The Factor Evander Maciver
Factor in Mackay Country from 1845 to 1895
Sutherland Estates Factorship at Scourie.
Memories From Tarbet, Scourie
Interview by Dr Pennie with D. A. MacLeod, early 1970’s
“I remember of MacIver. In fact I was over in Scourie, across the hill to the shop for messages the time he died and I remember my father - I was only a boy - but my father went to his funeral. I remember that. Oh, he was one of the old school, MacIver.
Well he had the power, you see? Before the Crofters’ Act he could tell you to walk out if you fell out with him. Oh, yes. But he was very good to my father. There was an old woman that had this house and this croft when my father married, and my grandfather was in an old house near where Jean MacKenzie is today…
That’s where the family were. All her relatives were scattered or died. And he found out now that she was putting half of the croft off, you know? She wasn’t keeping it all. So my father went over to MacIver and asked if he could have it. He was just newly married at the time. “Yes”, he said, “but look you here Angus, the day she fails altogether you must take the other half.” And the very thing he wanted - you know, he certainly agreed to that. Oh, she lived, I remember of her here, and I remember she was complaining.
The house was even longer than this house, then. And thatched. But it was longer and my father and the family lived in one end and this woman lived in this end. But when she got very frail my mother took her to our own end.”
From Field notes kept by Mary and Ray Mackay – Manpower Services work c 1970’s.
Handa
“Well, I was on Handa as a young schoolboy with my father –they were shearing sheep for MacIver. I remember it just as well as yesterday – when three or four bearded men came down by the fank. You see, they’d come over specially from the Butt of Lewis for birds and eggs. They were eating the birds, then. Any eggs that were within reach - they were taken out by the local people, but nobody ever looked at the stack. And they went up and stretched a rope from the both corners beyond the stack and just over the edge of the stack, like that, you see.
Like that, and this bold lad went over it, hands and feet like that, and then they rigged a basket or a box on the box – on the rope – and he was pouring in birds and eggs there, and they had then to take them down to the boat. That would be in the ‘90s, of last century (19th).
But I remember in 1905, they used to go out from the Butt of Lewis to a rock, oh, about 20 or 30 miles out - Sulesgeir. They encountered bad weather and they had to go around Cape Wrath and they were held up there till their provisions ran short and now when a lull came in the weather they made for home, and they came up to Handa. That was in 1905. And one or two of the crew were among the people that went to the rock, to the top of the rock.”
The Crofters Protest
Transcript of letter to ‘The Factor’ in 1873.
Transcript by Mary and Ray Mackay – Manpower Services work c 1970’s.
