Remote & Rural Remedies

Poverty and the Clearances

"The temperance or rather starvation in which they live as well as the salubrity of the dreary & desolate wastes in which we are imprisoned make them feel their miseries less painfully than they would otherwise do" (John McIntyre, Delting, Shetland)

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Old Poor Law

Scotland’s poor relief system was separate to that of England. The history of poor relief in Scotland is usually split into two periods, the ‘Old Poor Law’, which existed up to 1845, and the ‘New Poor Law’ which was introduced in that year. Under the Old Poor Law system, individual parishes were responsible for decisions relating to poor relief. This meant that who was eligible and what they received was often different in different parts of Scotland – it differed not only between the Highlands and Lowlands, but often even between different parishes in a single town or city. Some areas had workhouses, where the poor were sent, others relied more on ‘out relief’ – which meant that money, or sometimes medical aid and food, was supplied to a person while they kept living in their own home.

New Poor Law

Under the New Poor Law of 1845 the administration of poor relief became more standardised, with local Parochial Boards set up in individual districts and a central Board of Supervision based in Edinburgh overseeing them. This central board could raise local taxes to cover the costs of poor relief. This new law also included a medical allowance which could be applied for by the local Parochial Board to pay doctors to treat paupers – the very poorest people in the community.

These Highlands and Islands surveys were carried out only a few years after the New Poor Law was introduced and so some of the changes which had taken place as a result of this new law are clear from the survey responses. A particular problem was the fine line between, as one doctor in Orkney put it, the ‘legal poor’ and the ‘truly poor’. That is, there were those who were legally entitled to relief under the new law, and then there was the large number of people who were very poor, and struggled to provide for their families, but who were not poor enough, or sick enough, to qualify for assistance.

Medical Relief

Many doctors were suspicious of the intentions of their local Parochial Board. John MacDonald, a surgeon on the Isle of Harris, complained that while government funds were allocated specifically for medical relief, because these funds were paid to the Parochial Board rather than directly to the medical officer, often the board kept some of the funds for itself and only passed a proportion of them on. Parochial Boards paid what they wanted, when they wanted. The amount given to individual doctors varied from parish to parish and in some cases the board demonstrated ‘vexatious procrastination’, blaming their own lack of funds for the lack of payment to medical officers.

The Potato Famine

The potato famine in the Scottish Highlands began in 1846, one year after the Irish Potato Famine. Caused, initially, by widespread failure of the potato crop – poverty and starvation followed. The Free Church of Scotland was at the forefront of the initial relief provided – giving support regardless of the religion of the recipient. They organised Destitution Committees and distributed food, even to the most remote areas of the Highlands and Islands.

The 1846 crop failure was only the beginning of a bigger problem, with following years seeing more crop failures and a big reduction in prices for cattle. The impact of the potato failure is a theme which runs throughout the survey responses. One doctor in the western Highlands noted that due to the ‘failure of the potato crop they are reduced to such poverty that they are unable to pay their rents and have great difficulty in procuring even the necessities of life’. On the Isle of Mull, similarly, a surgeon there wrote that ‘the people who were previously in easy circumstance are now reduced to penury & want, unable to pay Rents, or debts’.

The Highland Clearances

The displacement of tenants by landlords to make way for large-scale cattle and sheep rearing had begun in earnest in the mid-1700s. One surgeon in Tobermory, on the Isle of Mull, noted that by the 1850s most of the land there was used for sheep rearing, rather than crops. By the time of the 1846 famine, this had combined with the collapse of local industries (such as the kelp trade) to force many residents to leave their communities. Part of the solution to the 1846 famine involved the Free Church and the Government encouraging seasonal migration of Highlanders to the Lowlands to seek work, particularly in railway construction. This was combined with increased emigration, particularly to Canada, America and New Zealand.

Groups, including landowners themselves, as well as the church, often covered the cost of passage to encourage emigration. The famine, inevitably, gave further impetus to a process that was already well underway. It is estimated that around a third of the Highlands population emigrated between 1840 and 1860 and the impact of this was detailed in a number of surveys. Church ministers and doctors in the west of Scotland were particularly concerned, with one noting that ‘the tenantry that can or have the means are about to Emigrate to some of the British colonies’.