SHAKES AND THE MORRISONS OF RUCHDI

A MODERN SCOTTISH CHIEFLY FAMILY

Andrew Morrison, Viscount Dunrossil

CONTENTS

1.    The Making of a Clan Chief

2.    The Clan Morrison

3.    Teaghlach Phabaigh, the Morrisons of Ruchdi

4.    W.S. Morrison, Viscount Dunrossil

5.    John William Morrison, 2nd Viscount Dunrossil

CHAPTER 1: 1959: The Making of a Clan Chief

            In 1959, W.S. “Shakes” Morrison, then 65 years old, was preparing to retire from his position as Speaker of the House of Commons in the British Parliament. He had served 30 years in Parliament, the last eight as Speaker, but his health was now starting to deteriorate. By tradition, the Speaker, as the senior commoner of the land, was granted a peerage and elevated to the House of Lords on his retirement. As a peer, a Lord, Shakes would need an appropriate coat of arms.

            Shakes already had a coat of arms. This had been prepared for him in England so that it could be painted on the doors of the Speaker’s ceremonial carriage as part of the procession for the Queen’s coronation back in 1953. They were a simple affair, with two gannets, sea birds, either side of a depiction of the great Parliamentary mace, surmounted by a Viking longship, as crest. The birds and ship were chosen to show that, as a Morrison, he was proud of being from the islands, the Outer Hebrides northwest of the Scottish mainland, and that the founder of the clan was supposed by tradition to be the son of one of the Kings of Norway.

            Shakes was intensely proud of his Hebridean heritage. Both his parents were born in the Western Isles and as a child he learned to speak Gaelic before English. Nevertheless, after graduating from Edinburgh University, along with his future wife, Allison, he decided to move down to London and it was in England that he established his legal and political career. England and Scotland have separate and distinct legal systems and he had chosen to qualify and practice in the English one. He also went on to represent an English constituency, the Cirencester and Tewksbury Division, in Parliament. It made sense, then, when he needed to get those arms designed and recorded for the coronation, to make use of the English heraldic authorities close at hand, Richmond Herald and the Garter and Clarenceux Kings of Arms. The Lord Lyon King of Arms, chief herald of Scotland, was not amused.

            Six years later, however, with more time to reflect and more at stake, he wanted arms that were more of a personal statement, less narrowly related to his office, and reached back out to Lyon, Sir Thomas Innes of Learney. To begin with, Lyon acted like a woman scorned. He argued that Shakes, having taken arms in England, was now an English gentleman and could not be granted new arms in Scotland, the land of his birth, because he was a foreigner! This bagpipe and fiddle playing, Gaelic speaking, elder of the church of St Columba was really an Englishman. Nevertheless, he asked to see Shakes’ family tree. Perhaps there might be an ancestor somewhere who had arms, a version of which Shakes could matriculate for himself. 

            The world of Scottish Heraldry was a relic of Norman Scottish feudal law, as were most Scottish noble titles, and the Morrisons had come from a different world, a more ancient, Norse and Gaelic culture. Not only did this culture have a different legal system from the Anglo-Norman mainland until the early seventeenth century, but the Morrisons were its traditional exponents, as hereditary judges in the Isles. Not surprisingly, no such armigerous ancestor existed. Instead Lyon was presented with a recitation of generations, handed down orally, and going back to about 1680. Now, instead of being put off, Lyon Innes was seriously intrigued. 

            Morrison is a large and ancient Scottish clan. It is one of the nine most common names in the Highlands of Scotland and the third most common in the Outer Hebrides. There are more Morrisons in the Highlands than Stewarts, Camerons, Murrays or MacIntoshes, for instance, and it’s a more common name in Scotland as a whole than such illustrious Lowland names as Graham, Douglas or Gordon. But the clan had been without a chief since the last Brieve, the hereditary lawgiver and judge of the Islands, had been murdered by MacLeods on the orders of James VI in the early 17th century, as part of the dynastic dispute known as the Troubles of the Lews. For some 300 years after that the Morrisons were chiefless, widely scattered, and played no significant role in Scottish affairs. Then in 1909 a Morrison Clan Society was established and granted corporate arms, its principal purpose being to identify a chief and have him recognized as such throughout Scotland. Only then could the Morrisons become a clan, a “noble community,” in the eyes of the law.

            The position of Lyon Herald has been in existence since the 14th century, but Lyon Innes was interested in expanding the role of this ancient office. One of his innovations was that he wanted to be the one officially to recognize or reject claimants to the position of clan chief, or at least to determine who might be in right of the undifferenced arms. The clan society had already put up names for consideration, but all had been rejected. Either they were not already armigers, and in Lyon’s eyes therefore not members of the broader “noblesse” (almost nobody from the islands had arms), or they were not from the islands originally at all. In either case, they were not suitable. Most recently, Lord Margadale, who owned the historic Hebridean island of Islay, had been proposed and rejected: he was certainly an armiger, but his family was originally English not Scottish at all.

            So here was Shakes, an armiger and unimpeachably Hebridean, able to trace his ancestry back to within a couple of generations of the last Brieve. Could he be the Morrison chief? Certainly not. Shakes pointed out he had several older brothers. The oldest, Dr. John Morrison, a retired eye specialist, was the “head of the family.” Though he and Shakes were remarkably close and had even married sisters, in one respect they were very different. One, as a politician, had lived constantly in the public eye, the other avoided it like the plague.  In short, John was not the kind of person who would be expected to welcome the idea of becoming chief. 

            Equally frustrating for Lyon was the lack of either corroboration or extension. Written records of the sort Lyon was used to were almost unknown in the islands back in the seventeenth century. Most Morrisons in Scotland probably grow up hearing that “we” used to be the Brieves and that we are descended from them, but such family traditions have no scientific or legal value. Tantalizingly, a certain aunt apparently remembered a few more generations, but she was now dead. Would they have taken us back to the Brieves? Who knows? Probably not, but there was no proof either way.

            Nevertheless, Lyon advised Shakes to matriculate arms in the form of a “differenced” version of arms to be prepared for Dr. John, while Lyon and the clan society examined whether the good doctor might indeed become “chief of the name and arms” of Morrison. Shakes, by this time known as the Viscount Dunrossil, died out in Australia, where he was Governor-General, in February 1961. Finally, in 1967, John was formally chosen and acknowledged by the clan as chief. Lyon issued the “undifferenced” arms to him, declaring him “chief of the name and arms” of Morrison. It was settled. At the clan gathering in Aviemore, where he raised his standard, by this time an old man in his eighties, the papers talked about the Morrisons having a chief again after 350 years.

