Gaelic Cape Breton Step-Dancing: An Historical and Ethnographic Perspective 9780773550605

Table of contents :
Cover
Copyright
Contents
Abbreviations
Maps, Illustrations, and Genealogical Charts
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1: The Religious Background in Scotland, 1746–1846
2: Step-Dancing in Catholic Gaelic Cape Breton and Northeastern Nova Scotia from 1790
3: The Mary "Tulloch" Macdonald Phenomenon Examined
4: Dancing in the Catholic Margarees, Glendale, and Boisdale
5: The Gluasad Gàidhealach / Gaelic Movement in Cape Breton, 1919–46
6: Step-Dancing in Presbyterian Cape Breton from 1790
7: The Evidence for Step-Dancing in Scotland, 1775–1848
8: Dancing in Moderate Presbyterian Gaelic Parishes in Scotland
9: Dancing in Inland Gaelic Strathspey and Northwestern Perthshire
10: Changes in Dancing in Gaelic Scotland: The Dancing Record from Gaelic Songs, 1850–85
11: The Four Doctors, An t-Òranaiche / The Gaelic Songster, and Others, 1879–1914
12: Scottish Attitudes to Dance: Twentieth-Century Letters from Gaelic Scotland
13: Dancing Schools and Dancing-Masters in Gaelic Scotland, 1775–1845
14: Last Words: A Scottish Country Dancing Enigma
Appendices
Appendix A: The Royal Bounty: The Presbyterian Reverend Duncan MacCallum (1784–1863)
Appendix B: From the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, 17 May 1925
Appendix C: From among the Crofters Questioned in 1883 by Members of the Napier Commission
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

G a e l ic C a p e B r e to n Step-Danci ng

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43 Gaelic Cape Breton Step-Dancing An Historical and Ethnographic Perspective John G. Gibson

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Gaelic Cape Breton Step-Dancing An Historical and Ethnographic Perspective

J o h n G . G i b son

McGill-­Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

©  McGill-Queen’s University Press 2017 ISB N 978-0-7735-5059-9 (cloth) ISB N 978-0-7735-5060-5 (eP DF ) ISB N 978-0-7735-5061-2 (eP UB) Legal deposit second quarter 2017 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Gibson, John G. (John Graham), 1941–, author Gaelic Cape Breton step-dancing : an historical and ethnographic perspective / John G. Gibson. (McGill-Queen’s studies in ethnic history. Series two; 43) Includes bibliographical references and index. Issued in print and electronic formats. ISBN 978-0-7735-5059-9 (cloth). – IS BN 978-0-7735-5060-5 (eP D F ). – ISBN 978-0-7735-5061-2 (eP UB) 1. Step dancing – Nova Scotia – Cape Breton Island – History.  2. Step dancing – Scotland – History.  3. Cape Breton Island (N.S.) – Social life and customs.  4. Scotland – Social life and customs.  I. Title.  II. Series:  McGill-Queen’s studies in ethnic history. Series two; 43 C2017-901602-4 GV1 79 3.G53 2 017     793. 3' 197169     C2017-901603-2

This book was typeset by Marquis Interscript in 10.5 / 13 Sabon.

For Beatrix and Alasdair, and Michael and Seumas, and in memory of an old friend, John Craig

Contents

Abbreviations xi Maps, Illustrations, and Genealogical Charts  xiii Acknowledgments xxxi Introduction 3   1 The Religious Background in Scotland, 1746–1846  14   2 Step-Dancing in Catholic Gaelic Cape Breton and Northeastern Nova Scotia from 1790  28   3 The Mary “Tulloch” Macdonald Phenomenon Examined  64   4 Dancing in the Catholic Margarees, Glendale, and Boisdale  74  5 The Gluasad Gàidhealach / Gaelic Movement in Cape Breton, 1919–46 96   6 Step-Dancing in Presbyterian Cape Breton from 1790  112   7 The Evidence for Step-Dancing in Scotland, 1775–1848  128   8 Dancing in Moderate Presbyterian Gaelic Parishes in Scotland  145   9 Dancing in Inland Gaelic Strathspey and Northwestern Perthshire 177 10 Changes in Dancing in Gaelic Scotland: The Dancing Record from Gaelic Songs, 1850–85  203 11 The Four Doctors, An t-Òranaiche / The Songster, and Others, 1879–1914 207

x Contents

12 Scottish Attitudes to Dance: Twentieth-Century Letters from Gaelic Scotland 230 13 Dancing Schools and Dancing-Masters in Gaelic Scotland, 1775–1845 255 14 Last Words: A Scottish Country Dancing Enigma  260 A ppen dic e s   A The Royal Bounty: The Presbyterian Reverend Duncan MacCallum (1784–1863) 271   B From the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, 17 May 1725: Commission to Some Ministers and Ruling Elders for Reformation of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, and for Management of the King’s Bounty for That End  275   C From among the Crofters Questioned in 1883 by Members of the Napier Commission  278 Notes 279 Bibliography 397 Index 447

Abbreviations

a dr agacs asfx u b ia chs c si c wp

Antigonish Diocesan Records (Antigonish, n s ) Acts of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland Archive of St Francis Xavier University, Antigonish, n s Beaton Institute Archives, University of Cape Breton, n s Church of Scotland Census of the Small Isles Carmichael Watson Project (Dr William Stewart, Edinburgh University) dd Doctor of Divinity efdss English Folk Dance and Song Society Early Gaelic Book Collection eg b c FES Fasti Ecclesiae Scoticanae Free Church of Scotland (1843) fc hs fpch Free Presbyterian Church (1893) g a /g ac s General Assembly / General Assembly Church of Scotland General Assembly Papers (main series) gap Gaelic History Society of Glendale (Cape Breton) g hsg g rts Glasgow Revival Tract Society Gaelic Society of Inverness g si HCCENS History of the Catholic Church in Eastern Nova Scotia hl/hu Houghton Library, Harvard University, Boston HOIC History of Inverness County JEFDSS Journal of the English Folk Dance and Song Society MP Mabou Pioneers n a National Archives (Kew, London) nas National Archives of Scotland

xii Abbreviations

n ls n mc NSA OPS OSA pa n s PSAS r b /RD rc a hms Rel. Celt. rsc ds s c sc /r s c sfx u s pg h s sg s s spc k s ss

