Originally Posted by
pinotnoir
In addition to being profoundly affected by the Clearances, Caithness was to play a central role in the events that led to an emancipation of the crofters from what was becoming serfdom.
Although many emigrated either to North America, New Zealand and Australia, or to the cities in the south of Scotland in particular Glasgow, which underwent an explosion in its population during the period of the Clearances and the Irish famine, most stayed behind at least for a time. They were crammed into crofting townships on very small areas of land where they were often vulnerable to the abuse and exploitation of their landlords. Many lacked even crofts of their own and became cottars and squatters on the crofts of other people. In the 1880s the Highlands and Islands were recently ravaged by the potato famine of the mid nineteenth century. The 1880s were also a time, however, of growing democracy and of government which was increasingly responsive to public opinion, particularly after the electoral reform Act of 1884.
In the early 1880s, in terms of gaining sympathetic public opinion, crofters were protesting very effectively, with rent strikes and land raids, about their lack of secure tenure of land and their severely reduced access to land. The government responded in 1883 with a commission of enquiry headed by Francis Napier, and the Napier Commission published recommendations in 1884. Napier’s report fell a long way short of addressing crofters’ demands, and it stimulated a new wave of protests.
The earlier protests had been largely confined to Skye. In 1884 protest action was much more widespread, many thousands of crofters became members of the Highland Land League and among MPs elected in the United Kingdom general election of 1885 there were Crofters Party MPs elected into the constituencies of Argyllshire, Inverness-shire, Ross and Cromarty and Caithness – Dr Gavin Brown Clark. At Wick Burghs John Macdonald Cameron was also allied to the Crofters Party. A year later Parliament created the Crofters Act.
The recognised leader of the Land League group who was to play the most prominent part in its activities in Parliament was DR G.B. Clark, who was returned for Caithness by 2,110 votes to 1,218 for the Liberals. A graduate of the Universities of Edinburgh, Glasgow and London, Clark was active in a number of ‘advanced’ causes. He had been a member of Karl Marx’s International Workingmen’s Association in London in the 1870s – the ‘International’ gave a good deal of attention to land tenure. He was also a member of the Fabian Society and the Scottish Home Rule Association. He had travelled in Africa, India and Canada, and contributed to periodicals on the African, Indian and crofting questions. He was also the editor of the ‘Good Templar’, this being the interest which brought him into close touch with Keir Hardie, who was an enthusiastic member of the order in the 1880s. He strongly encouraged Hardie on his first entry into politics in 1887. After the Crofters Party dissolved he was re-elected as the Liberal candidate in 1886, 1892 and 1895. For the 1900 General Election he was replaced as Liberal candidate and defeated.
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