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Insurrection: Scotland's Famine Winter
A gripping, heart-breaking account of the famine winter of 1847' - Rosemary Goring, The Herald
Longlisted for the Highland Book Prize
When Scotland’s 1846 potato crop was wiped out by blight, the country was plunged into crisis. In the Hebrides and the West Highlands a huge relief effort came too late to prevent starvation and death. Further east, meanwhile, towns and villages from Aberdeen to Wick and Thurso, rose up in protest at the cost of the oatmeal that replaced potatoes as people’s basic foodstuff.
Oatmeal’s soaring price was blamed on the export of grain by farmers and landlords cashing in on even higher prices elsewhere. As a bitter winter gripped and families feared a repeat of the calamitous famine then ravaging Ireland, grain carts were seized, ships boarded, harbours blockaded, a jail forced open, the military confronted. The army fired on one set of rioters. Savage sentences were imposed on others. But thousands-strong crowds also gained key concessions. Above all they won cheaper food.
Those dramatic events have long been ignored or forgotten. Now, in James Hunter, they have their historian. The story he tells is, by turns, moving, anger-making and inspiring. In an era of food banks and growing poverty, it is also very timely.
Longlisted for the Highland Book Prize
When Scotland’s 1846 potato crop was wiped out by blight, the country was plunged into crisis. In the Hebrides and the West Highlands a huge relief effort came too late to prevent starvation and death. Further east, meanwhile, towns and villages from Aberdeen to Wick and Thurso, rose up in protest at the cost of the oatmeal that replaced potatoes as people’s basic foodstuff.
Oatmeal’s soaring price was blamed on the export of grain by farmers and landlords cashing in on even higher prices elsewhere. As a bitter winter gripped and families feared a repeat of the calamitous famine then ravaging Ireland, grain carts were seized, ships boarded, harbours blockaded, a jail forced open, the military confronted. The army fired on one set of rioters. Savage sentences were imposed on others. But thousands-strong crowds also gained key concessions. Above all they won cheaper food.
Those dramatic events have long been ignored or forgotten. Now, in James Hunter, they have their historian. The story he tells is, by turns, moving, anger-making and inspiring. In an era of food banks and growing poverty, it is also very timely.
384 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published January 1, 304
10 people are currently reading
65 people want to read
About the author
James Hunter
167 books40 followersJames Hunter was brought up in North Argyll. He was educated at Duror Primary School, Oban High School and Aberdeen and Edinburgh Universities.
He was the first director of the Scottish Crofters Union which he helped to establish as a highly effective pressure group with a substantial membership right across the crofting areas.
A journalist, broadcaster and writer, Hunter has published a number of books about the Highlands and Islands. He has lectured in Britain and North America on Highland history and on Scottish environmental and land use issues, as well as making many radio and television programmes.
He was the first director of the Scottish Crofters Union which he helped to establish as a highly effective pressure group with a substantial membership right across the crofting areas.
A journalist, broadcaster and writer, Hunter has published a number of books about the Highlands and Islands. He has lectured in Britain and North America on Highland history and on Scottish environmental and land use issues, as well as making many radio and television programmes.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
October 22, 2022
Before reading this book I was unaware that potato blight, a major contributor to famine in Ireland in the mid 19th century, had also led to famine in parts of Scotland. The infamous clearances had pushed the crofting populations of the Highlands and Islands to the coast where they had to build new homes on land too poor to cultivate crops sufficient for their needs. The loss of the potato crop in 1846, a crop that was their main, and often only, source of nutrition led to a winter of starvation in which many died. Had it not been for the quick actions of the government Commissariat for famine relief, proactive fundraising and campaigning by the Free Church of Scotland, and the compassion of some of the landlords, there would have been many more deaths that winter. As it was, the levels of poverty and distress witnessed and reported by those sent to help are truly shocking - children with distended stomachs and little if any clothing, parents going without food for days so that they could give the little they had to their children, grown men weeping through weakness and desperation.
