John Prebble (1915-2001) appears to be a 'marmite' character amongst Scottish historians. In the early 1980s the Historiographer Royal, the late Professor Gordon Donaldson of Edinburgh University, described Pebble's work as utter rubbish. More recently, Tom Devine, the Scottish academic and author, argued that there was no evidence of any original research in Prebble's book, it relied on late nineteenth century accounts, and was politically motivated. Devine called it 'a sort of faction' - a mixture of fact and fiction. (I will be listening to Devine on Sir Walter Scott at the Caledonian Club in London in September - I may well slant a question at him!) Perhaps his comment on political motivation holds one key to the appraisal of Prebble's works. Brian Wilson (b.1948), the ex-Labour politician who served in Blair's government, wrote a long appreciation of Prebble in 2001, a few days after the latter's death. He wrote: Particular recognition is due to John Prebble for his massive contribution to popular awareness, at home and abroad, of Highland history and the unwelcome challenge which this presented to Scottish academic historians. There is no doubt that Prebble did more than any individual to restore recognition of the brutal forces, largely generated from within Scotland itself (I shall return to this further on), which had driven Gaelic society to the verge of destruction...
Prebble's own early life and career explains much. Although born in Edmonton, Middlesex, he emigrated with his parents to the predominantly 'Scottish' township of Sutherland in rural Saskatchewan, Canada . Only there for a short time, he learned through family lore of the Battle of Culloden and the later Highland emigration to Canada, Australia and elsewhere. Returning to England, he became a journalist in 1934 and also joined the Communist Party (leaving it after the War). He wrote seven works of fiction between 1944 and 1959, but it was his first big success - The High Girders (1956), a description of the 1879 Tay Bridge Disaster - which cemented his interest in nineteenth century Scottish history. So by the time he came to write The Highland Clearances, it was no real surprise that the book turned out as it did. Family lore, a left-wing slant, a novelist and journalist style and approach and, most recently (as a result of a visit to Culloden in the 1950s), his first book of what was to become the Fire and Sword trilogy - Culloden (1961. As an aside, I was interested to read that Prebble was not only the co-scriptwriter for the movie Zulu (1964), but was also a contributor to the TV series The Six Wives of Henry VIII (1970), Elizabeth R (1971) and The Borgias (1981), and the adapter of John Buchan's The Three Hostages for television in 1977.
The Highland Clearances describes in awful detail the usually heartless actions of the lairds and their factors against their tenants. There were two main periods: 1782-1820 - which included what became known as The Year of the Sheep in 1792 and The Year of the Burnings in 1814. Neither were pleasant, but neither were the cholera epidemic in 1832 and widespread famine condition in 1836. The speed and scale of the seizures of land (and brutal expulsion of the peasants from their homes) increased markedly after the 1820s until the 1850s - the second period. Prebble makes it very clear in his Introduction as to his objective in writing the book: This book, then, is the story of how the Highlanders were deserted and then betrayed. It concerns itself with people, how sheep were preferred to them, and how bayonet, truncheon and fire were used to drive them from their homes... More than a shade of Thomas More in his Utopia: your sheep...be become so great devourers and so wild, that they eat up, and swallow down the very men themselves. I felt, occasionally, that Prebble was repetitive, but, surely, that was the tragedy - the tsunami of sheep kept on repeating itself, until, later on in some areas, they were replaced by a deluge of deer.
Prebble's account, if not quite a polemic, is certainly partisan. His attacks on the Dukes and Duchesses of Sutherland and their factors, such as Patrick Sellar and James Loch, are furious and sustained. He has near contempt for the famous American authoress, Harriet Beecher Stowe, in her support of the second Duchess. He gives ample space, and tacit backing, to the main opponents of the Clearances - Donald Macleod, Donald Ross, David Stewart of Garth and the eccentric, Thomas Muloch, who deserves a book to himself! The journalism in him ensures that Prebble writes good 'copy'. He also makes it clear, to their detriment, that many of the Scottish Ministers of religion worked hand-in-glove with the factors to drive their flock off their land. Several were rewarded with upgraded Manses and extra/improved glebe. However, Prebble was equally forthright in pointing out that the Clearances were invariably executed by Scottish high heid yins, especially aristocrats. Sections of the labour and trade union bureaucracy and the SNP attempted to focus working class opposition in Scotland to job losses and social inequality along nationalist lines. Prebble's work was used to encourage the view that England suppressed Scotland (it is remarkably effective these days) - but they (deliberately?) misread what he was writing. It was not jingoistic propaganda.
Two final points of interest. When the Crimean War broke out, London looked to the Highlands yet again to replicate the stream of soldiers as had occurred during the Napoleonic Wars. Between 1793 and 1815, 72,385 Highlanders served in forty line, fencible or reserve battalions, seven regiments of regular militia, and a number of companies of local militia. In comparison, of 33 infantry battalions sent to the Crimea, three only were Highland. Districts once home to thousands of potentially young soldiers were now home to shepherds and sheep. The men told the parsons "We have no country to fight for. You robbed us of our country and gave it to the sheep. Therefore, since you have preferred sheep to men, let sheep defend you!" Secondly, Sir Walter Scott is mildly mocked. The rich inspiration for Fergus MacIvor, the young Highland chieftain, in Waverley was one Alistair Ranaldson Macdonnell. In real life, he was an absurd, heroic, impossible man, heavily in debt, always quarrelling and living unproductively in the past (he hated the Caledonian Canal). Prebble also regarded Waverley as feeding its readers with pictures of a never-never Highland past, peopled with proud and noble gentlemen, and an amusing and simple peasantry that gave its betters the right amount of service and devotion.
Prebble never claimed to be an historian and admitted that his methods were idiosyncratic. He gave little thought or space to discussing any economic imperative about the Clearances. But his Highland/Gaelic 'people's nationalism' (shades of his Communist past) and his effective journalist's approach, made a great impact on readers' thinking. He ended his book, The Lowlander has inherited the hills, and the tartan is a shroud.
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