The Silent Weaver

 

Roger Hutchinson is an award-winning author and journalist. After working as an editor in London, in 1977 he joined the
West Highland Free Press
in Skye. Since then he has published fifteen books. He is now a columnist for the
WHFP
, and a book reviewer for
The Scotsman
. His book
The Soap Man
(Birlinn 2003) was shortlisted for the Saltire Scottish Book of the Year (2004) and the bestselling
Calum's Road
(2007) was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature's Ondaatje Prize.

Preface

1  The Horse Soldiers

2  Tir a' Mhurain

3  The Rocky Hill of the Bird

4  Self-medicating

5  A Rare State of Purity

6  The Reluctant Exhibitor

7  Another Age

Notes

Bibliography

The life of Angus MacPhee seems at times more like fiction than fact – it is difficult not to be reminded of the epic Gaelic stories which were still told in his childhood by old men before peat fires over four or five consecutive nights.

A boy from an island far out in the western ocean, who learned antique traditions before riding away on his horse to become a soldier, who experienced a transformational crisis, who then maintained an almost Trappist silence for the rest of his long life while weaving items that nobody understood from the produce of the fields and woods, before burning them. It sounds like a medieval legend, or a flight of fancy better left to a magical realist. In the twentieth century it seems purely fantastic.

But the facts are true. The story of Angus MacPhee wanders down several captivating country lanes. The tenacious old ways of Celtic Britain; the deracination of a remote and insular culture. The under-celebrated adventures of the Lovat Scouts during the Second World War; the drama of remote islanders being sent to garrison islands even more remote than their own. The scandals and achievements of mental health theory and treatment in the second half of the twentieth century; the troublesome and influential realisations of Outsider Art. The possibility of redemption through creativity; the love of family and place . . .

That is the story of a man who was thought to drift through
his own life like an aimless ghost. It is true that Angus MacPhee was robbed of control and direction for a period in his youth. It is also true that he steadily, wilfully won back his character, his substance, and ultimately the place that he loved; the place that for half a century he can only have seen in dreams, but that had inspired the burnt offerings which he made twice a year throughout his adulthood.

One of the many mysteries surrounding Angus MacPhee's handmade filigrees of grass, leaves and flowers is that none of them survive as they originally appeared and few of them survive at all. To a large extent we can only guess at his achievements.

The creations of what must have been his prime between 1946 and 1977 – those fabled patterns of bright green grass and spring blossoms, the gloves and swallow-tailed coats and hats like sunbursts – were all, with the artist's consent if not active cooperation, cremated or composted.

Even those that were saved after 1977 were soon distorted and made colourless by the passing of the seasons. Like classical statuary, or forgotten frescos in the eaves of some Calabrian chapel, their verdant beryls, blues, yellows and reds have all been naturally, inevitably reduced to different shades of brown.

But they impress us even in their deterioration, and that is curious. Are we projecting? Is our imagination allowed too free a rein, so we appreciate not something that actually was, but something as we wish it to have been? Is it a freak show – are we wondering not at the quality of an object, but that it was made at all by a mentally handicapped Gael and former mounted soldier from the Western Isles?

It doesn't matter. During an extraordinary life Angus MacPhee made idiosyncratic objects with unique skills. It is no
longer important how we or the critics value them; whether they are described as art, craft or therapy. Their originator was always above and beyond all that, and his weavings have joined him. As he wasted no time giving them marks out of ten, nor need we.

They are in a different place and should be seen from another perspective. The few of his creations that have been preserved are what anthropologists call survivals. They have not only survived from the 1970s and 1980s. They are in essence much older than that. They are living relics of a lost world. They are atavisms. They are like nothing else in twenty-first-century Europe.

They are also symbols of another survival: the endurance, against terrible odds, of the indomitable wit and spirit of Angus MacPhee. That is why we gape.