In the chapters that follow I plan to tell you something about Clan Morrison and about the family of the chief, the Morrisons of Ruchdi. Finally, I want to tell you a little more about Shakes and his son John, the second Viscount. Shakes was my grandfather and John my father. 

 As you might expect of a public figure like Shakes, there are plenty of short biographies to be found on the internet. He also left letters and journals, some of which can be found in archives in Edinburgh or Gloucestershire. My goal here is to supplement the public record chiefly with anecdotes passed on by Allison, his wife and my grandmother. In fact, throughout this short book I plan to place a disproportionate emphasis on oral tradition. There is a reason for this. Oral tradition plays an important and often underappreciated role in what might be termed tribal memory and the creation of the myths that bind us together, and by which we live. It has always played a more important role in Gaelic culture than elsewhere.

            Allison remarked many times on the resemblance she felt I bore to my grandfather. We were both 6’4” and slightly built, both grew more than a foot between birthdays in our early teens, both would rather have been poets than whatever else we became. One Christmas, during lunch, she even grabbed my thumb and pulled it back sharply. When I complained, she responded that it shouldn’t hurt, “because Shakes was double-jointed.” Even if the difference between us stuck out to me like the proverbial sore thumb, for her there was a connection. And so, Allison loved to talk about him, and I to listen.

Shakes and Allison in Australia

John W. Morrison, 2nd Viscount Dunrossil, as Governor of Bermuda

“Seoc” and Marion Morrison and their sons, including Dr. John (the oldest, standing) and Shakes (the second youngest, sitting)

In the center, Dr. John Morrison, the first Chief, and Dr. Iain Morrison, the second Chief of Clan Morrison

Ruchdi

My children and I at the opening of the bridge to Dun Eistein in Lewis

CHAPTER 2: The Clan Morrison

         Looked at purely in terms of numbers, a picture clearly emerges of the Morrisons as one of the leading Highland Clans, with a main base of operations in the Outer Hebrides. Morrison is the 18th most common name in Scotland, but the eighth or ninth most common in the Highlands (more common even than Smith or Brown) and the third most common in the Outer Hebrides. The greatest number of Morrisons in the Islands live in the Ness district in the north of Lewis, while the highest concentration of Morrisons in percentage terms live in Harris. Clearly, if there was a significant movement or migration of Morrisons within Scotland it would have been towards the south and east from these islands. 

On the other hand, there are very few records of the Morrisons from the period of major clan activity on the mainland, roughly 1400 to 1750. They are almost invisible and are omitted on many popular clan maps altogether. The explanation for this seems to be the violent takeover of the island of Lewis by Torquil MacLeod around 1350 and the MacLeods’ domination of the area for the next 250 years. With the ascendancy of the MacLeods and the MacDonalds to their south the Morrisons’ powers were restricted both geographically and functionally. And in about 1600 the last Brieve was murdered by MacLeods after they had obtained a mandate from King James VI for the purpose. 

If we are to say they were restricted or reduced, we must believe they were greater beforehand. Evidence for this is tantalizingly small, but it was what motivated the founders of the clan society in its early days. They were not just playing the fashionable Victorian game, whereby every Scot had to have a clan, a chief and a tartan. They wanted recognition that they had an illustrious history, even if it was distant and remote, and even if they had fallen on harder times. 

Soon after the Clan Society was formed in 1909, Hew Morrison LLD, who was principal librarian at the Carnegie Library in Edinburgh from 1887 to 1921, was asked to give an address on the clan and its origins. First, he cited John Morison of Bragar, known as the “Indweller,” who wrote a Description of Lewis, some time between 1678 and 1688. Morison states that the first inhabitants of the island were three men of different races: “the first was Mores, son of Kennanus, whom the Irish (i.e. Gaelic) historians call Makurich.” Mores was one of the sons of the King of Norway, “and all Morrisons in Scotland may challenge their descent from this man.” The second was Iskair, son of Aulay, a Gael, ancestor of the MacAulays of Uig, and the third Macnaicle (MacNicol or Nicolson). He goes on to say that Torquil Macleod of Skye “violently espoused” the daughter of MacNicol, murdered her family, and thus “possessed himself of all the lands they had in Lewis.”

This Norse origin was clearly an important part of the folk memory of the Lewis Morrisons, and Hew Morrison thought it significant that the commonly used form of the name there has  long been Morrison or Moireasdain, not the Gaelic mac Ghillemhuire or the earlier Mac Brief. This would seem to run counter to the title that the Morrisons of Ness held, that of Brieve or breitheamh, someone who administered the Celtic brehon law. Certainly, in later years Brieves were going to Ireland to study and the law they practiced by the sixteenth century was purely Celtic, but this does not need to have been the case early on. Hew suggested that their original role was that of Deemster and that the law they judged was Norse. Either way, Sir Robert Gordon in his History of the Earldom of Sutherland around 1630, stated that the Brieve is a kind of judge among the islands, who held an “absolute judicatorie and to whose authority and censure they willingly submit themselves, when he determineth any debatable question between party and party, and they never do appeal from his sentence when he determineth.”

The learned Hew speculates that the authority of the early Brieves or deemsters was more extensive even than that. In the absence of written records, he quotes an old Gaelic rhyme, which had been chanted to his father by the old woman who nursed him, indicating that the Morrisons would yet rule (riaghlaidh) from the Tigh na Cise (the parliament in either Man or conceivably Edinburgh) to Tigh na Grot, John O’Groats in Caithness. The implication was that they had done so before, when the Norse ruled Caithness and the Kingdom of the Isles. 

This was the thinking of those Morrisons involved in starting the search for a chief and liaising with Lyon. This was the story, the narrative that Morrisons were raised believing. Lyon Innes of Learney disclosed to Shakes that he had already had conversations in principle with the clan society about the arms that would be appropriate for a chief of the clan. These, he said, should include the royal lion of Norway with a sword and a castle to indicate Dun Eistein, the fortress of the Morrisons of Ness. They should also not include any Moors’ heads, as had been depicted in the arms of certain mainland Morrisons and of the clan society. The arms granted to Shakes, then, are exactly of this kind. The only things he had to decide for himself were his mottos and his supporters.

