The Silent Weaver (12 page)

The hospital had grown and grown. In 1947, the first full year of Angus MacPhee's residence and a year before it was taken over by the new British National Health Service, Inverness District Asylum was renamed Craig Dunain Hospital. It had 852 patients.

In the light of new diagnostics in the post-war years another comparative analysis was made of Highland mental illness. It turned out that if admissions to Craig Dunain were credible, Highlanders' mental health was still twice as bad as the Scottish average. There were in the Highlands and Islands proportionately fewer paranoiacs and fewer manic depressives than in the rest of the country. But there were more neurotics and more hysterics. There were three times as many alcoholics and almost seven times as many melancholics. ‘The Highland
temperament,' said Dr Martin Whittet ruefully, ‘has a gifted capacity for the gay as well as the grave occasion.'

While the population of the Highlands fell, the population of Craig Dunain grew. In 1901 there were 352,371 people in the crofting counties of the Scottish Highlands and Islands, and 583 people in Inverness District Asylum. In 1961 there were 277,948 people in the Highlands, and 1,051 people in Craig Dunain Hospital. It was not a question of transference – the missing people did not all move into dormitory wards on the south slope of Dunain Hill. But a community and its ancient culture were draining away, which makes them difficult statistics to ignore. While the population of the region fell by 20 per cent, the population of the hospital grew by 80 per cent. At the beginning of the twentieth century 0.16 per cent of the Highland population was registered as mentally ill. By the middle of the century, almost 0.4 per cent was in Craig Dunain. There was either an unusually generous admissions policy at the old Inverness Asylum, or there were causal connections to be made elsewhere.

Only in schizophrenia, that most universal of illnesses, was there some equivalence. In the whole of Scotland in the middle of the twentieth century, 50 people in every 100,000 were annually diagnosed as schizophrenic. At the same time, each year on average 65 out of every 100,000 Highlanders were referred with schizophrenia to Craig Dunain Hospital, in what a contemporary psychiatrist called ‘the somatic and medicinal era of Cardiozol, insulin, electro-shock . . . and various brands of tranquillisers and antidepressants'.

Craig Dunain had itself expanded sideways to meet the ballooning demand for places. In 1903 the Inverness District Board of Lunacy had bought Kinmylies Farm for the asylum.
It was a substantial acquisition. Kinmylies was a mansion house with outbuildings and 200 acres adjoining the northern boundary of the asylum grounds. The board bought it for £17,000 as a working farm, including ‘stock, crop, implements and valuations'.

Twenty-nine years later, in 1932, the hospital's population had risen to 750 and the board paid £4,000 for Milend Farm, another 117 acres of good arable land adjacent to Kinmylies. A neighbouring croft was added in 1944, and by the time that Angus MacPhee arrived there the hospital's farming estate amounted to 400 acres.

Its function was both practical and medical. The farmhouse and other buildings provided extra accommodation for the growing asylum. Many if not most of the hospital's male inmates came from rural communities and were accustomed to agricultural labour. Farm managers were brought in from outside, but at its peak 200 male patients worked on Kinmylies Farm and ‘great stress . . . was placed at that time on the therapeutic value of the occupation of patients on regular open air employment'.

Their employment was of course unpaid. The superintendent of Inverness District Asylum at the time of the initial purchase in 1903, Dr John Keay, ‘said he did not wish to speak of the profit likely to be derived from Kinmylies', but in the middle of the twentieth century the hospital's treasurer wrote that the farm provided Craig Dunain Hospital ‘with the bulk of its requirements of milk, eggs, poultry, potatoes and vegetables'.

Angus MacPhee was lodged in the farm ward and put to work with the animals. His knowledge of horses and cattle in particular was quickly noted and utilised. ‘He was very, very good, Angus,' said the farm manager Jock MacKay. ‘He knew
everything about the farm, and he didn't need any supervising. See, they could put him away to a job himself, and he would do it. You know, that was his style.'

He got up in the morning at 7 a.m., ate his breakfast and went out to the fields. He returned for meals. His appetite was always good – ‘Angus enjoys his food and eats anything.' He smoked roll-up cigarettes but was never discovered to suffer from a respiratory ailment. He read newspapers. His nurses were occasionally irritated by such of his bachelor habits as stuffing his coat pockets with ‘rubbish'. At night he was given a tot of whisky which, it was noted, ‘relaxed him'. He did not ‘express emotion at all'. He went to bed between 9 p.m. and 10 p.m. He slept well.

