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What was needed was decent housing at affordable rents, but the private market had failed to deliver this. The other option was to build local authority housing, but this was frustrated by property owners who tended to be in control of the city and town councils. They weren’t likely to agree to a massive programme of public housing that would deny them an income. So, housing had to wait for the state initiatives that came after the First World War (see Chapter 15).
The following description of slum living at the end of the century shows how little progress had been made:
Our parents established themselves in one room, with my little brother Archie. All the rest of us [four children] slept in the other room in large bunks built into a recess. The kitchen consisted of a small gas ring in the corner. The only source of water was a small basin, with a lavatory next to it. This served all the tenants on our floor.
Poor housing also had an impact on the health of the nation. The death rates among young children were scandalously high in one-room houses. Many of them died prematurely because disease spread so easily in such cramped living conditions. But many children also died in household accidents. As late as 1861, 42 per cent of all deaths in Glasgow were in the age group 1 to 10 years.
Poverty: Starving in the midst of plenty
Poverty
in the 19th century was easily defined: destitution – the inability to feed, house or clothe oneself. To be classed as poor in 19th-century Scotland was to be labelled a pauper. Of course, poverty pre-dates the 19th century, but what made it such a huge social problem was that it was dramatised by being concentrated in cities and by the recurring economic slumps that put people out of work through no fault of their own.
The following is a description of the impact of unemployment on Paisley in January 1842:
Unemployment was the rule … few of the workmen of Paisley were employed: they were broken up and found to be wandering about in every town in the country begging for bread.
There were no mechanisms for dealing with destitution on this level. The Old Poor Law existed, but that was only concerned with the aged, infirm and orphans, people who couldn’t work. The poor law had nothing to say regarding the
able-bodied poor
(people who were able to work but for whatever reason did not). Legislation had to be introduced to deal with the new problem of mass unemployment.
On the back of the depression in Paisley, a government inquiry was set up; it recommended a new set of rules governing the provision of poor relief.
The New Poor Law of 1845
The old system had been run by the Church of Scotland, but the split known as the Disruption in 1843 led to elected parochial boards assuming control of poor relief. Rates were levied on property owners for the upkeep of the poor, but the able-bodied still had no right to statutory relief, although temporary relief could be given to them in times of emergency at the discretion of the authorities.
Among the entitled poor, the parochial boards had very clear guidelines as to which of the claimants constituted the deserving and the undeserving. As Andrew Wallace, Inspector of the Poor in Govan, explained in 1867, ‘deserted wives’ should be tested thoroughly because there was often collusion between the spouses. Orphans and children should be treated ‘tenderly’; however, women with illegitimate children should not be taken on the pauper roll if it could be avoided because ‘they have transgressed the moral law’. On the other hand, lunatics must be well cared for, although as Wallace complained, ‘it is galling to think that 40 per cent of this numerous and expensive class are rendered insane through drink’.
In order to get poor relief, you had to prove that you had been resident in a parish for five years. Scottish paupers could be allowed to stay in a parish if supported by remittances from their parish of birth, but English or Irish paupers were forcibly removed. The Irish were particularly severely dealt with. Edinburgh and Dundee refused to give them relief whenever possible, and when they had to, the rates of relief were always below that given to the local population.
For the successful local claimant, rates varied across the country, but the average was between 1 shilling sixpence and 3 shillings per week. One calculation showed that for Edinburgh in 1867, 90 per cent of families on poor relief had only 1 shilling left after rent to pay for food, clothing and fuel. The rates were miserly because the poor law was intended to deter people from claiming.
But who were the poor? According to the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws of 1909, 83 per cent of those claiming poor relief in Scotland in March 1906 were women and children. Widows made up the majority of female claimants. So, the most vulnerable sections of Scottish society were the least provided for, but their ranks could be multiplied many times over during periods of economic depressions, with even skilled male workers thrown on hard times.
The Highland Clearances: The Second Wave
The speed of industrialisation and its impact on Scotland were profound, but there were equally profound changes taking place in agriculture over the course of the 19th century. These changes led to decreasing numbers of people employed on the land. In the Lowlands, the process of depopulation hardly produced any discontent, but the same could not be said of the Scottish Highlands.