The main subject of this book is the unrest that this brought to the North East coast of Scotland. They knew what was happening in the Hebrides and elsewhere and feared that the same would happen to them. Poor weather that year had meant a poor white fish harvest and the collapse of the market for salted herring had caused a significant drop in income for the fishing towns and villages. A shortage of grain and oatmeal in the Scottish Lowlands and in England meant that Highland producers could make much more money shipping their produce south than selling it locally. The local population needed those crops to make up for the loss of their potato crops however, and that was the catalyst for the riots that were to break out up and down the North East coast, from Macduff in Moray to Wick and Thurso in Caithness. Fearing that they would soon find themselves starving, hundreds of people would gather to try to prevent exports of produce by blockading roads and harbours, and by boarding ships and unloading the cargo. Soldiers were sent into the worst affected areas and this led to altercations, arrests, and further riots. Remarkably, although some goods were deliberately spoiled to prevent their sale, nothing whatsoever was stolen.
James Hunter has written a fascinating account of these events which I found at times exciting but more often both humbling and moving. It is a complex and detailed account which is also very readable. I’m pleased to have learned about a piece of history previously unknown to me and look forward to reading more of this author’s work.
The main subject of this book is the unrest that this brought to the North East coast of Scotland. They knew what was happening in the Hebrides and elsewhere and feared that the same would happen to them. Poor weather that year had meant a poor white fish harvest and the collapse of the market for salted herring had caused a significant drop in income for the fishing towns and villages. A shortage of grain and oatmeal in the Scottish Lowlands and in England meant that Highland producers could make much more money shipping their produce south than selling it locally. The local population needed those crops to make up for the loss of their potato crops however, and that was the catalyst for the riots that were to break out up and down the North East coast, from Macduff in Moray to Wick and Thurso in Caithness. Fearing that they would soon find themselves starving, hundreds of people would gather to try to prevent exports of produce by blockading roads and harbours, and by boarding ships and unloading the cargo. Soldiers were sent into the worst affected areas and this led to altercations, arrests, and further riots. Remarkably, although some goods were deliberately spoiled to prevent their sale, nothing whatsoever was stolen.
James Hunter has written a fascinating account of these events which I found at times exciting but more often both humbling and moving. It is a complex and detailed account which is also very readable. I’m pleased to have learned about a piece of history previously unknown to me and look forward to reading more of this author’s work.
March 26, 2021
Aside from being extremely well written, this book is meticulously researched with links to sources, providing evidence that contradicts the stance taken by some well-known historians, who in recent years, have tried to explain away the Highland Clearances, amongst other shameful episodes in the history of the British empire, as merely the march of progress.
Being Scottish, it is a sad fact that I was in my mid-twenties before I learned the full extent of the Highland Clearances. Being from Moray, it is even more saddening that it was only through this self-learning I became aware of the Moray food riots. This highlights how much of Scotland’s history is whitewashed.
This book tells the history of the cruelty that some of the richest land proprietors in the British empire perpetrated upon the working classes in the North of Scotland, for the sake of extra profit.
The book also gives testament to the bravery of ordinary men and women from Aberdeen, through Banffshire, Moray and the Highlands and all the way to Caithness, who stood up to face legal threat and military violence in the face of famine and destitution. They attracted a national backlash that would help to grow the movement that would lead to workers' and tenants’ rights and eventually universal suffrage.
Although the disastrous events in this book were in part brought about by misfortune (the failure of the potato harvest), the escalation and exacerbation of misery, suffering and death, was caused by the greed of the rich landowners and merchants in the North of Scotland and the injustice of a corrupt legal system.
It is a must-read for anyone interested in the history of Scotland, the British Empire or the worldwide struggle for equality.
Being Scottish, it is a sad fact that I was in my mid-twenties before I learned the full extent of the Highland Clearances. Being from Moray, it is even more saddening that it was only through this self-learning I became aware of the Moray food riots. This highlights how much of Scotland’s history is whitewashed.
This book tells the history of the cruelty that some of the richest land proprietors in the British empire perpetrated upon the working classes in the North of Scotland, for the sake of extra profit.
The book also gives testament to the bravery of ordinary men and women from Aberdeen, through Banffshire, Moray and the Highlands and all the way to Caithness, who stood up to face legal threat and military violence in the face of famine and destitution. They attracted a national backlash that would help to grow the movement that would lead to workers' and tenants’ rights and eventually universal suffrage.
Although the disastrous events in this book were in part brought about by misfortune (the failure of the potato harvest), the escalation and exacerbation of misery, suffering and death, was caused by the greed of the rich landowners and merchants in the North of Scotland and the injustice of a corrupt legal system.
It is a must-read for anyone interested in the history of Scotland, the British Empire or the worldwide struggle for equality.
