FROM NORTH OF TWEED

Otago Witness, Issue 3524, 27 September 1921, Page 21

FROM NORTH OF TWEED

A LETTER TO SCOTTISH EXILES.

(By

Robert S. Angus.)

EDINBURGH, August 4. It used to be a jibe (of Glasgow origin) that families in the West End of Edinburgh ■were always in the habit of pulling their bouse blinds down in August, so that it might be thought they had gone to the seaside or the country, whether they had or not, As a matter of fact, the summer exodus seems to bo larger this year than it lias been since before the war. The Court of Session is closed; the judges have gone to their country estates; the advocates (except a lucky lew, who are picking up handfuls of guineas as counsel before a provisional order inquiry) are unemployed; the solicitors have left their offices in charge of a man and a boy; the schools have had their annual prize-givings and speech days; and the golf courses in East Lothian and Fife and Forfarshire are thronged with young players, whose free swing is the envy, and whose recklessness in driving into couples in front of them is the terror, of tneii seniors. Buddon Camp lias regained some of its pre-war glory, and is the scene of warlike manoeuvres by Territorials and O.T.C. contingents. And the daily papers, for lack of news and advertisements, have shrunk to their usual August leanness. THE HIGHLAND INVASION. The full tide of humanity (which Dr Johnson used to say was to he found at Charing Cross) is in course of being transferred to Penn Central Station. The lairds who can afford it and the shooting tenants of those who cannot are on their way to the Highlands, aiyl by this day week a lot of powder and shot will bo in the course of being iet off. The prospects for ;lio season are good, and the abundant rain during the last week or two has made conditions pleasant, as well as s:: vetht he moors front the danger of widespread damage by fire. It is easy to mock or to be indignant at the extent to which the Highlands have become dependent on sport, but the fact is that unless the transition is made gradually an economic crisis would result, involving both local authorities and tradesmen of all sorts who reap their harvest from the southerners with well-lined pockets who cgme to us every autumn. DEER FORESTS. For instance, Mr James Scc'.t, an Edinburgh S.S.C.. provides an indignant minority report to the recommendations of the Deer Forests Committee, of which ho was a member. He rails against the fact that one-fifth of our whole area is devoted to purposes of sport, but that proportion, ns Mr Scott i- well aware, or should be, gives a totally false impression, since much of the land is fir for little else. But it is a sign of the change of opinion on the subject, that even the majority of the committee which included a good few landlords, recommend that owners of deer forests should be required to fence them adequately, so as to prevent the deer invading the adjoining cultivated land, and that if they fail the farmer should have power to destroy the deer. It is also recommended that the agiiculturalist should have similar rights in regard to grouse and other winged game, as well as foxes. South of the Tweed it is little short of sacrilege to shoot a fox, but on this side we are less squeamish. HEATHER-BURNING. Not many of us who used to find the burning of heather and whirrs in the spring months one of the glories of our boyhood days, realised that we were serving a valuable economic function. Heather is a valuable food for sheep and grouse when it is young and tender, but when it grows old and thick in the stem it is good for neither. Both sheep farmers and gamekeepers have failed to realise this thoroughly, for the former were anxious, as to tile safety of the lambs and the latter concerned lest the nests of the grouse and the pheasants should be destroyed. Now a departmental committee reports that the burning should be done regularly and systematically every year or two, and that where there is failure the Board of Agriculture should have power to intervene. But once the burning is reduced to the level of an agricultural process it will lose half its attraction to the country small boy, for whom the fact that the blaze was forbidden was a great part of the fun. TIIE BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. At long last the Government has, under Parliamentary pressure, agreed to reconstitute the .Scottish Board of Agriculture, which has been for years the target for complaints. The chan man (Sir Robert Wright) is retiring at the end of the month; Sir Arthur Rose, who has done admirable work in land settlement, desires to return to his own business; and there is also another vacancy. The filling of these will be the occasion of a good deal of wire-pulling. The name of Air Campbell, a Scotsman who has made the Irish department the success it is, has been mentioned as a probable chairman, but I am told that he does not care to leave his present post, though one would have thought Ireland was a good count rv to get out of at, present. Failing him. there is Air Charles Al. Douglas, of Auchlochan, a philosopher turned farmer. The Secretary for Scotland is not likely to lack advice, and whatever he does he has the melancholy reflection that he cannot please everybody. But I know he is genuinely anxious to see the board started off on sound lines. VACANT THISTLES. I hear that the vacancy in the Order of the Thistle eau-ed by the death of Lord Balfour of Burleigh will he filled by the appointment of the Earl of Crawford and Balcarres, who is the head of one of our oldest families (the Lindsays), arid has done a large amount of public work. The other vacancy will he given to either Viscount Novar (late Governor-General of Australia) or to Lord Carmichael, who was a successful Governor in India. None of these appointments " ill justifv tlio gibe of the late Lord '.Hlisbury, who. when a certain nobleman was suggested to him for the Order, remarked: “Why, if we I were to give him tho Thistle he would eat it.” A SCOTTISH IK TCIIMAN. Lord Reay, who died the other day in Berwickshire, at the age of 82 years, was <jno of the few men who have had, in modern times, a public career in two European countries. Before his father succeeded to the title, some 46 yen-; ago (la hold it for only a year), the hire peer had been Minister for Education in Holland, of which country a cousin was afterwards Prime Minister. Lord Beiy had actually if; he naturalised after Lis succession to the peerage.

