|
DUNCAN MACKERCHAR and I were
so much engrossed in our own affairs that we seldom wrote
letters to our friends in the Highlands, and they too
seldom sent us any news down the Pass of Dunkeld.
So it was quite a surprise when I got a letter from
Mr Drummond, saying that he and my father
thought I ought to apply for the Fortingall Parish
School, which had fallen vacant, because my namesake Duncan Campbell, who had taught it for
twenty years, had gone to Lesmahagow, where he
vigorously exercised his vocation for the next twenty-five years. I thought that Mr Drummond and my
father were expecting too much for me, and I at
first declined to become a candidate, both because I
wished to continue my own education and because
I thought myself too young and inexperienced for
the management of such a large school. But while
my reply was in the course of transmission by the
winter weekly post, Mr Drummond had actually
sent in my name, and, on knowing this, I felt bound
to attend on the day appointed at Fortingall for examination before the heritors. Through delay I was
the last. Five or six had been examined, and some
way or another, none of them seemed to have given
satisfaction. An Edinburgh professor and Dr Duff
of Kenmore had prepared test questions which
ranged over a fair amount of history, literature,
Latin, Greek, and practical mathematics.
Duncan Mackerchar and I
walked together from
Cargill to Port-na-craig, opposite Pitlochry. It is a
long way from Cargill to Port-na-craig round by
Dunkeld, and we stopped there for the night. Next
morning before daylight I left my companion and
crossed the hill to Strathtay, and walked on to
Fortingall, another pretty long walk, so as to be
there at twelve o'clock.
I had not the least
expectation of being appointed,
so I was not in the least flustered when Doctor
Duff took me in hand and put the questions of his
examination catechism to me. Finding that I had
read a great deal more Latin than the former candidates, he passed beyond his catechism, and I really
got interested in the proceedings, and was not a
whit concerned as to what the issue would be. To
my astonishment I was appointed, subject, of course,
to another examination by the Presbytery of Weem.
The old hotelkeeper and his
wife took care to
give me a good dinner before I set off on my return
journey. Night closed round me soon after I left
Weem rather stormy, and with heavy showers of
snow. In crossing from Strathtay I lost my way
and wandered westward off the line amidst bogs
and ice, so that it was a dilapidated youth I was
when I finally reached Port-na-craig. My boots
had got soaked in ice water, and next morning my
toes were blistered, and I had a sore journey back
with Duncan Mackerchar round by Dunkeld to
Cargill.
Pitlochry looked a very small
village when we
passed through it on that sunshiny morning after
the snowy night on our return to Cargill. Some
eighteen years had yet to elapse before railway
connected Perth and Inverness, and caused forthwith to make old villages expand into towns and
new villages to arise for the accommodation of
summer visitors. In the winter of 1849 Aberfeldy,
although a small village, was bigger than Pitlochry
and of more local importance. Birnam had scarcely
begun to tower over and absorb little Dunkeld.
Mickle or old Dunkeld, with its now partly restored cathedral, has remained
throughout the whole era more unchanged than any place on the line from
Perth to Inverness. It still belongs to the far off past. The old villages
which expanded into towns and the new ones which have been called into
existence by railway and steamer communications with the crowded cities and industrial
districts of the South, as well as with the whole
world, have now made the Highlands a happy
hunting-ground for sportsmen, and one large shealing for summer visitors. Mingled good and
evil are the result. The old humble shealing
existence was part of the agricultural system. It
helped mightily to keep a large and hardy population, dependent on
cultivation and grazing, spread out over the face of the country, people
content with simple, natural life if they only had a bare sufficiency of
absolutely necessary means of subsistence. To all appearance the Highlanders, with
their ancient language, were impregnably race-defended. But with the sheep
regime began the change which culminated in the conversion of the Highlands
and Isles into summer resorts. Visitors brought with them the artificial
life of towns, and Highlanders who served them commenced to turn their backs
upon farming pursuits and forget their ancestral language, although bilingualism would often be materially, and always
intellectually, useful to themselves and to their
children. "Sluagh gun teangaidh, sluagh gun
anam" a race which loses its language loses its
soul but it would only fortify its soul to acquire
other languages while carefully keeping its own as a
sacred inheritance and source of inspiration. Gaelic
suffered no fatal detriment from the sheep regime
and the invasion of the Lowland farmers and shepherds. The real destroyers have been the children
of the Gael themselves; and I fear the Gaelic
Societies, Mod, and Comunn Gaidhealach, began
their revival movement when the decay had gone
too far for being but very partially stopped.