The Highland Clearances had begun in the 18th century and gathered pace in the early decades of the 19th century, when peasants were forcibly removed from the land to make way for sheep (see Chapter 13). The brutality of the evictions, particularly those carried out on the Sutherland estates, are still remembered by the peoples of the Highlands and their descendants across the world. They’re interpreted as an act of greed on the part of the ruling class – it acted to protect its wealth and power at the expense of the people. Thus, the whole episode is fraught with emotion and consistently provokes people to take sides.
The displaced peasantry was resettled on coastal areas on small plots of land, known as
crofts,
which were uneconomic from the start and forced crofters to find additional ways of making a living (see Chapter 13). The living was precarious and, as in Ireland, the people were highly dependent on the potato as the main source of nourishment. When the potato crop failed in the mid-1840s, the result was famine. This began what is known as the ‘second wave’ of Clearance.
The famine was not on the same scale as it was in Ireland, thanks to the intervention of civil society in Scotland. The free market principle upheld by the government meant that state interference was limited, but the charitable body – the Central Relief Board – averted a potential human tragedy of immense proportions.
Famine created the opportunity for the landowners to remove the surplus population from the land. The Highlands and Islands Emigration Society was set up to oversee the process of resettlement. Under the scheme, a landlord could secure a passage to Australia for a nominee at the cost of £1. Between 1846 and 1857, around 16,533 people of the poorest types, mainly young men, were assisted to emigrate. The greatest loss occurred in the islands, (particularly Skye, Mull and the Long Island), as well as the mainland parishes of the I
The main phase of Clearance was over by the mid-1850s, but there were still unresolved issues that flamed into all-out confrontation and violence in the 1880s – popularly known as the Crofters’ Wars. What caused these confrontations? In a word: desperation.
Opportunities to earn additional income dried up with the collapse of the herring industry. In the 1870s the herring industry drew in migrants with as many as 5,000 men and women arriving in the fishing ports of Caithness and Aberdeenshire during the catching season.
The harvests in 1881 and 1882 were poor.
Agricultural prices were falling due to a depression in the 1870s that forced landowners to put a squeeze on rents.
Cheaper wool and lamb imports from New Zealand and Australia were making sheep farming unprofitable in the Scottish Highlands.
The ‘war’ began on Skye in April 1882 when crofting families obstructed the sheriff’s officer, backed by 50 Glasgow policemen, sent to enforce rent increases and carry out evictions. This became known as the ‘Battle of the Braes’. From there, land raids were initiated on the Isle of Lewis. The events attracted widespread interest and support was forthcoming from the Lowlands in the form of the Highland Land Law Reform Association, which boasted a membership of 15,000 in 160 branches.
The Highland Land Law Reform Association did a lot to raise awareness of the plight of the crofters and successfully politicised the issues of land ownership. Under pressure from the public and the election of five crofting members of Parliament (MPs) in 1885, the government did two things:
It sent in a boatload of marines because it feared that there would be a breakdown of law and order, as had happened in Ireland.
It set up the Napier Commission to look into the ‘condition of the crofters and cottars in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland’.
The Napier Commission recommendations were legislated on in 1886. The legislation provided for the three F’s:
Fixity of tenure
Free sale
Fair rents
Although between 1886 and 1950, more than 2,700 new crofts were created and a further 5,160 were enlarged, it did nothing to relieve tensions. Land raids and rent strikes continued in the Highlands well into the 1920s. It also did nothing to affect the rate of depopulation. In 1831, the population of the Highlands reached a peak of 200,955, or 8.5 per cent of the total population of Scotland; 100 years later, it was only 2.6 per cent. Education proved a far more effective way of ‘clearing’ people than eviction.
In Search of Democracy
Chapter 13 ends with the passing of the so-called ‘Great Reform Act’, which if measured in the number of new voters was a severe disappointment. But the Great Reform Act heralded the possibility of further reform, even if many people at the time thought that the franchise question was over because all property was now represented in Parliament. The 15,000 men who marched in Edinburgh in celebration at its passing watched by a crowd of 50,000 to 60,000 were of that opinion. However, that did not take into account the working class, many of whom had been active in the struggle for democracy since the 1790s.