he was young. He grew up a Gaelic speaker under a benevolent landlord, Walter F. Cambell, whose son became the famous scholar of Gaelic, J. F. Campbell. Murdoch would join the civil service and commit his life to writing about Gaelic and Highland issues, advocating for the rights of Crofters, the interests of Gaelic-speakers, and Scottish nationalism. Although he is forgotten today, it is in the interests of Scottish nationalism that his words are reprinted here with commentary to enrich public knowledge of our tradition.
He radiated good will. I only saw John Murdoch once, but I never forgot him.
Raised as the son of a crofter in the nineteenth century Highlands, it is no surprise what Murdoch focused on.
The two grand sources of wealth are still [on Islay], the land on the one hand and the labour of the people on the other; and with these brought into union, under a just system, there is every reason to believe that the Highlands will yet present the pleasing spectacle of a free, industrious, contented people.
I had no right to hoard up money… I had no right to think of myself as anything better than an instrument in the hand of God to do whatever good came my way.
Following the introduction of the same vandalising system into the Highlands, Sutherland may be said to be one vast sheep walk… If anyone penetrates these tracts of old primaeval firs, brushwood and ranges of granite hills he will hardly find a scene more impressive and yet more melancholy; for over this enormous tract, in glens once busy with hamlets, not a house is to be seen but the smart lodges of a few gamekeepers.
I need not tell you how this state of things was brought about. I need not state the particulars of the wholesale evictions under Sellars, Loch and other agents of Sutherland cruelty… Last month, and even last week, the columns of the patriotic Northern Ensign were occupied with some of the details of similar doings in the year of grace 1856 and by the agents of the very Duchess of Sutherland who matronised Mrs Stowe, the advocate of negro liberty.
One of the causes that he was most committed to was that of land reform and the liberation of the crofters. Murdoch was not just a contemporary of the Famine and the Clearances but someone who grew up on a croft and had close relationships with people who suffered as a result of the Famine and Clearances. As a result, he was uniquely advantaged in giving commentary on the situation.
Witnessing the evictions of crofters, almost all of whom were Gaels, he became radicalised against landlordism and committed to obtaining security for crofters. James Hunter provides the following remarks on Murdoch’s activism.
Whole communities survive because of the Crofters Act. And because these communities contain the last strongholds of Scots Gaelic, the Act has also had important cultural consequences. That would not have surprised John Murdoch who always believed that land reform, Gaelic revivalism and social advancement were inextricably linked. Only when Highlanders took a proper pride in their language, their history and their background, Murdoch insisted, would they acquire the self-respect and the self-confidence without which they would neither win control of the land nor develop the initiative and enterprise which he thought to be the keys to progress of every kind.
This assertion that the Crofters Act saved Gaelic society is not wrong, and neither is the hagiographic praise of Murdoch. Prior to its introduction, crofters were treated as less than the animals they were evicted to make room for. It became known as the Magna Carta of Gaeldom for the protections and rights that it introduced, and Murdoch played a significant role in bringing it about. He was well-connected across the Highlands and wrote hundreds of thousands of words across his journalistic career covering the tragedy which was unfolding.
When a ship carrying evicted Irishmen crashed at Islay in 1847, Murdoch remarked:
They lost their course and, before morning, the Exmouth was dashed against the rocks and her unfortunate cargo of living beings shared the fate of the thousands of other evicted Celts who were shipwrecked in rotten vessels to be out of the way of more highly favoured sheep and cattle.
The vessel was literally reduced to atoms – for she was an old craft fit only for the timber trade. She had, in fact, been chartered to bring a cargo of timber from Canada. But it was turning a double penny to take out a cargo of ‘mere Irish’. Their passage money was paid. And although they and the ship went to destruction, the owners were no losers. And the landlord who cleared out the people thought no more about them than if they had gone quietly to rest in their beds. In Ireland they were in the great man’s way. At the bottom of the sea they ceased to trouble him.
And when the day of reckoning and of retribution comes, the loss of these people will be laid at the door of the supporters of the British feudal land system. And these supporters, coronetted and gartered though they may be, will be arraigned at the bar of justice for the murder of these poor Irish men, women, and children.
Murdoch saw the struggle against the British landlordist system as one which Scots could not fight alone. The Gaels of both Ireland and Scotland suffered it together and they were best positioned to work together to fight for their liberation. This theme of Irish-Scottish unity was prevalent for much of his career.