Before leaving Cargill, I had
to look for a substitute, and was lucky enough to find one at once, who
sowed and reaped, or rather sold the crop which
grew on the glebe the farmers had so generously
ploughed for me. My substitute was a Highlander
from Aberfeldy, who went to some other school in the Lowlands next year. For
seventy or eighty years before the setting up of the school board system,
Highland schoolmasters were constantly drifting southward, very many to the
Lowlands, and not a few to England. I suppose they must have been good
teachers in other respects, but I suspect they met with special favour in
various places where broad dialects held sway, because they spoke and wrote
book English. After the passing of the Scotch Education Act, Highland school
boards reversed the former rule by preferring teachers from the Lowlands to
Highland ones. This preference contributed to the forces which were killing
the Gaelic language. In this matter, the Gaelic revival movement has done
much to induce school boards in Gaelic-speaking places to appoint teachers
who can understand, read, and speak and teach the language of their pupils.
But the southward drifting of the Highland teachers continues and must
continue, since the professorial chances in the south
are much better than they are in the Highlands.
Examination before heritors
was rather a new
thing. It was the usual custom that, on personal
knowledge or certificates, they should select and
nominate a man for the parish school vacancy, and
that the Presbytery should examine him, and either
appoint him or reject him. As it happened, I had
to undergo two examinations; for the Presbytery
examination was the real seal of appointment, and
not the one before the heritors. In my own case,
the examination before the heritors was of a more
searching kind than the legal one before the Presbytery. But I did myself far more justice in the first
than in the easier one, for when before the heritors, as I had no idea of
being appointed, I was perfectly self-possessed, and rejoiced in being
catechised in such a manner as allowed me to make use of some of my
desultory reading as well as of my more scholastic studies. Before the
Presbytery I must have been flurried and nervous, for I managed, or
mismanaged, to misstate a mathematical proposition with which I was quite
familiar. In Latin and Greek I succeeded much better, and in general
knowledge subjects I passed muster. My appointment was therefore ecclesiastically confirmed. As
the Presbyterian Church of Scotland and the parish
schools were covenanted State institutions under the
Revolution Settlement, ministers and schoolmasters
had to take the same oaths of loyalty as officers of
State, Members of Parliament, Magistrates, and
others holding public office. On the morning of the
day on which I was examined by the Presbytery at
Weem, Mr Stewart, the minister of Fortingall, took
me to Moness House, where I was sworn by Mr
Campbell of Glenfalloch, a ruling elder of the Church
of Scotland, whose son, fourteen years later, succeeded the evicting Marquis as Earl of Breadalbane.
His son's son is now the third Marquis. Parish
schoolmasters might hold different views on the
public questions of the day, but few, if any of them,
took any pronounced part in politics. They did not
think it suited their profession to speak, write, or
act as political partisans. I fully agreed with that
view, and acted upon it all the years I was a parish
schoolmaster. As an ex-officio freeholder, I had the
right to be registered as a voter. But I never
allowed myself to be registered, because I wanted to
keep out of party politics while teaching the children
of Whigs and Tories, and was in honour bound, as I
thought, to remain neutral in the conflict which
divided the parents of my pupils. The schoolmasters
who did register themselves gave quiet votes, and
were never mixed up with hot political agitations.
Their school board successors do not always act so
wisely. |