and to the end of his days he spoke with a pronounced foreign accent. He was wellmeaning, laborious, and did much useful public work, especially in connection with education, but as a speaker he was woefully dull. He was descendedfrom the first Lord Reay's grandson, “Colonel-Proprietor” of Mackay’s Scottish Regiment, which went to fight in the Low Country wars of the seventeenth century. To him, according to Hill Burton, the world is indebted for the invention of the fixed bayonet, which enabled the soldier for the first time to use his musket and then charge without having to wait, an easy target for the enemy, while he screwed his bayonet to the muzzle. The heir to the Reay peerage is another Dutchman, Baron Eric A lack ay. But the Reay estates have long passed into other hands, and as the late peer held his Scottish estates through the widow he married, I fear the title will be a barren honour for the new holder.

COPPER MINING IN SHETLAND. For the third time in a hundred years an attempt is being made to exploit the veins of copper ore in Shetland at Sandlodge, a few miles south of Shetland. That the metal is there is certain ; the only question is whether it is in paying quantity. The promoters of the present enterprise believe that it is, and they have imported not only skilled miners from Cornwall, but the most up-to-date plant and methods. Formerly it was not possible to produce more titan 40 tons of ore a day ; now it. is estimated' that the output will be at least 1000 tons a week. Afotive power is being obtained from peat, gas made on the spot, and, as the. manufacture of it yields valuable by-products, it is estimated that the mines will have their power for nothing. Besides there is abundance of sea water, another essential. Should the industry succeed it will be a great boon, especially in view of the failure of the herring fisheries on the west side of Shetland—the result, as the local people believe, of the whale fishing, a Norwegian enterprise which the Secretary for Scotland is now being urged to prohibit, SOCIAL CHANGES BY THE WAR,

According to the report of the Scottish Board of Health, one of the minor effects of the war was the disappearance of the

trumps irom the roads and of the “ins-and* outs ’ iiom „ the workhouse. The report refers to last year. I am a little doubtful if it would hold equally true to-day. The abundance of employment for both sexes, young and old, and the supply of ready money where formerly it was little known, produced changes in the habits of the people, some of which may be permanent. llius the inspector for Shetland notes that in former clays “it was a common thing to see people walking barefooted to Lerwick with their boots 'for greater ease) slung over their shoulders. Outside the town they would put them on, so as not to be different in appearance from the townsfolk. Now the island is full of motor cars, and walking appears to be a forgotten --'.lost of the extra money earneu clur--31 ' iie v, *ar was spent on luxuries, and “economic conditions from 1814- to the end o. rue war taiig'hfc the populations of these \> Inch, ifc 13 to he feared, will have to be painfully unlearned.” But it must ah-o have taught them a higher standard of life, which will tend to make them less readv to be content, with a few acres of barren "soil and eke out a precarious livelihood by occasional fishing. Yet; even that wav of hie would seem to be preferable to that of a considerable proportion of the artisans of Edinburgh, where, on the admission of the medical officer of health, 37 per cent, of the population are still living in houses of not more than two rooms.