We have long been of the opinion that the Scotch and Irish, instead of being led on either side into the disputes raised by Englishmen who know nothing of the old language of the Celtic people, should work into each other’s hands for the purpose of rescuing from destruction such fragments of what is unquestionably common property.
The things which we have noted show that in Scotland the Celt is not going to lie down tamely under the heel of the oppressor; he will be up yet and hand-in-hand with his Irish kinsman will labour for the emancipation of both. May we not look forward to a period not very distant when we shall see the long-separated Gaels of Ireland and Scotland working together for the common good.
Murdoch, as a civil servant, would find himself living in Dublin for some time and would eventually marry Eliza Jane Tickell in the city. Prior to this he almost married a Lancastrian, but the failing health of his mother caused him to leave the region.
His time in Dublin acquainted him with the Irish nationalist intelligentsia and, under the pseudonym Finlagan, he would contribute a number of articles to the nationalist newspaper The Nation. He had a close relationship with Michael Davitt, who had been evicted from Mayo and was living in Haslingden in Lancashire for some time.
Years later, Murdoch would give a speech in New York which was praised by the Irish World newspaper, which wrote the following:
Murdoch, who clad in the manly and graceful costume of his race and clan, which he always wears, stepped to the front amidst cheer after cheer from tier after tier of Irishmen… Murdoch spoke in telling terms of the libels of the English and pro-landlord press on the Highland people and of the exclusion of Highland wrongs from the press… No words can adequately describe the effects of this telling speech, almost every sentence of which was cheered to the echo. Repeatedly he tried to conclude. But the audience would not have it. Cries of ‘Go on, go on’ still kept him before them until in sheer modesty, and apologising for presuming so much on their kindness, he closed one of the most spirited, timely, and telling addresses ever heard by a great and popular assembly.
It was after this time in New York, and after the Napier Commission, that Murdoch stepped up his land reform activism, but also began to synthesise it more closely with his Gaelic activism.
From one end of the country to the other, there are complaints in regard to the land. There is not a district in which the evils of a defective land system are not complained of. From within a short distance of the Pentland Firth a voice reaches us that the people have been swept off the land and that the soil is not made to yield its proper increase. From the straths of Sutherland, from the mountainsides of Ross-shire, and from the glens of Inverness-shire, Argyleshire and Perthshire, much the same sound reaches us; from Kintail, Lochalsh and Lochcarron; from Glenelg, Lochaber and Badenoch; from Strathspey, Strathdearn and Strathnairn; from the islands of Uist, Barra, Skye, Raasay, Mull, Islay and Arran there is a wonderful concord of testimonies to the effect that wrong has been done to the people, and loss inflicted on the nation as a whole, by the manner in which the land is administered.
The Crofter Act of 1886 had been passed months prior (while Murdoch was still living in Shetland) and yet this still was not sufficient for Murdoch. His radicalism caused him to disdain the Liberal government, whose representatives in the Highlands he considered "about as conservative as the Tory Party" when it came to social reform. While continuing to target the socioeconomic structure of Scottish society, he introduced more passionate defences of Gaelic culture into his land activism.
But what is the use of preserving or cultivating the language?’ One might almost assume that there was no need to answer such a question. As long as the language does live and is a medium of communication, instruction, and worship among hundreds of thousands of Scotsmen, it is surely worthy of fair and liberal treatment – in their province at any rate… So long as our rivers, our mountains, our towns, our castles are to a large extent named in Gaelic, the language is worthy of being studied and cultivated and spoken. So long as there are proverbs and songs and tales afloat in that language, which have not been preserved in type, Gaelic is as deserving of being as carefully cultivated as any branch of science or art. And yet these are only the veriest superficialities of the subject.
We go in for the preservation and cultivation of the language for the sake of the people whose mental treasury and repository of culture it is.
The clearances meant that Gaels were dispersed across the globe, coming into the English-speaking regions of lowland Scotland, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia for the purpose of survival. As a result, Gaelic society in the Highlands was declining and the future of the language was uncertain. Many "progressive"-minded Britons, both Scots and English alike, sought to eliminate the language once and for all, but Murdoch would not stand for this.