Such, then, is the foundation myth that had been passed down through generations of Morrisons, through John Morison of Bragar and Hew Morrison to Shakes and Dr. John. Modern DNA studies have not been kind to this myth. They indicate that all Morrisons may not, in fact, “challenge descent from” this Mores, son of Norway. We appear to be a disparate clan, of diverse origin, just as Scotland is a diverse nation. The Ness kindred were known as Breif or MacBreif or even macGhillemhoire in the earliest records: they seem to have adopted the form Morrison only after the loss of the brieveship, after many of them took up a new profession as ministers of the kirk. The name was probably chosen not because of an attachment to old Norse tradition but because it sounded modern, English and above all Protestant. 

Clan tradition and modern science have contradicted each other elsewhere too: the MacNeils of Barra, for instance, had always claimed descent from King Nial of the Nine Hostages, a famous King of Ireland, but DNA has shown they are Norse. On the other hand, a clan, like a nation, is both a legal entity and a fictive construct. Foundation myths perform a service in binding the people together, whatever their origins. A narrative has value and meaning now, not merely as a record of something past. It is what gives us, and has given our ancestors, our sense of identity. Thus, the 12 tribes of Israel, which came together in a political confederation, at some later date seem to have constructed a myth that their eponymous ancestors were brothers. It was that story, that myth, that made them a nation and not just a confederation. Similarly, in Scotland it was the job of a chief’s bard and seanachie to compose such stories and genealogies, to bring glory to the family of the chief and to bind his people together into a common force, built on the notion that they were all the children of some ancient king.

Today all Morrisons are united in law into a single clan with a “chief of the name and arms.” But it is our tradition and our foundation myths that make us a community. This tradition is what is enshrined in our coats of arms and in our understanding of who we are. It states that all Morrisons and Gilmores are indeed descended from the kings of Norway and from the Brieves, and that Dr. Ru Morrison, our chief, is their heir. 

At the Loon Mountain Games in NH. L to R: the Author; Rev. Dr. Joe Morrow, Lord Lyon King of Arms; and Dr. Ru. Morrison, Chief of Clan Morrison

Above, Arms of the Chief of Clan Morrison. Below, Arms of Viscount Dunrossil

CHAPTER 3: Teaghlach Phabaigh, The Morrisons of Ruchdi

            The chiefs of Clan Morrison today carry the title “Morrison of Ruchdi” and their family is known in Gaelic as the “Teaghlach Phabaigh.” Teaghlach Phabbay (the Family of Pabbay) is the motto on the chief’s arms and also on the arms of the Viscounts Dunrossil. Ruchdi is the name of the house in the northern part of the Island of North Uist, which was built by Alasdair Mor Morrison, my great-great-great grandfather in the early 1820s. Today it is owned by Dr. Ru Morrison, the third chief in this new line. Although he lives and works in the United States, Ru spends every July with his family in Ruchdi. Ru’s father Iain and grandfather were medical doctors, while Ru and his American wife, Ann Michelle, have doctorates in marine science. Ru has been working hard restoring the old house and, when his children are old enough to go to university, they plan to move there permanently. His son Alasdair, his tanist, who will one day become the first American-born chief of the clan, plans to make Ruchdi his permanent home. Alasdair is already learning Gaelic and immersing himself in clan history and island life.

            Pabbay (in Gaelic, Pabaigh) means “priests’ isle” in Old Norse. It is a now uninhabited island in the Sound of Harris, between North Uist and Harris. Harris is the southern part of the same large island whose northern part is called Lewis. At one point the bulk of the population of Harris lived either on the fertile west coast or on islands like Pabbay and Taransay. Pabbay, in particular, was known as the Granary of Harris, because it was so fertile. Pabbay was also known for producing the finest whisky in the islands, albeit without one of the precious Government licenses, which were so hard to come by. This was the excuse given when the island was cleared in the 1840s on the orders of the factor of the Harris estate, a man called Campbell, who wanted it for a sheep farm. 

            It is thought that our particular family of Morrisons may have moved from Pabbay to North Uist as early as the first decade of the 17th century, when a MacLeod of Berneray married a Uist MacDonald and received the land in dowry. From that time, they would have been small farmers, crofters and cottars, in that northern part of North Uist until the Clearances came to the island in the early 19th century. At that point, while two of his brothers emigrated to Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia, Alasdair Mor (Big Alexander) got to remain because of his skills as a stonemason. This is the same Alasdair who built Ruchdi. I have met a descendant of one of those emigre brothers, who now lives in Toronto, and together we visited the old Gaelic graveyard in Inverness, Cape Breton, where all the family names are island names, and where there is a small but poignant monument to the first arrivals. 

            The known genealogy of Ru, the current chief, may be given as Ruaraidh mhic Iain mhic Iain (Dr. John) mhic Iain (Seoc) mhic Iain mhic Alasdair Mhor mhic Rhuaraidh mhic Alasdair mhic Rhuaraidh mhic Dhonnaichidh mhic Rhuaraidh mhic Mhurchadh. In a letter to Richmond Herald, Allison reports that before moving to North Uist the family was in Berneray, before that in Pabbay, before that in Harris and before that in Lewis. While in Pabbay, they were described as having been “keepers of the Dun of Pabbay,” presumably the seana casteal or old castle on the island, which guarded the passage between the islands of Uist and Harris. It has been suggested that one of the castles in both the chief’s and Shakes’ arms is meant to indicate this castle, rather than Dun Eistein in Lewis. 

There is a legend that the eponymous founder of the clan (in this version one Gilmore son of Olav the Black, King of Mann) floated ashore on a piece of driftwood and married the heiress of the Clan Igaa on Pabbay. Igaa has been rendered Gow or Smith and it is certainly true that the Morrisons of Pabbay and south Harris were known as expert smiths and armorers in later years. Since the MacLeods came to dominate the area in the fourteenth century, anyone keeping the dun would have been keeping it for the MacLeods, not for himself. The Viking invasions took place some five hundred years before that, and so it is certainly possible that the Morrisons controlled both Pabbay and Ness for a long time before the MacLeods arrived, possibly longer than the subsequent rule of the Macleods. 