After supper, rather than join his fellow patients in their armchairs and doze away the evening, he went outside again. There he did something unusual. ‘Very untidy,' said a nurse's report. ‘Takes grass and leaves into ward, these he makes into ropes, socks, etc.'

‘Patient continues his weaving activities,' said others. ‘Keeps himself busy outside weaving grass and leaves.'

‘Continues to go about the grounds gathering long grass to make into various things.'

‘Out in hospital grounds most of the day. Still makes weird and wonderful objects from grass he collects. Has to be reminded not to bring it into ward.'

‘Still making things with straw. Very talented with this.'

‘Quite happy working with his grass designs.'

‘He spends his time walking round the grounds,' reported a consultant psychiatrist, ‘making rope from the long grasses which he pulls. Sometimes he fashions these grass ropes into other items. This is quite a unique “craft” which he is interested in and spends hours at it.'

Angus MacPhee strolled quietly in the gloaming through the farm estate, plucking and weaving grass with his fingers. He would never publicly acknowledge it, but he began to make into an art form the dying traditions of the island which he had lost and found and then lost again.

‘What is found quite frequently in schizophrenia,' said Dr Joanne Sutherland, ‘is a loss of the sense of self, a loss of the ego boundary. This is very tormenting, and it is real suffering, when people feel this. And sometimes it's evidenced by them doing things that are an attempt to sort of find themselves and find their identity – re-find it, really.'

In weaving grass, Angus MacPhee was doing something that helped him to relocate his identity. He was self-medicating – he had discovered a singular form of therapeutic treatment. He found an activity that calmed him and even made him happy. Whatever his creations became, that is how they were born, and that is how he personally perceived them for the rest of his life.

The fear and insecurity inherent in his condition caused him to turn back with yearning to the last time that he had been content within himself. That was in South Uist in the late 1930s, before the call-up came and before he rode off to Beauly, Nottinghamshire and the Faroe Islands. There were not many features of Uist life that could be recaptured on a hillside near Inverness, but weaving grass was one of them. It also satisfied another demand. Other sufferers attest that restless fidgeting can be an irritating symptom of simple schizophrenia. Weaving kept his hands constantly busy. He very soon discovered that it also engaged, to the exclusion of almost everything else, his mind and his imagination.

‘He wouldn't talk to anyone in the ward,' said Jock MacKay.
‘He would go in Kinmylies House, get his meal, come out, and start gathering all the different things that, you know, the grasses, and then he would weave them. He did it, and that was that.'

Nothing survives and little is known of what Angus MacPhee wove from grass and leaves and snagged tufts of sheep's wool during his first 30 years at Craig Dunain Hospital. Almost all of it rotted into compost beneath the trees and the holly and rhododendron bushes where he stowed his work in progress and his finished items, or they were raked up and burned by himself and other farmworkers. For the rest of his life he put no artistic or other value on his unique creations. He was not weaving for recognition. What ego, what sense of self he had was too fragile and too precious to be spent on the products of his recreation. He would not and probably could not explain why he was weaving. He was simply compelled to do it, with increasing imagination, ambition and ability as the months and years rolled by. There was, during his lifetime, a label and a premium put by connoisseurs, academics and other artists on his form of creativity, but Angus MacPhee knew nothing of that and would not have been interested if he had known. When in the twenty-first century Henry Cockburn resumed painting and drawing as a therapy for his schizophrenia, his father Patrick noted that none of his ‘dark and chaotic graphics' survived, ‘because Henry was developing a habit of spontaneously giving his drawings away'.

Angus probably began as he would continue, by weaving from fresh green meadow grass the contents of the wardrobe of a stylish and very large man with many different vocations and interests.

‘He made a cap, you know,' said Jock MacKay, ‘like a captain
on a ship, and he made a coat, a swallow-tailed coat, and he made trousers, and he made boots, and he made gloves.'

Robert Polson was a young assistant gardener at Craig Dunain in the 1970s. ‘Angus was an interesting character because he stood out,' he said. ‘There were some aspects of mental illness that they still couldn't get to grips with, and Angus was part of that. He was just so distant. He passed you, he wouldn't speak, he wouldn't look at you, it was almost like you weren't there and he wasn't there in a sense either.