The walls around may be poor and rough. But the walls of Norman’s mind are hung up with pictures which are not equalled by those of the laird in his castle. Why, the language were worth preserving, and worthy of being learned by strangers, for the sake of these pictures alone. Abolish the language and all this beauty, and all this historic thought which it adorns, are lost to the race and the poor Highlander sinks to the level of the mere English hind who has no thought above his bacon, his bread, and his beer. Abolish the language, and even erect white cottages with blue slates and good furniture for those who come after the Gaelic-speaking Gael, and there will be a hard, sordid, barren atmosphere within and without compared with what would be there if the people and their language were preserved and cultivated as they ought to be.
Wise men recognise that there is an education of the race going on and that grandchildren are educated in the grandparents. It is thus, for example, that the thoughts and words and deeds of the wise and brave and generous men who have gone before go to nerve and stir their descendants to equal, if not to greater, deeds. Who will not acknowledge that the prowess of Fionn and Osgar and Diarmaid… have had much to do with the development of that highland bravery, gallantry, and chivalry which have shed lustre not only on the race but on the nation! Napoleon understood this sort of thing when he carried about with him a translation of the poems of Ossian.
Gaelic and what it contains are worthy of being preserved for the sake of the people whose they are… The sentiment, the taste, the memories, the emulation, the self-respect and the race-respect which the preservation and cultivation of our language and lore promote in our people are like fresh currents of life let into their veins, fresh vigour into their nerves and more stability into their bones…
Gaelic was, for Murdoch, not just a struggle for the survival of a language, but the very survival of the Gaelic race as a distinct community. The memory of the Gaelic nation was preserved in the oral tradition so this should not be a surprise, but the racial aspect of this stands out when we considered the mainstream civic nationalism present in Scotland today.
No doubt there are many who think that it would be far better to force the people to adopt improved husbandry, and the like, than to try to keep Ossian and Fingal and Cuchullain alive in their minds. As we have abundantly shown, we very much value agricultural improvement. But the least sentimental will allow that improvement will be much more effective and congenial when it comes as an intelligent result of high and generous thought and feeling.
But imagine the young man who has been taught to value his language, his traditions, his race, his circumstances. He looks about him and he thinks of the credit of himself, of his family and of those who went before him.
Further, Murdoch was of the belief that preserving Gaelic would be materially beneficial to the Highland peoples. This struggle was for the very soul of the Highlands, for the future and survival of a people and their prosperity.
Gaelic, of course, is the great medium by which the old doctrine of the Land for the People comes down to us from antiquity. The Lowland people, having lost the Gaelic language, lost the tradition of ever having cherished the idea that they had any right to the land but what they might acquire by purchase or by contract with the landlord. This accounts for the deadness of southern and eastern Scots in regard to the land.
Indeed, Murdoch attributed the Lowland Clearances to loss of Gaelic down south. While the Celtic nation was inherently "poetic", the "Saxon could not realise or imagine" Scotland in the same manner.
And there is no doubt that Murdoch sympathised with [socialism and Scottish nationalism]. But no such creed was central to his outlook. Throughout his career, John Murdoch’s conduct was governed primarily by a profound concern for, and commitment to, the Celtic people – as he himself would have called them – of Ireland and the Scottish Highlands. It was to their liberation he devoted himself. And it was in order to secure their political, social and cultural advancement that he advocated land reform, the regeneration of the Gaelic language and the right of both the Scots and the Irish nations to self-determination.
Hunter ends off his introduction to For The People's Cause with the following paragraph, arguing that Murdoch sympathised with socialism and Scottish nationalism. While his sympathies for socialism can be disputed (he was certainly not a Marxist socialist, in any case), his sympathies for Scottish nationalism are clear as day. He laments the decline of Gaelic in both the Lowlands and Highlands and saw his cause as one for Gaelic self-determination, united with the struggle in Ireland which he aligned himself with.
Murdoch passed into eternal life in 1903, dying in northern Ayrshire where he lies today. Undoubtedly this son of the Highlands would have preferred to have been buried up there, but surely he takes solace in the fact that this corner of south-west Scotland was the heart of Fingal's kingdom. His friends placed a Celtic cross upon his grave which they inscribed with a simple message.
He was a man of noble ideas, pure and unselfish public spirit, who devoted his life to the uplifting of his downtrodden countrymen.
Scotland is all the better for John Murdoch. Scottish nationalism can be too, by remembering his name and life.