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The weekend picture
Poetry corner
Quote of the day
Rear Window
Current top bores
The daily horoscope
The weekend picture
Poetry corner
Quote of the day
Rear Window
Current top bores
The daily horoscope
The weekend picture
Poetry corner
Quote of the day
Rear Window
Current top bores
The daily horoscope
Unknown to each other, three SR contributors ended up in the same city on the same day attending the same event. What do they remember of the occasion?
[1]
The human chain that links us
Steven Mallon
[2]
The unifying force missing
in Scotland
Douglas Marr
[3]
But all is not radical sweetness
and light
Brian Fitzpatrick
[1]
The human chain that links us
Steven Mallon
[2]
The unifying force missing
in Scotland
Douglas Marr
[3]
But all is not radical sweetness
and light
Brian Fitzpatrick
Let me begin with the foundation of Lews Castle College in Stornoway. Four people met in a room in Stornoway in 1950. They had a dilemma that most of us will never face.
They were part-owners, amidst thousands of others, of a castle – i.e. a castle which had been bequeathed by Lord Leverhulme in the 1920s to a local community trust; and they were unsure in 1950 what do with their castle. It was a castle with a controversial past: having been built by Sir James Matheson in the 19th century. He is currently described on a poster outside the castle itself as ‘an astute trader’. That, I suppose, is indeed one way of describing the biggest and most notorious drug-dealer of the 19th century: for he was responsible for importing vast quantities of opium from India into China. This was a man who, with his business partner Jardine, induced the British government to declare war on China to keep his trade going.
These four people in 1950 eventually reached a conclusion: ‘Let us make this castle a place of learning’. And that is how Lews Castle College UHI (now part of the University of the Highlands and Islands) began. Wise people these four were; and their advice was significant in persuading the Stornoway Trust and Ross and Cromarty education authority to establish a college. Out of a building financed from the fruits of infamy, they created an institution for good.
The island of Lewis already had the Nicolson Institute, a school which in 1898 had for the first time acquired the power to send students directly into university. Two students went to university that year, the first two out of many thousands to follow. One of these two, Robert M Maciver, records in his autobiography how he departed from Stornoway on the midnight steamer, knowing that he would never return to live again in Stornoway. (That was one of the side-effects of much advanced education in rural Scotland: it created a good to be exported, not a good for local communities or even for Scotland as a whole.)
Maciver indeed did not return to Stornoway, except on holiday (during one of which he and his father, in 1913, drove the first Ford Model T in Lewis on what is now Stornoway Airport): he had gone to study in Edinburgh and in Oxford; and then in 1913 was already into an illustrious academic career in Aberdeen, then Toronto and then New York.