‘Treasa Tuath na Tighnearna; The People are Mightier than a Lord’

In July 1906, ten men from Barra loaded some cattle onto small boats and rowed them across a stretch of sea to the neighbouring island of Vatersay. The cattle were released on the island and left to graze freely and roam. This marked the beginning of the men’s occupation of the island and their intention to reclaim it for self-subsistence, as their grandparents and generations before them had previously done. The move was interpreted with all due severity –as the symbol of an incoming occupation- and the cattle were promptly rounded up by the island’s only tenant farmer and held hostage in his cow pen, only to be released upon receipt of a fine, though the raiders simply ignored this and freed them on their own accord. In response, the tenant farmer again rounded up the cattle and returned them on boats to Barra, though by 8pm the same day the men had reciprocated the deed and by nightfall the cattle were back on Vatersay again. For weeks the cattle found themselves being rowed back and forth between the two islands, having become tokens of a battle over what the Vatersay soil was to be used for and by whom, in a conflict that spanned many years beyond the initial cattle dispute and triangulated between the tenant farmer, the raiders and an aristocrat landlady.

The tribulations of some cattle in a rural dispute from over 100 years ago may seem somewhat farcical, however the power relations at play in the story are fundamentally the same power struggles we witness time and time again, as people seek to meet their material needs under the maniacal shadow of capitalism. We can see the same relations here as whenever the dispossessed, tenants or unpropertied masses face the propertied classes who control our access to food and shelter. What is useful about the events of the Vatersay story is that it reads somewhat like a pantomime, making the injustices of capitalism delightfully easy to read and allowing the structural roles played by each party to be more theatrically illuminated than is often the case. So please do read on and take as much (pained) delight in the pantomime as I have.

After two years of illegally living off the land, the ten men faced prosecution by the Edinburgh Court of Session for their occupation of Vatersay. It was the culmination of a conflict between opposing parties who had distinct and irredeemable claims to make upon the island. The ten men held a physical relationship to the land, eking out a living from growing crofting plots and grazing a few sheep, in contrast to the opposing party whose relationship to the land was legal. Lady Gordon Cathcart had inherited Vatersay in 1878 alongside other Outer Hebridean islands and swathes of Aberdeenshire, making the soil beneath the crofters’ feet her property under the technical auspices of the law. She herself had not stepped foot on the land since 1878 and decisions about the land were issued, without a hint of self-aware irony, from her castle in Aberdeenshire. Aspects of the story such as this are almost satirical, were it not for the fact that they actually took place and were not merely the imagined figments of a parodic tale.

Throughout the account of the Vatersay Raiders, the contrast between the two traditions (the peasant self-subsistence tradition, and the aristocratic and capitalist tradition) reappear over and over on stark display, giving air to all the rituals and symbolic displays that have been developed under each tradition as to legitimise themselves. As a consequence, the Vatersay events play out in a series of absurd and somewhat theatrical oppositions, letting some of the tragi-comic theatre that underpins any claims to the ownership of natural materials become visible. What does it mean to own the land? Does it mean something to grow potatoes from its soil? To sell the sheep that feed from it? To have your ancestors buried in that soil? To hold a piece of formally-decorated paper that links your name to the plot of land? How can we establish which claim to possession is truer, or which claim is more worthwhile? Which testimony holds more validity within the structure of contemporary society, both ours and theirs?

As the legal owner, Lady Gordon Cathcart was bestowed with the power to call the men to court for their occupation of the land. They had never before been travelled beyond the fishing ports that line Scotland’s western coast, nor did they own clothes appropriate for the urban metropoles, so their travels, legal ceremonies and eventual imprisonment were all carried out whilst clothed in their fishing-wear. Furthermore, the initial court hearings were delayed upon receipt of a letter sent by the accused, the men having written to the court saying that they had no access to money to pay for the train that would bring them from Oban to Edinburgh. The court was rearranged, and the prosecuting party, Lady Gordon Cathcart, who was the single person responsible for bringing forward the criminal charges and thus the whole court affair, dipped into her pocket to ensure that the men could be transported to the place where the charges could be brought down upon them. Though the historical record is unclear, it is likely she also paid for their train fares home again once they had completed their two-month prison sentence.

