A Highland Laird

Press, Volume CII, Issue 30176, 6 July 1963, Page 3

A Highland Laird

Butt and Ben. By Donald Sutherland. Blackwood. 246 pp. Only voluminous excerpts from this delightful book of reminiscences could do justice to its quality. Donald Sutherland was born in the latter years of Queen Victoria's reign, the only son of a Scottish laird resident near Oban. Without flourish or drama he describes the placid lives of the Scottish gentry between 1900 and the beginning of the first world war. x

We are all disposed to believe that the standards of our own youth are those most acceptable to humanity generally. Manners certainly have deteriorated in the last 50 years and the discipline which young Donald accepted as the natural order of things would probably be frowned on by psychologists today. The chief result of parental sternness was, however, to make him a well-integrated individual.

Memories in the Highlands are long and the unfortunate happenings at Glencoe, so many centuries back, is still held against the Campbells, even in their stronghold of Argyllshire, by the members of the clans they treated so badly. Yet the courtesies are observed.

One of young Sutherland’s fiercely-held convictions was his father’s superiority as a shot over all others in the United Kingdom, yet when King George V, who had come to hear of this, graciously permitted him to stand near the royal butt at a shooting party, the boy manfully acknowledged at the end of the day that his sovereign was the better man. There is an amusing chapter on the eccentrics he knew. Sir Duncan Campbell, of Barcaldine, for example, engineered a perfectly feasible plot, backed by some abstruse Scottish reasoning, for the judical murder of Lloyd George; after his presentation of the 1909 budget. Here, argued Sir Duncan, was an enemy of the constitution and his simple intention was to have him hanged . over the gate there., I still have a couple of men who would do whatever I told them.” Campbell Muir was a horse of a more dubious colour. Having nearly succeeded in drowning a boatload of civic dignitaries who had offended him, and committed motoring offences which would certainly have got him goaled in these days, he decided to seek a career in less tame surroundings and was last heard of in Chicago driving a car for Al Capone.

Mr Sutherland illuminatingly condemns what he terms the “regiolatry,” which is seen at its worst during the Braemar Highland games. Gawping crowds indulge in this specious entertainment which is “sired by curiosity out of familiarity . . . and only succeeds in debasing the individual and the office,” not to mention making a mockery of the Royal Family’s few opportunities of privacy.”