September 5, 2020
Highly readable account of a wave of food riots that erupted in fishing communities in northeastern Scotland in the wake of potato blight arriving in the country in 1846, wiping out the staple crop of most rural families and pushing parts of the Highlands and Islands to the brink of mass starvation. A catastrophe comparable to events in Ireland was avoided, largely through a charitable relief effort in which the recently established Free Church of Scotland played a central role. But this was still a highly significant phase of Scottish history The years of hunger that followed 1846 sent thousands of Highlanders to the New World while at home the collective memory of the suffering endured and the indifference of some lairds helped to shape the following decades, which culminated in the creation of the distinctive crofting system based on smallholders having security of tenure.
This is an academic book based on meticulous research of a long neglected archive about the unrest in the fishing communities. But Hunter’s eye for colourful detail makes it feel more like a journalistic long read with the narrative constructed around the story of three fish wives who walked across Scotland in the hope of gaining an audience with Queen Victoria, a devotee of the cult of the romantic Highlands then in residence at a pre-Balmoral retreat. Did they succeed and why were they so desperate to see the monarch in person? No spoilers here!
This is an academic book based on meticulous research of a long neglected archive about the unrest in the fishing communities. But Hunter’s eye for colourful detail makes it feel more like a journalistic long read with the narrative constructed around the story of three fish wives who walked across Scotland in the hope of gaining an audience with Queen Victoria, a devotee of the cult of the romantic Highlands then in residence at a pre-Balmoral retreat. Did they succeed and why were they so desperate to see the monarch in person? No spoilers here!
August 1, 2022
In the “hunger winter” of 1846/7, crowds of ordinary people stopped landlords and merchants from shipping food away from their areas of Scotland and forced them to sell the meal at prices they could afford to pay. They got organised and used every means necessary – they formed committees, postered, leafletted, signalled other villages and towns, drummed up support, broke windows, destroyed carts, blocked harbours and physically challenged soldiers. They sparked campaigns that raised tens of thousands of pounds for hungry people, got arrested women released without charge and saved men from hard labour and transportation to Australia. This is a brilliant retelling of the events and horror wrought on people whose poverty left them no safety net when potato blight and bad weather struck.
One of the most remarkable aspects of the lives of the people of the Highlands and Islands is how little violence there was to landlords and their factors – they didn’t get murdered or even attacked and their houses weren’t burnt down. Yet the violence they heaped on their tenants is staggering. Tenants were moved, evicted, shipped out or weren’t allowed to emigrate when their landlords wanted workers for the kelp industry. Landlords and their agents prevented hunting and fishing and then sold food away from tenants when there was more profit to be made in markets elsewhere.
Hunter describes some of the worst landlords including Colonel John Gordon who owned Barra, South Uist, Benbecula and an Aberdeenshire estate and had previously stolen Barra’s poor fund. He was a slave owner and had been well paid when forced to release people from his sugar plantations in Tobago. Then in 1851 Gordon shipped 1700 people from Barra, South Uist and Benbecula to Canada with only the rags they stood up in. A Senior immigration officer described them, “these parties presented every appearance of poverty and …were without means…of procuring a day’s subsistence for their helpless families on landing.” Many were shipped shackled to stop them escaping.
Then there was Lord MacDonald of Sleat, who owned Northern Uist and so much of
Skye that most of the island’s 25,000 people by 1846-7 lived on his estate. At least 13,000 of these people got no help from MacDonald in the famine and the scenes of horrific starvation that Oban doctor Andrew Aldcorn described in December 1846 were MacDonald tenants.
Hunter says Aldcorn’s description was similar to Nicholas Cummins writing about Skibbereen in Ireland during the same famine, which reads like the discovery of a concentration camp. “Famished and ghastly skeletons, to all appearance dead, were huddled in a corner on some filthy straw, their sole covering what seemed a ragged horsecloth….. I approached with horror and found, by a low moaning, that they were alive. They were in fever, four children, a woman and what had once been a man. It is impossible to go through the detail. Suffice to say that, in a few minutes, I was surrounded by at least 200 of such phantoms." MacDonald’s father had burned through his Kelp fortune partly by spending £500 on a staircase window but his son was still rich, while his tenants lived in miserable huts made from “bark slabs” removed from logs becoming timber.