The Vatersay men traced their story back to 1850, when their grandparents and great-grandparents had been cleared from Vatersay by Lady Gordon Cathcart’s father-in-law, either having been pushed to the neighbouring island of Barra (also owned by Lady Cathcart) or to the colonial frontiers of America and Canada. For them, their occupation of Vatersay was simply a re-occupation, in response to the traumas of the Highland Clearances and the subsequent over-congestion of the islands that remained populated by crofters and cottars (a new class of landless peasants who had been generated by the overcrowding of the land, they had no crofts of their own for self-subsistence). The land mass was not sufficient to provide subsistence for the crofting population who grew in number with every new generation, making the pains of the clearances pointedly felt despite the decades that had since passed.

As legal owner of the island, Lady Gordon Cathcart held the legal right to choose how the land would be used. The entire island was rented to a single farmer for use as a sheep farm for the purpose of earning her a secure and stable income from rent. Despite population excesses and overcrowding across the neighbouring islands, literally leading to the creation of the new landless class ‘cottars’, Lady Gordon Cathcart remained resolute in her decision to keep this economic model and forbade the development of any crofts on the islands, despite many years of local petitioning. She wrote in response to the requests-and please do hold in mind that this would have been written from her Aberdeenshire castle, having not have visited the island in 28 years- ‘I am intimately acquainted with the local conditions and the influences that have been in operation and I have come to conclusion that it would be a great mistake to plant a crofter population in the isolated island of Vatersay’. This led to the men moving onto the island illegally in 1906 and managing their own survival through crofting, fishing and the maintenance of a few animals per family.  

The conservative media looked on in terror at what they saw as ‘landlords being held victim by a host of Hebridean delinquents’ through their ‘gross violation of the law’. The Scotsman even went as far as to plead for the use of gunboats in defence of Lady Gordon Cathcart’s property rights, affirming that the government’s slow response was a failure to vindicate the law and was leading to epidemic of highland raids and law-breaking. 

Which brings to mind the question -what the hell is the law if not just declarations on paper that protect other declarations on paper, the declaration that someone’s house or land is officially private property for example? 

This call for law and order reifies ‘the Law’ into a sublime and inalienable entity, as if it is a deific being living in a realm beyond time or space. The law’s reification is reiterated throughout history, most famously in Nixon, Reagan and Clinton’s clamours for law and order as a justification for the vast expansion of the prison industrial complex in USA, though it is pertinent that the ideology suffuses across the history of capitalist modernity, even down to the defence of a 3.75 square mile island from a handful of crofting families.

This way of idealising the law wilfully ignores how it is only legitimised by a self-serving series of documents, stamps, signatures, symbolically grand rituals and institutional gestures. Could the fact of growing potatoes from the land legitimise a claim to that land, in the same way that the legal documents legitimise Lady Gordon Cathcart’s claim to the land? How is it that we have come to naturalise one claim to the land as the default, over any other claim to the land? How is it that housing is interpreted through the lens of property and is thus seen as a site of financial investment rather than as a form of necessary shelter, allowing property rights to triumph over the right to shelter in the case of the many homes that stand empty across Scotland? We can see the same stranglehold on land and shelter, under the legal term ‘property’, across Scotland. And at the same time people have been continuously pushing back against this property behemoth, squatting both land and buildings, as in this case of the Vatersay raiders amongst an unknowable number of others. There are some well-known cases, such as the occupation of Kinning Park complex (1996) or Govanhill Baths (2001) in Glasgow, and others that are less known, such as the squatting of an opulent terraced house on Queens Crescent in 2018, and likewise there are the countless cases that have slipped by undocumented, be that the many other land raids that were sweeping across the highlands and islands at the turn of the century or the occupation of disused buildings/sites by homeless persons or traveller communities. All of the cases allow the behemoth to be challenged.