‘He was a tall, thin, distinguished-looking character. I seem to recollect him in a dark-brown tweed sort of suit, his own clothes. He wore his own hats most of the time, the ones he made of straw. They varied from, like Panama hats, to peaked caps, to American baseball-type, sometimes a straw fore-andaft, sometimes one of the flat-peaked caps that old gentlemen used to wear . . . I think I saw him wearing his grass boots once or twice. It may have been that he wore them on top of welly boots.'

The hospital groundsman Ian McLellan told the film-maker Nick Higgins in 2004:

Sometimes you would meet him [indoors] in the corridor, but you knew he was on his way out. This was his garden here, his workshop. He spent all the time in here.

And his work was . . . all over here. That wee cherry tree there, there would be bits hanging over the bough of the tree there. But you were so used to seeing bits all over the place. You would speak to him, but you would get no acknowledgement from him, at all, he would just carry on, carry on weaving. The main path here is getting all overgrown now, but he had all his own little routes through these bushes. The feeling of this place . . . you just feel he's still around here.

The ‘bits' were lengths of multiple-plaited grass which Angus made, and then hung on bushes or branches or dropped on the ground behind him, as he walked the grounds. Gathered up later, those strips of rope would be the building blocks for his grander items. They would be coiled and interwoven into trousers (with a belt), jackets, waders, boots, pouches and a hundred other biodegradable fantasies.

‘Have you seen the way he did it?' asked his nephew Iain Campbell. ‘He plaited it, and then wound a bit in to tie all the plaits together. He'd very nimble fingers. It wasn't easy, what he was doing, especially when he was sewing it up. He would make a plait, a big bit, and then he would make a very thin plait, and he would sew it all together with the thinner plait.'

As Jock MacKay and Robert Polson observed, headwear was a speciality. Angus MacPhee made serious hats and funny hats. He made peaked caps and caps with earflaps, top hats, hunting bonnets and the ship's captain's tricorne seen by the farm manager. He made a Davy Crockett hat, and a hat described by nurses who saw it before it rotted or was burned as ‘stunning, like a sunburst'.

The sunburst effect was achieved because Angus MacPhee's raw materials were plants in bloom. He wove meadow flowers as red, pink and blue highlights into the emerald green fabric of his jumpers, boots and hats. When the creation survived, its colours faded. After a few months, if they were lucky enough to escape the bonfires, his constructions dried out and turned from soft green grass into brittle brown and yellow straw. It was by definition disposable, auto-destructible art, like a sketch made in the soil before an approaching plough, or an elaborate sandcastle built below the high-water mark.

‘And then it all vanished,' said Joyce Laing, the art therapist who discovered Angus MacPhee's work in 1977. ‘He'd started it
when he came in, he'd been doing it since he came in. I'm sure I missed the best, because when he was younger he'd have been quicker and better at it. Some of the nurses told us, “You know he made like an opera coat with tails?” Of course, we never found anything like that. But I'd have loved to . . .'

Because of the mess it made in the wards, Angus MacPhee was after several years banned from weaving grass indoors at Craig Dunain. But he was allowed to knit inside with more usual fabrics. He gathered clumps of sheep's wool from the fences around the farm. He handspun this unpromising fluff into yarn – a manual process which itself would later be described and become admired as ‘fibre art'. He teased out and twisted with his fingers the rough wool until it became threads of yarn. Using two pieces of wire broken from a fence, he then knitted vests and handkerchiefs and scarves and other items, most of which have long been lost and forgotten. Several of the shreds of wool were stained with bright herd markings, and those colours were carefully knitted into the garments.

‘So he sat on the edge of his bed at night weaving wool,' said Joyce Laing. ‘And he spun, until he got lengths of wool. He got two wires, knitting wires, and he sat with these wires. I thought he'd be knitting, but I've been told by a professional knitter that he was netting, because he'd been taught how to net for the fish. They put them down for these flat fish in Uist which are silly enough to go into nets, so he knew how to make nets. He was making undergarments, vests, and mufflers, squares that looked like hankies – all from sheep's wool. He kept the sheep marking on it – it gave a punch to it, you know.'