It also remains quite feasible that there was an earlier, pre-MacLeod connection between these two apparent centers of Morrison activity, one at the northern extremity of Lewis, the other off the southern coast of Harris: there are or were churches dedicated to St Moluag in both places and in Raasay, a third place identified with Morrisons according to the historian Matheson. If this were St Columba or Brigid or Mary, that might be unremarkable and insignificant, but Moluag, a more obscure Irish contemporary of Columba in the sixth century, has far fewer dedications to him.

The later history of the Morrisons of Ruchdi is a little better known. John, the son of Alasdair Mor, married Annie Ross from Skye. She was of the family that owned the Drambuie, the recipe for which had been bequeathed by Bonnie Prince Charlie to Flora MacDonald. These two had several children, all of them very tall, only one of whom married. The daughters were all over six feet at a time when most men were only 5’6”. In 1870 a young couple Alexander and Mary Carmichael, moved in next door, to the Trumisgarry Manse. Mary Carmichael was 29 and the Morrison girls were 33, 31 and 29. The families became great friends. Alexander Carmichael was a collector of Gaelic folklore and poetry in his spare time and in 1900 began publication of the monumental four volume Carmina Gadelica, which, among other things, was to fuel the now burgeoning Celtic Christianity movement. Both John and Annie Morrison contributed pieces to this endeavor and the last entry is a list of the names of their son Seoc’s cows. Carmichael died in 1912 and his daughter, married by then to WJ Watson, Professor of Celtic at Edinburgh, gave young Shakes, then a freshman, her father’s copy of the Book of Common Prayer in Gaelic. 

Carmichael, apparently conflating his hospitable neighbors with the traditions of the Brieves, wrote: “These Morrisons have been celebrated throughout the ages for their wit, poetry, music, philosophy, medicine and science, for their independence of mind and sobriety of judgment and for their benevolence of heart and unfailing hospitality.” 

Seoc (John), John and Annie’s son, was a giant himself, larger than life in every way and the real founder of his family’s fortunes. His career had an inauspicious beginning. He was attending the small Trumisgarry village school (a house Allison was to buy a hundred years later). One day the teacher, a bully, started slapping around one of the smaller boys, a friend of Seoc’s. Seoc reacted by knocking out the teacher. He was then advised to get off the island by morning, which he did. Like many islanders, he joined the merchant marine and went to sea. He was the bosun on the boat that laid the first trans-Atlantic cable. Later, the ship he was on was down in South Africa, where he and his friend, William Shepherd, heard about the diamond mines in Kimberley. The two Scots jumped ship and headed for the action. There they found the hole was already deep. The best claims had been staked and taken. But miners were having a hard time getting people down safely or diamonds back up. The two sailors developed a machine involving ropes and pulleys and sold it to the miners for either diamonds or claims. After a while they sold out to their friend Cecil Rhodes, founder of the diamond giant, De Beers. As Allison put it: whereas most Scots who made money there spent it all on drink, they spent half of it on drink and came home with the other half, wealthy men. 

The first thing Seoc wanted to do was go back to North Uist. The story is that on the ferry over from Skye some men started giving him a hard time about being single. He explained he didn’t want to marry a foreigner, someone not from his own culture. After a little more banter and a lot more whisky, he vowed to propose to the first single woman he met when he came ashore. They all, as visitors still do, carried straight on to the bar at the Lochmaddy Hotel, where Seoc duly proposed to the barmaid.

He and Marion MacVicar then slipped off down to Glasgow and were married. There is a clear implication that she was not considered an appropriate match for him, and she may well have been illegitimate. He didn’t care. There was a kind of swagger about him reminiscent of John Wayne (whose real name was also Marion Morrison). He listed his profession on the register as “diamond digger.” 

Most of Uist was tied up in huge estates. They wanted land and found it away from the island’s wagging tongues on the mainland, in Argyll, “the coastland of the Gael.” There they were to have eight sons, of whom seven survived, one of them Dr. John and another Shakes. 

Chapter 4: W.S. Morrison, Viscount Dunrossil, GCMG, MC, PC, QC

            William Shepherd Morrison was born on the 10th of August 1893 on his parents’ farm at Torinturk (torr an tuirc, the Hill of the Boar) in Argyll, the sixth of seven sons who survived infancy. It was a bilingual, transitional household. Both parents, Seoc and Marion, were native Gaelic speakers from North Uist in the Outer Hebrides, and they hired a nanny for the boys from South Uist, Marion Campbell, known as Bean Nill, a singer and tradition bearer, who spoke only Gaelic. By the time he entered university, Shakes had acquired a voluminous repertoire of Gaelic poetry and song by heart, as well as the Gaelic psalms, in their metrical form. 

And yet, in Scotland as in England, the universities and the professions operated only in English. The boys were given names that were for the most part English equivalents of old Gaelic family names, (except for the last two, who were named after Seoc’s old friends and business partners, Shepherd and Cecil Rhodes). They called the oldest John, not Iain, and another Alexander or Sandy, instead of Alasdair. Even if the heart and their dreams lived in Gaelic, the outer man had to speak English to move on in the world. And move on they did: of the brothers, three went on to become doctors and two were lawyers. The most talented, of course, Sandy, was to die in the First World War.

            In pursuit of a “proper” education for his boys, Seoc bought a big home in the neighboring town of Oban, where he went on the town council, and then moved the boys to Edinburgh, where they were foisted, collectively, on the headmaster of George Watson’s College. In 1912 Shakes entered Edinburgh University. There he was elected the University Bard on the strength of his own Gaelic poetry, and with his new position acquired the nickname he was to carry all his life. He became William Shakespeare Morrison to his friends, or just Shakes, after that other William, the Bard of Avon. He didn’t write only in Gaelic: some of his poems in English were also published in anthologies of student verse at the time. Any thought he may have had of a literary career, however, died, like so many other dreams, with the outbreak of the First World War.