There were plenty of other bad landlords – the Duke of Argyll; Lord Reidhaven, heir to Earl of Seafield and owner of Glen Urquhart; James Edward, tenth Lord Cranstoun owner of Arisaig Estate where 671 people out of 868 were starving; Alexander McDonnell of Glengarry; Keith William Stewart Mackenzie, owner of Morvich in Kintail; Sir James MacKenzie and on it goes. Various Mull landlords evicted their unemployed tenants in the winter when they could no longer pay rent, despite large government loans and grants being available to landlords and owners for winter work schemes to improve infrastructure.
Hunter doesn’t join the common theme in the history of Scotland that the Clearances were bad but it was necessary for progress and people went on to better lives elsewhere. Some did, but he shows that thousands of others were brutalised and traumatised and the vulnerable died in droves while the rich got super-rich. Insurrection explains why these people were poor and how so many of them fought their landlords and the prospect of starvation in 1846/47. Their fight must also have inspired the generation who fought and won secure tenancy rights in the 1880’s. Hopefully this book will also inspire people to investigate and write more of this kind of history – about ordinary people who shaped the world by fighting their ruling class and forcing some of them to put people before profit.
One of the most remarkable aspects of the lives of the people of the Highlands and Islands is how little violence there was to landlords and their factors – they didn’t get murdered or even attacked and their houses weren’t burnt down. Yet the violence they heaped on their tenants is staggering. Tenants were moved, evicted, shipped out or weren’t allowed to emigrate when their landlords wanted workers for the kelp industry. Landlords and their agents prevented hunting and fishing and then sold food away from tenants when there was more profit to be made in markets elsewhere.
Hunter describes some of the worst landlords including Colonel John Gordon who owned Barra, South Uist, Benbecula and an Aberdeenshire estate and had previously stolen Barra’s poor fund. He was a slave owner and had been well paid when forced to release people from his sugar plantations in Tobago. Then in 1851 Gordon shipped 1700 people from Barra, South Uist and Benbecula to Canada with only the rags they stood up in. A Senior immigration officer described them, “these parties presented every appearance of poverty and …were without means…of procuring a day’s subsistence for their helpless families on landing.” Many were shipped shackled to stop them escaping.
Then there was Lord MacDonald of Sleat, who owned Northern Uist and so much of
Skye that most of the island’s 25,000 people by 1846-7 lived on his estate. At least 13,000 of these people got no help from MacDonald in the famine and the scenes of horrific starvation that Oban doctor Andrew Aldcorn described in December 1846 were MacDonald tenants.
Hunter says Aldcorn’s description was similar to Nicholas Cummins writing about Skibbereen in Ireland during the same famine, which reads like the discovery of a concentration camp. “Famished and ghastly skeletons, to all appearance dead, were huddled in a corner on some filthy straw, their sole covering what seemed a ragged horsecloth….. I approached with horror and found, by a low moaning, that they were alive. They were in fever, four children, a woman and what had once been a man. It is impossible to go through the detail. Suffice to say that, in a few minutes, I was surrounded by at least 200 of such phantoms." MacDonald’s father had burned through his Kelp fortune partly by spending £500 on a staircase window but his son was still rich, while his tenants lived in miserable huts made from “bark slabs” removed from logs becoming timber.
There were plenty of other bad landlords – the Duke of Argyll; Lord Reidhaven, heir to Earl of Seafield and owner of Glen Urquhart; James Edward, tenth Lord Cranstoun owner of Arisaig Estate where 671 people out of 868 were starving; Alexander McDonnell of Glengarry; Keith William Stewart Mackenzie, owner of Morvich in Kintail; Sir James MacKenzie and on it goes. Various Mull landlords evicted their unemployed tenants in the winter when they could no longer pay rent, despite large government loans and grants being available to landlords and owners for winter work schemes to improve infrastructure.
Hunter doesn’t join the common theme in the history of Scotland that the Clearances were bad but it was necessary for progress and people went on to better lives elsewhere. Some did, but he shows that thousands of others were brutalised and traumatised and the vulnerable died in droves while the rich got super-rich. Insurrection explains why these people were poor and how so many of them fought their landlords and the prospect of starvation in 1846/47. Their fight must also have inspired the generation who fought and won secure tenancy rights in the 1880’s. Hopefully this book will also inspire people to investigate and write more of this kind of history – about ordinary people who shaped the world by fighting their ruling class and forcing some of them to put people before profit.
January 8, 2021
A must read.
A look back to greatly distressing times, the greed and prejudice of the "haves" as opposed to the "have nots".
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A look back to greatly distressing times, the greed and prejudice of the "haves" as opposed to the "have nots".
.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews