Far From a Fling

The shelves of John Murray seemed filled with books by its strong-minded, often indomitable women writers when I went to work there in 1972: Jane Austen, Queen Victoria, travellers like Isabella Bird, Freya Stark and Dervla Murphy. Elizabeth Grant was one of whom I had not heard; idle curiosity drew me to her but I was soon engrossed. Born in 1797 she died in 1885, her posthumous fame beginning with the publication of her memoirs, edited by her niece (also Lytton Strachey’s mother) in 1898. The Memoirs of a Highland Lady went through four printings that year and has been reprinted regularly ever since, for readers are fascinated by its picture of the life of a Highland laird’s family in the twilight years of the clan system, at Rothiemurchus, the beautiful ‘Gateway to the Cairngorms’ near Aviemore. Adding to the interest are the casual though then unexceptional cruelties of her upbringing, a mysterious tale of star-crossed love and the eventual ruin of the family fortunes brought about by the political pretensions and financial incompetence of her father.

The memoirs were written between 1845 and 1854, but both before and during these years Elizabeth also kept a diary. In 1980 a selection from this was published as The Irish Journals of Elizabeth Smith, 1840–50. Suddenly it was as if a portrait in profile had changed to a full-face one, and to the girl and young woman on Speyside, in Enlightenment Edinburgh, Regency London and Bombay there had been added the wife of Colonel Smith of Baltiboys in County Wicklow, 14 miles south of Dublin, busy improving their property, before facing the awful famine years from 1845, as one potato crop after another failed. At Rothiemurchus there was no question of going to a nearby shop for the necessities of life. Instead there were ‘such spinnings and weavings, and washings, and dyeings, and churnings, and knittings, and bleachings, and candle-makings, and soap-boilings, and feather cleanings as never are seen or written of in these days’. The house was full of servants and there was a piper who ‘declined any work unconnected with whisky, which with plenty of oat-bread and cheese was given to all comers all day long’. Even ‘decent gentlewomen began the day with a dram’. The laird might no longer be ‘worshipped as a divinity by every human being in the place’, but there was still a strong feudal spirit abroad. Entertainment had to be made and it often took the form of dances where ‘gentles and simples reeled away in company’ or performed ‘the single and double fling, the shuffle and heel-and-toe step’. The Floaters’ Ball, named after those whose job it was to float logs from the surrounding forest down the Spey, was a grand affair with two sets of fiddlers and whisky punch mixed in washtubs. Other aspects of life for the young Elizabeth and her siblings were far from a fling: days beginning with an outdoor plunge in a tub of cold water, ‘the ice on the top of which had often to be broken’, then dressing in cotton frocks with short sleeves and low necks before a breakfast of bread-and-milk or porridge, both of which she hated. Even when older she still had to get up at 6.30 ‘without candle or fire or warm water’, then practise playing scales for an hour in the dark. If not the piano there was the harp, its strings ‘cutting the poor fingers’. Punishments were whippings from her father or being locked in a dark cupboard, or being starved until finally a plate of spinach was eaten well over a day after it had first been refused. Elizabeth’s mother was ‘often ailing’, her ‘habits indolent’ and ‘she also hated the worry of children’. Her father, ‘a man of £12,000 a year’ yet not content to look after his estates in Scotland and England, instead went in search of fame, first at the Bar and then in Parliament. Both winning and then losing the notorious rotten borough of Grimsby cost him huge sums of money and by 1820 the family was forced to retreat to the Highlands from Edinburgh. John Peter Grant was given one of the Duke of Bedford’s pocket boroughs when he lost Grimsby, so was immune from arrest for debt, but his family’s life became increasingly hand-to-mouth. At least without the distractions of city life Elizabeth did much reading and, as she said, ‘It was new to me to think.’ When finances became really stretched she and her sister Mary tried their hand at writing. The £40 which their first articles earned was just enough to keep the household afloat, but when the Duke wanted his borough back in 1827, there was nothing for it but for John Peter to leave the country. Luckily for him, there was a very particular favour which he could call in. When George IV had visited Edinburgh in 1822, supplies of his favourite Glenlivet whisky ran out. ‘My father sent word to me – I was the cellarer – to empty my pet bin . . . [the whisky from it] and fifty brace of ptarmigan all shot by one man went up to Holyrood House . . . A reminder of this attention at the proper moment . . . ensured to my father [an] Indian judgeship.’ John fled first to France, leaving £60,000 of debt behind him. When his family went south to join him for the voyage to Bombay, their coach was seized for an unpaid bill in Edinburgh. Like so many before and after her, Elizabeth was prostrated by the Indian climate, convinced she only survived the hot weather thanks to supplies of bitter beer, and then appalled at the prospect of four months’ wet weather once the monsoon broke. Her uncle, an old India hand, kept telling her to ‘wait for Smith’, while her cousins assured her he would make a perfect husband, since ‘he is so kind tohis horses’. When the mysterious Colonel Smith eventually arrived she soon saw they were right, even though, aged 50, he was eighteen years older than her. They went on honeymoon with an entourage of bullocks and camels and an escort of irregular cavalry, but shortly after, the doctors said the Colonel must return home if his asthma were not to kill him. Luckily his elder brother had died just before the wedding, so he had inherited his 1,200-acre Wicklow estate. They found it in a state of utter neglect, since the brother had been an absentee landlord, with £6,000 of rent in arrears. ‘When I first saw it there stood to welcome me a crowd of, as I thought, beggars – dirty queer-looking men doffing their remnants of hats with much civility. “Thim’s the tenants”, said the only man with a whole coat.’ Kept afloat by the Colonel’s army pension and what Elizabeth could make from her writing, they gradually took the estate in hand and rebuilt the ruined big house where their three children were born. Those tenants whose holdings were too small to provide anything like a living were either helped to emigrate or ‘furnished with the means of setting up in useful employments, and were fully paid for any value left’. David Thomson, author of those fine memoirs Nairn in Darkness and Light and Woodbrook, and editor of her Irish Journals, took Elizabeth to task over this, and one suspects that it would be hard to find an Irish historian today with much time forher. But a sympathetic reading must make one ask what alternatives were open, short of handing over the land and walking away. She had her blind spots, like her antipathy towards the Catholic priesthood and her continuing suspicion that most emigrants left with money which should have gone to pay rent arrears. She was driven mad by Irish fecklessness, dishonesty, ‘vindictive temper, love of pleasure, undue appreciation of self ’. At the same time she could recognize ‘the untidy dirt and fun of most uncomfortable Ireland’, and could write of the Irish that ‘as a race they are wonderfully clever people’, though she had to add that, ‘In this their grub state they are very disheartening to deal with.’ No one was more condemning of the mostly Anglo-Irish landlords: ‘Gross neglect of the duties inseparable from the possession of landed property is at the bottom of all this misery.’ Her best defence lies in her actions rather than her words, particularly during the famine years: in the schools she established in the teeth of clerical obstruction, the new thatch and window glass for the cabins on the estate, the toleration of rent arrears as long as there was the prospect of ways being mended, making clothing for the poor (lacking scissors, they could not make their own), the distribution of food, the denial of any luxuries for her own family, her devotion of any spare minutes to writing articles to earn money then spent on charity. In January 1847 she wrote, ‘idle, improvident, reckless . . . call the bulk of the Irish what we will . . . here they are starving around us . . . To feed them must be our business . . .’ Elizabeth Smith, while well aware of what she regarded as her proper place in Society, was equally conscious of the responsibilities accompanying it, and they were no doubt reinforced in her mind by the memory of her father’s failures in this respect. She more than fulfilled them when the time came, but it is not so much for this that one reads her as for the forthright vigour, brisk wit and intelligence of her writing, the mixture of asperity with warmth of heart. And if she oversteps the mark when regularly lambasting the Irish character, it must be remembered that this was a diary, written in the heat of the moment, a healthy venting of frustrations which then allowed her to return to the task of improving their lot as best she could.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 44 © Rodger Hudson 2014