            Shakes had been in the ROTC at Watson’s and at Edinburgh, and in August 1914 joined the Royal Field Artillery as a Second Lieutenant. Field Artillery were not the big guns that bombarded the enemy positions from deep behind their own lines. These were light, tactical weapons, carried into position at the front by horses and often a principal target themselves for enemy guns. On one occasion in March 1915, most of their force was destroyed and they were ordered to withdraw. Shakes kept going back into the barrage to carry off badly wounded soldiers, although wounded himself. He was awarded the Military Cross for his actions and was told the only reason he was not given the Victoria Cross was because he was the only surviving officer and the eye-witness testimony of enlisted men was not considered adequate for the highest honor in the British military. Four times he was mentioned in Dispatches. Perhaps the bravest thing he did, however, was to refuse to obey a direct order by a senior officer which would have led to the certain death of most of his men. The officer had been skulking far behind the lines when he gave the order to take up what was by now a horribly exposed position. He was unaware of conditions on the ground. Nevertheless, he was furious at Shakes’ refusal to carry out his order and stormed to the front, threatening to have him shot on the spot. Fortunately, a Canadian General happened to be there and saved the situation, giving the British officer an earful in the process. Years later, when Shakes was Speaker, the Canadian General wrote a long letter to Shakes, reminding him of the episode. Otherwise, we would probably never have heard about it.

            Shakes resigned his commission in 1919 with the rank of Captain and returned to the university, a changed man. Before taking his degree the following year, in Arts and Law, he had been elected President of the University Union and of the Students Representative Council. He’d also met Allison. She was on a float as part of the procession for the university Rag Week, when she saw him standing in the crowd, by the side of the road. She had her escort, Geordie Selkirk, stop the float and introduce them. That evening she told her best friend, “Grig” MacGregor, that she’d met the man she was going to marry. I asked how she could be so certain, and she said that she’d seen him already in her dreams and recognized him immediately. The irony of this is that Allison usually came across as a very modern, very rational woman. She placed first in her class at the university in Logic. Her father was Moderator Elect of the Church of Scotland when he died, a paragon of rationality and enemy of superstition. And when she told me how his brother Sandy had sought out Shakes the night before he died in the war, to say goodbye, she attributed that to the Second Sight. She seemed to regard possession of the Sight, in a matter of fact kind of way, as a sign of being not quite civilized. “A lot of people from the islands had it,” she told me. Perhaps she was not so “civilized” herself.

            She told me that it was her idea they should both go down to England and read English law, not Scottish law, and that she had found a poet and made him a politician. Not everyone today would agree that that was an improvement. But there’s no doubting the force of her ambition for him, nor the support she gave him in both his legal and political career. She had been one of the first women called to the bar (qualified to practice as a litigation attorney) in England and collected many such firsts throughout her life. When he was elected Speaker, which meant moving into the Speaker’s House in the Palace of Westminster, the comment in the political diaries of Chips Channon is simply, “A Palace for Allison.”  

            Shakes, of course, was at worst a willing participant in his own destiny, but that doesn’t mean he had no regrets, nor that he stopped writing altogether. In the 1950s he was given an honorary doctorate of letters by a Scottish university along with one other person, the poet T.S. Eliot. One was a politician with a passion for poetry, and the other a poet with an interest in politics. They spent the weekend together at the home of the university president, Eliot trying to get the conversation onto politics, and Shakes working just as hard to get the conversation onto poetry. Shakes, the superior debater, of course prevailed. Allison said it was the happiest weekend of his life. I have a charming letter from Eliot to Shakes in which he makes it clear that he’d enjoyed the weekend almost as much as Shakes himself.

            When I was a student, looking for an excuse to avoid the library one afternoon, I wandered into a bookshop, where they were advertising a new paperback entitled Scottish Tales of Terror. Underneath the title it said, “Stories by Arthur Conan Doyle, Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson and other MASTERS OF THE MACABRE.” Intrigued, I opened the book to see who the other Masters of the Macabre might be and there was a story attributed to W.S. Morrison, MP.

            His political career got off to a slow start. He first contested the Western Isles, which he had very little chance of winning: it was a safe Liberal seat back then, while Shakes ran as a Unionist. He campaigned in Gaelic and did better than previous Unionist candidates, but still lost. He wrote a fascinating and very funny article about the experience for an Edinburgh magazine, which I still have. Next, he was asked to run in another Liberal seat in the north of Scotland, in Caithness. No sooner had he begun campaigning there, however, than a safe Conservative seat opened up in Gloucestershire, in the west country of England. The party told him they wanted him in Parliament and suggested he move down to Gloucestershire immediately. He knew nobody in the county, but fortunately a couple of local landowners knew about his war record and pronounced themselves in favor. Not only was he adopted by the constituency party as their candidate, but Major Reg Gunther let him use the beautiful old Manor House in Withington as a home for a peppercorn rent. A quarter of a century later Reg became my godfather. In fact, he tried to persuade my parents to have me named Shakes Reginald. They compromised at Andrew William Reginald. Shakes and Reg are the reasons my family has lived in Withington for the last ninety years.

Entering Parliament in 1929 at the age of 36, Shakes spent his first five years as a backbencher, learning the ropes. He was made Financial Secretary to the Treasury in 1934 and was brought into the cabinet by Prime Minister Baldwin in 1936 as Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries. At this point he was being recognized as “a coming man.” The MP and diarist Chips Channon records a conversation he had with King Edward VIII when they joked that it looked as if they would be ruled by a succession of Morrisons, Shakes from the Conservative side and Herbert from Labour, the king adding that he hoped it would be mostly Shakes. Later that year, however, Edward announced his determination to marry the American divorcee and Nazi sympathizer, Wallis Simpson. The leaders of all three major parties were firm in their opposition to the King, as were the Prime Ministers of Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa and the Archbishop of Canterbury. Edward, however, refused to give up. Channon came to the House late one evening and sought out Shakes. Channon enquired whether he would be prepared to lead a King’s Party, which would include Churchill and the leaders of both the fascists and communists. Clearly such a party would divide the country at a delicate moment. Shakes adamantly refused and, in his diary, Channon, until now an admirer, sneers about Shakes’s “northern” accent and his “middle-class” morality. 

He was never to be Prime Minister. When Baldwin retired, the party felt that the long serving Neville Chamberlain deserved first crack. This, of course, led to the disastrous policy of appeasement and Britain’s entry into the Second World War, utterly unprepared for what was to come. And, when Chamberlain was forced to resign, the country turned to the outsider Churchill, who had not even been in the cabinet. Churchill was to lead the party for the next fifteen years. 

When war broke out, Britain was forced to contemplate how it would feed itself. For years it had depended on importing food from Europe and from its far-flung Empire, under the protection of the Royal Navy. Now, Germany controlled Europe and its submarines prowled the seas around the British Isles, looking for merchant shipping to attack. Shakes was made Minister for Food. Agriculture was put on a war footing, even as farm laborers were flocking to the cities to join up. Two of his main initiatives were the revival of the Women’s Land Army and the introduction of rationing. Even the new king and queen asked for and were sent ration books to demonstrate their willingness to share the sufferings and privations of their people. Rationing was to continue well after the war, until 1954, and shaped the outlook of a generation of Britons, much the way the Great Depression did in the US.

In 1940 he was made Postmaster General, a rather arcane position, which involved all communications. As part of that responsibility he championed the building of radar towers around the coasts, which were to be so useful in protecting the cities and airfields from aerial bombardment. Basically, he was in charge of the defense of the British cities from the air, and there are press photos of him inspecting searchlights on the roofs of buildings during the Blitz. For whatever reason, however, Churchill seems not to have enjoyed having him in Government. Churchill liked to wear his war decorations to meetings and encouraged others to do the same: Allison suggested to me that he was irritated by the fact that Shakes alone among the cabinet had more and better ones than he did. It is probably more to the point that the war cabinet was a National Government and Churchill had to find roles for the leaders of the other parties. Shakes remained in, as it were, the second tier of ministerial positions.

            In 1943, with the worst years of the Blitz over, he was moved to a position where he would be planning for the eventual peace, as the first Minister of Town and Country Planning. Despite their best efforts, the cities had been pulverized by German bombing and whole neighborhoods destroyed. It was widely understood that, when the troops came home, they would and should expect decent new homes to live in. Millions of homes needed to be built before that happened. And yet, as a former minister of Agriculture, Shakes wanted to preserve as much of the countryside as he could from urban sprawl. The result was the Green Belt, which encircled London and other cities, preserving an area free from developers.

            When the troops came home in 1945, there was a General Election, and Churchill, Shakes and the Conservatives found themselves voted out. For the next six years Shakes held a variety of “shadow” portfolios in Opposition, while Labour set out to build up the new welfare state, nationalize major industries and dismember the Empire. When the Conservatives swept back in, in 1951, Churchill was already 76, with visibly failing powers, and Shakes 58.

            Having been on the Conservative front bench for 15 years, in Government and Opposition alike, Shakes might have expected a plum cabinet position. On the other hand, with a large number of new members, there was a case for bringing in new blood and sweeping out the old. Appointments were made and invitations sent out and none came through for Shakes.

            The night of the first cabinet meeting he and Allison were settling down for a quiet evening at home when the phone rang. Allison answered it. It was Churchill and he was furious. “Where the hell’s Shakes? He’s late!” “Late for what, Prime Minister?” “For the cabinet meeting, of course!” “He’s not in your cabinet, Winston.” “Don’t be ridiculous, woman. Of course he is.” “Well, what position do you think you’ve given him?” “I don’t know. Someone bring me a list of cabinet offices!.... Oh, there seems to have been a mistake.” And he rang off.

            Shortly afterwards, as if to explain his omission, he announced that he was proposing Shakes for Speaker. There were two problems with this. First, there was a strict rotation and it was Labour’s turn to nominate the Speaker, and second, by convention the Speaker was always chosen from the back benches, not from among people who had served in Government positions. This was because it was widely agreed that the Speaker should be above party politics, strictly neutral in his management of the House. Labour strenuously objected to Shakes’s nomination, but Churchill persisted, and the result was the first contested election of a Speaker in centuries. 

            Ironically, though he had been only a moderate success as a minister, he was to be one of the great Speakers, with a reputation for being scrupulously fair that would have impressed those early Morrison judges, the Brieves. He was also the first and, so far, only, native Gaelic speaker to become Speaker.

            There are signs that perhaps Churchill would have been happy for him to be less fair. I have letters in which Churchill invited Shakes to chair the board which would then choose Governors for the BBC, the national broadcaster. Shakes politely declined, saying that he wouldn’t do anything that might call into question the impartiality of either institution, the BBC or the Speakership. 

            The great test for his Speakership came in the tense debates during the Suez Crisis, when members very nearly came to blows on the floor of the House. Britain and France had built and still owned the Suez Canal, which they considered to have vital strategic importance, connecting Europe with their imperial and trading connections in the East. When President Nasser of Egypt nationalized the canal, Britain and France were ready to use military force to retake it. Despite the fact that the USA owned a similar canal in Panama and would later go to war to protect its interest there, this time it saw an opportunity to ingratiate itself with the oil-producing countries of the Arab world and denounced the proposed action as blatant colonialism. The result was a massive crisis in the Western Alliance at a delicate time during the Cold War. It also crystalized an emerging identity for Britain as a post-colonial, medium sized nation, bound by international conventions and no longer free to take unilateral action to impose its will on smaller countries. This was an identity that Conservatives like Churchill and the new Prime Minister, Eden, were most reluctant to embrace. In the end, faced with international criticism and lacking the support of their American allies in the Security Council, they were forced to back down, utterly humiliated. 

            Shakes used a couple of ploys to keep order in the House during the crisis. One was his sense of humor. A quiet aside could turn a mood of angry hostility to smiles and laughter at a stroke. The other device was his deafness. His hearing had been damaged by his years in the artillery and continued to deteriorate. He had microphones hung in the chamber and a speaker built into the Speaker’s chair. He could often be seen with his head leaning against the (small s) speaker and his eyes closed trying to make sure he heard what was said. If a member said something in a rash moment, which caused his opponents to demand he be disciplined, Shakes might simply claim that he hadn’t heard the remark and give the member the chance to withdraw it and rephrase his comments.

            Eventually, not just his hearing but his general health had declined to the point he felt he could not perform his duties as he wanted. He informed the House and his constituency that he would not seek reelection in the 1959 campaign. A grateful House voted him a generous pension and he began looking forward to retirement: golf, poetry and long visits to the islands, perhaps in combination. When in Uist, he was known to carry his 7 iron down to the machair, the sandy seaside plane that resembled a natural links course, as an aide to concentration and decision-making. One of his old friends, however, had other plans for him.