I would like to thank Angus MacPhee's nephew and niece, Iain Campbell and Eilidh Shaw, for their time and their invaluable help, and Joyce Laing for guiding me patiently through the long story of her own and Angus MacPhee's involvement in Art Extraordinary. Without those three people I could not have written this book. Any errors are of course mine, not theirs.

Neither are errors the fault of any of these men and women. . . thanks also to Jackie Agnew, Patrick Cockburn, Maggie Cunningham, Wilma Duncan, Shona Grant, George Hendry, Nick Higgins, Brian Johnstone, Iain MacDonald, the late Jimmy ‘Apples' Macdonald, Father Michael J. MacDonald, Morag MacDonald, Roddy ‘Poker' MacDonald, Alasdair Maceachen, Joan Macintyre, Calum MacKenzie, Chris Mackenzie, Linsey MacKenzie, Tommy MacKenzie, Cailean MacLean, Norman ‘Curly' MacLeod, John McNaught, Donald
John MacPherson, Dougie MacPherson, MacTV, Chris Meecham, Mary Miers, Donnie Munro, Rob Polson, Andrew Wiseman and Gus Wylie.

And finally, thanks to Hugh Andrew, Andrew Simmons, Jim Hutcheson, Jan Rutherford and all at Birlinn, to my editor Anita Joseph, and to my agent Stan of Jenny Brown Associates.

Roger Hutchinson
Raasay, 2011

‘Here's to . . . we never have to do it again.'

Early in September 1939, riders in battledress cantered down a broad, grassy plain on the western edge of Europe. The young men of Uist were going to war again.

They went in the high hundreds from islands whose populations numbered only a few thousand. Crofting families in the Scottish Hebrides were big families, with a surplus of men in their late teens and twenties to offer to the army and the navy.

Over sixty years later an elderly lady, a sister of one of the men of 1939, would gaze from one end of her small South Uist village to the other. In a still, calm voice she recalled how the girl she had been watched the youths depart from every single croft.

‘Two people from that house, somebody from that house,' she said. ‘Angus from this house, Father MacQueen's middle brother from that house, two boys from that house . . . They all went the day when war broke out. It was a great adventure for them. They all loved going.'

Some walked to muster, some sailed and some took their horses. The crofters and fishermen of the Outer Hebrides had been for decades willing recruits to the Territorial Army and the Royal Naval Reserve. Drill halls were established in North Uist, Benbecula and South Uist. Teenage boys with few other recreations joined up, learned to parade and do press-ups, and were rewarded by annual excursions to mainland summer camps.

‘It was the best way for getting a fortnight's holiday away from the island and enjoying yourselves,' said one Uist man. ‘I don't think it was patriotism. For some it might have been, but not as far as I was concerned. The other boys went, and you all went for a fortnight to camp and had a good time.'

Most of those army reservists went from Uist early in September 1939 to be infantrymen in the Cameron Highlanders. But some, a self-consciously select minority, rode off to be horse soldiers with the Lovat Scouts. They were a military anachronism in 1939, but they could not be expected to recognise it. They and their animals were the last representatives of an equestrian culture which had flourished on the greensward of western Uist for millennia.

As they rode to war they skirted mile after mile of ground which their people had turned over for grains and root vegetables using horse-drawn ploughs. They passed over the arenas for popular horse races in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They led their mounts through communities which had not yet been colonised by the motor car, the lorry and the tractor.

They rode from all parts of the three distinct islands of North Uist, Benbecula and South Uist. Some districts contributed more horse soldiers than others, by virtue of
their greater reliance on horses in everyday crofting life and consequently their superior horsemanship.

One such district was Iochdar at the north end of South Uist. ‘The horses in Iochdar were famous throughout the Uists,' said a local priest. ‘The Iochdar people have always had the reputation of being “big farmers” and the horses were the most important farm animals. They had to be fed first – every type of croft or farm work depended on them.'

The young Lovat Scouts who rode out of Iochdar on 4 September 1939 included a tall, shy, quietly spoken 24-year-old named Angus Joseph MacPhee – the older brother of that girl who, decades later, would point out one by one the homes of the mobilised men.