            Robert Menzies had become Prime Minister of Australia in April 1939 and in September that year joined Britain in declaring war on Germany and Japan. In 1941 he spent four months in Britain, during which he attended war cabinet meetings and was even proposed as a replacement for Churchill, whose autocratic style some found irksome. He also struck up a warm friendship with Shakes, with whom he felt a special bond as fellow Scotsmen. When he returned to Australia, he found he had lost the support of his own party and was forced to resign. He later credited Shakes with restoring his faith in himself and his commitment to public service during this dark time. After pulling himself together, he responded by helping to start a new party, the Liberals, and led them to victory in 1949. In this new guise Menzies served as Prime Minister from 1949 to 1966, still a record for an Australian. 

            In 1959, as Shakes was preparing to retire, so was Field Marshall Lord Slim, the Governor-General of Australia. The Governor-General is the Queen’s representative in a Commonwealth country and plays the same role that she does in the UK constitution. While they have the power theoretically to dismiss governments and call elections, they try to remain apart from party politics. The idea is that the Head of State should be above the business of politics, trusted to represent the interests of the nation as a whole. 

            With Slim preparing to step down, Menzies reached out to his old friend Shakes and insisted he come out as Slim’s replacement. He assured him there would be little to do: the position was largely ceremonial, the weather was warm and pleasant, and so were the people. The reality turned out to be very different. Many in the Australian press had decided it was well past the time that they had a native-born Australian as Governor-General. The appointment of Shakes, they said, smacked of Menzies’ obsequious pro-British behavior during the war. 

            Shakes realized he’d have to work hard to save his friend’s career, once again. He went around every state capital, opening Parliaments and making himself and Allison available for any and all social and charitable events. All the activity served to accelerate the decline in his already precarious health, and in February 1961, exactly a year after taking office, he died. He was only 67 years old. He was buried in the church of St John in Canberra and 22 years later, when Allison died in England, the Australian Air Force flew her body out to be buried beside her husband. That he had succeeded in winning the country over can be inferred from the magnificent State funeral he was awarded and the fact that the beautiful tree-lined avenue leading to Yarralumla, Government House, is today named Dunrossil Drive. Shortly afterwards, the Queen’s consort, the Duke of Edinburgh, came out to deliver the first Dunrossil Memorial lecture in the Australian Parliament.

A gracious and extraordinarily formal letter from Churchill after Shakes agreed to become Governor-General of Australia

Chapter 5: John William Morrison, 2nd Viscount Dunrossil CMG, KStJ

            My father, John William Morrison, was born in the Temple, the old compound of legal offices and flats, in the City of London in 1926, three years before Shakes was to enter Parliament. He went to junior school in Cheltenham and High School at Fettes in Edinburgh. Leaving school in the last years of the Second World War, in 1944, he then tried to join the Royal Air Force but was told he should take up his place at Oxford instead. He spent six months at the university, where he joined the university’s own flying club, and then re-presented himself to the Air Force, pointing out that they wouldn’t even need to teach him to fly. They accepted him to the Air Force college at Cranwell, where he completed a crash course (not literally) and spent the last months of the war patrolling the east coast of England in a Spitfire. 

            When I was at school myself, I asked Allison why she thought my father had been in such a rush to join up. She said that mere survival was not really an option in our family. Apparently, Shakes had given a speech which particularly angered the German Propaganda Minister, Ribbentrop, who responded by saying that the first thing they’d do after their victory would be to wipe out Shakes and his entire family. I suspect there was more to it than that. In my early 20s I had a choice to make between two jobs, one more dangerous and exciting, the other much more conventional, and asked my father for his advice. His response was, “It’s good for a young man to be shot at.” I ignored him and joined the bank. And years later, when I visited him in Bermuda with a couple of brilliant young banker friends, Dad told us it was a shame that the best minds of our generation seemed more interested in making money than in public service. Dad and his friends were raised to value service before all else.

            After eventually leaving the Air Force, he spent a year In Canada, where he almost settled and became a rancher, before coming back to Oxford to finish his degree. There, not surprisingly, he became interested in Politics and joined the university Conservative Association, OUCA. To his irritation he discovered that one of the colleges, Christ Church, tended to monopolize the offices of OUCA. To this day it has produced almost as many Prime Ministers (13) as Cambridge University in its entirety (14). As it happened, Dad and his friend Cranley Onslow had invented a fictitious character in their college. They used to put this imaginary student down for sports teams, then ‘VS” him as being unavailable, and wrote up Oriel College JCR debates, detailing how he’d made a brilliant closing speech, which had clinched the case for his side.

            They decided, as a prank, to run him for Treasurer of OUCA. They climbed up one of the statues outside the Sheldonian Theatre, put a cap and gown on the head, and took an out of focus photo for the application. Then they hosted parties for him, telling people how much he cared for their causes. To their surprise, they found people responding that they were themselves great friends with the candidate and were fully in support. To their even greater surprise, he ended up winning the election, at which point they had to reveal his (non) existence. They thought they’d both be sent down, that is, expelled from the university, but the Times newspaper ran an editorial saying this was a model demonstration of the power and effectiveness of machine politics, for which we should all be grateful. Dad proceeded to break Christ Church’s monopoly on high office shortly afterwards. 

Cranley went on to a long career as a Conservative MP, but Dad wanted a more predictable, steady income. He had fallen in love with a beautiful fellow student, Mavis Spencer-Payne, and wanted to start a family. My parents were married at Oxford the week after graduating and raced up to the islands on Dad’s motorbike for a brief honeymoon. The next week Dad had to present himself back at the Air Force, when the Reserve was called up because of the Korean War. At some point he knew the crisis would be over and he’d need a real job. Politics was too unpredictable. “Shadow” ministers were paid much less than their Government counterparts, and he’d seen the impact on his own parents when the Conservatives lost the 1945 Election. The Civil Service seemed to be the answer – it was politics with a salary, and he joined the Commonwealth Relations Office, later to be merged into the FCO. 

            We set sail for Australia when I was six weeks old. By the time I was eight, when my parents put my sister and me on a plane for England and boarding school, we had spent two years in Australia, two in what is now Bangladesh and almost two more in South Africa. 

In South Africa Dad was assigned to cover the Mandela trial and was so impressed with Mandela’s poise, grace and intelligence, that he obtained permission from the Foreign Office in London to smuggle law books into Mandela’s cell on Robben Island. Dad felt that the best hope for South Africa was that Mandela should one day be in a position to form a Government, and that it would be disastrous if his brain was allowed to rot and atrophy in the meantime. Dad’s role in this was only discovered when the relevant papers were eventually declassified under the 30 year rule. This led to a few hardy journalists trekking all the way to the Outer Hebrides to interview and photograph the hero of the hour. “My Mandela Secret,” ran one headline: “Isles’ envoy helped jailed hero with gift of law books.” “Scots peer who helped Mandela survive prison,” ran another.

            It was also while we were in South Africa that Shakes died and Dad succeeded him as Viscount Dunrossil. He was 34. Shakes had written to him back in 1959 to discuss possible names for his title. He could not choose Morrison, because there was already a Lord Morrison. At one point there were as many as a dozen different names under consideration, including Uist and Moiresdain, the Gaelic spelling of Morrison. My father wrote back to say that any title would only be a hindrance to him in his career as a Diplomat. Shakes replied that, even if Dad didn’t want it, he wanted it for Dad and for his descendants. 

            Dad went on to hold posts in London, New York, Ottawa, Brussels and finished up with Fiji, Barbados and Bermuda. While in Ottawa, his Uncle John, the chief, sent him a letter appointing him Chieftain over North America for Clan Morrison, a title I inherited and which became meaningful after I settled in Texas. Much as he liked the major capitals, he particularly loved relating to fellow islanders. He had been only six months as High Commissioner in Barbados, during which time he had negotiated the independence of St Kitts Nevis, when he received a telegram informing him that “the Queen and the Prime Minister have approved your appointment as Governor of Bermuda.” He was supposed to be there the following Monday. The Bermudians had ousted their previous Governor and sent him packing back to Britain. Now there was a serious crisis: all the talk was of independence. There was a general expectation that Dad was being sent there to manage that process. 

            One problem was that the previous Governor had been a meddler, trying to make decisions for the Bermudians. Dad felt that they needed to learn to make these decisions for themselves, if they were to be able to make a go of it as an independent country. He told the Cabinet upfront they weren’t ready for independence and he wouldn’t even discuss it for a year. Meanwhile he told the Housing minister to make the decisions about housing, the finance minister about the economy, and so on. Gradually, they stopped rushing up the hill to Government House every time there was a problem. At the end of a year, he called the Government back and said he was ready to talk about independence. He thought they were finally ready. But now, they were happy and didn’t want to discuss it anymore. At the end of his term, the Bermudian Premier, Sir John Swan, petitioned the British Government to let Dad stay for another term, now they finally had a Governor they liked and respected. The British Government agreed. At the end of that second term, Premier Swan tried again, but Mrs. Thatcher told him enough was enough and there was no longer any crisis which would cause the Foreign Office to break its own strict rules about retirement. 

            And so Dad came home and eventually retired back to the islands, living in the house where his grandfather Seoc had gone to school. He was also able finally to take his seat in the House of Lords, the Upper House of the British Parliament. Until now he had been unable to take part in any debates because he was a public servant. Dad loved the business of politics and took his responsibilities seriously, until the House of Lords was reformed under Prime Minister Tony Blair, when he and most other “hereditaries” lost the right to sit in their own House. Until then, despite being a lifelong Conservative, he opted to be listed as a cross-bencher, an independent. This was to remove any inhibitions the islanders might have about asking him to resolve their problems. He said he wanted to represent the islanders, not a political party. Soon he was also asked to succeed the Earl of Granville in the largely ceremonial position of Lord Lieutenant of the Western Isles, that is, the Queen’s representative in the islands. 

When he turned 70, in 1996, Dad held an enormous party, part celebration part seminar, for all the descendants of Seoc and Marion he could trace. 90 people came to North Uist, from seven different countries, many of them for the first time, as we delighted in discovering similarities and differences, and speculating about the clan and our origins. In the winter he used to go on swimming vacations with a couple of local merry widows, including the Dowager Countess of Granville, to other islands where the water was warmer. On one of these trips, in the Canary Islands, he fell ill suddenly and died the next day. He was just 73. We buried his ashes next to his Uncle John, the chief, and about twenty yards from the grave of John and Annie, his great grandparents, in Clachan Sands, North Uist. 

            One thing Dad set in motion shortly before he died was the building of a bridge across from the mainland of Ness to the stack, where the old fortress of Dun Eistein, by tradition the stronghold and refuge of the Morrisons, had been. The following year the bridge was built, partly financed by the North American Clan Society. A large number of Morrisons came from all over the world for the opening. While we were there, we were all invited to come to the council chamber of the Comhairle nan Eilean Siar, the Western Isles council. To my embarrassment, and to the greater embarrassment of my children, we were treated to a moving tribute to my father and grandfather and assured of the warm regard in which they were both still held.

            In effect, the council was telling us that the family had brought honor to the islands and that they appreciated that we continued to come home. They could see that, however far we moved around the world, the islands remained an important part of who we were. Chief Ru demonstrates that every year by his actions, bringing his family home and working on the old house. His wonderful aunt Mary moved back to North Uist on her own retirement and has built a house, and a home, there. She has come to play a central role in the communal life of North Uist, helping collect and preserve both written and oral records, and contributing, as a good seanachie, to the island’s historical memories. Now Ru’s son Alasdair, although born in America, is planning to live there during his gap year before going to university and ultimately to make it his home.

            The Morrisons of Ruchdi may be a new line of chiefs, but I believe they understand exactly what the role of a modern chiefly family should be.

The Author

            Andrew Morrison, the 3rd Viscount Dunrossil, was born in London in 1953 and lived in Speaker’s House with his parents when a baby and from 1956-8. After spending most of his early years in Australia, Bangladesh and South Africa, he attended Eton and Oxford, where he studied the Classics. He moved to the US in 1981, working for a British bank, and has lived in San Antonio, Texas, since 1989.

            Andrew is a former Chairman of the American Financial Services Association and serves as the Honorary British Consul in San Antonio. He is also a former Chairman of the Society of Scottish Armigers, whose President is the Lord Lyon. He serves on the Advisory Board of the Council of Scottish Clans and Associations and on the Executive Committee of the Standing Council of Scottish Chiefs. In addition, he is an Honorary Patron of the American-Scottish Foundation and a Director of Scottish Heritage USA. He has been an honored guest and keynote speaker at various Scottish Games, St Andrew’s Day dinners, Tartan Day ceremonies and festivals in the US, as well as the Scottish North American Leadership Council. He serves as the Hereditary Chieftain for the Americas for Clan Morrison.