TGSI ucb u fp

National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh National Museums of Canada New Statistical Account Origines Parochiales Scotiae Old Statistical Account Public Archives of Nova Scotia Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland Royal Bounty / Regium Donum Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland Reliquiae Celticae Royal Scottish Country Dance Society Scottish Catholic Society of Canada / Records Special Collections, St Francis Xavier University, Antigonish, ns Society for Propagating the Gospel at Home Society for the Support of Gaelic Schools Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge School of Scottish Studies (University of Edinburgh). Now Celtic and Scottish Studies Transactions of the Gaelic Society of Inverness University of Cape Breton, Sydney, n s United Free Presbyterian Church

Keppoch, Badenoch, and Laggan (Strathspey)

The Catholic Mainland and Eigg

Episcopal Appin

Cape Breton Island

Parish of Judique, Inverness County Note: Some placenames and locations included on detailed maps of Cape Breton were transcribed as they appeared in various sources, including Roy’s military surveying and map (1748–55), Ordnance Survey, and other cartography, nls. Ambrose F. Church’s topographical township map of Inverness County, Cape Breton, 1884; D.B. Cann, J.I. MacDougall, and J.D. Hilchey, 1963 Soil Survey of Cape Breton Island, report 12 (map); Albert E. Roland’s Geological Background and Physiography of Nova Scotia.

Glendale and River Denys, Inverness County

Mabou–Port Hood parishes

Lake Ainslie and South-West Margaree

Iona and Boisdale parishes

Old man dancing, Argyllshire, c. 1900

Harvey MacKinnon step-dancing at the International Folk Music Council meeting, Quebec, 1961. Reproduced from Helen Creighton and Calum MacLeod, Gaelic Songs in Nova Scotia, National Museum of Canada, Bulletin no. 198, Anthropological Series No. 66, 1964, p. 57

Judique step-dancer Angus John Graham (Angie John) giving an al fresco performance, place and date uncertain. Photo by kind courtesy of the dancer’s daughter, Mary (Graham) Macdonald (Mary Archie), Judique

Modern Scotch Four, à la South-West Margaree style, Port Hood Arena, 6 August 1994. Photo from Greg Smith

William Fraser dancing, Strathlorn region

Theresa McLellan

MacLeods Captain Neil MacLeod of Gesto (Collection … 1828; d. 1836) Kenneth MacLeod Anne MacLeod d.s.p. 1869, = Charles founder of MacDonald of Ord Gesto Hospital Dr Keith Norman MacDonald

Janet MacLeod, Caroline Hill / House (1799–1882) (thirty-two steps) Lachlan MacDonald at Skeabost = Wilhelmina “Minna” MacKenzie, a convert to Catholicism (after whom a fiddle reel was made, Skye Collection, book 2, 40; kn m ’s arranging)

A r g yll Campbells and Lovat Fras ers Archibald Campbell 9th Earl of Argyll

John Campbell of Mamore (d. 1729) 2nd son

Archibald Campbell (d. 1703) 1st Duke of Argyll

Simon Fraser = 1. Margaret Grant = 2. Primrose Campbell Gen. John Campbell Archibald Campbell John Campbell (decap. 1747) (1691–1729) (1710–1796) 4th Duke of Argyll (d. 1761) (d. 1743) from 1761 3rd Duke of Argyll 2nd Duke of Argyll Simon Fraser* (1726–1782)

Archibald Campbell Fraser (d. 1815)

C a merons , MacPhers ons, and Fras ers Sir Ewen Cameron = 2. Isabel MacLean of Lochiel (d. 1719) John Cameron of Lochiel = d. Flanders, 1748 Donald Cameron = d / o MacLeod of Lochiel, the “Gentle Lochiel”

= 3. Jean Barclay

Jean Cameron = Lachlan MacPherson of Cluny Ewen MacPherson = Jane Fraser of Cluny

Simon Fraser* = (decap. 1747) Simon Fraser (1726–1782)

* Simon Fraser = 1. Margaret Grant (d. c. 1729); 2. Primrose Campbell (d. 1796), d / o John Campbell of Mamore, s / o Archibald, 9th Earl of Argyll The Camerons of Lochiel, the MacPhersons of Badenoch, and the Lovat Frasers of Beauly were tightly knit with powerful Campbell linkages. What is important is that while John Cameron of Lochiel (1663–1748)’s death came at the end of a long life, both Donald Cameron’s and Ewen MacPherson’s took them off relatively young (considering their financial status). Donald Cameron died in Bergues, northern France, of meningitis in 1748, aged about 48, and Ewen MacPherson died at Dunkirk in 1756.*

* Thomas F. Henderson, entry for Ewen MacPherson of Cluny in the Dictionary of National Biography, 1885–1900, vol. 35 / DN BOO (electronic source).

Acknowledgments

Without a generous grant from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation in 2005, without the photographed and other data available on the Internet (including books, records, doctoral theses, articles, artwork, and cartography), and without many scholars, archivists, librarians, and friends, I could not have written this book. To start with, I had a viewpoint but did not know exactly what would emerge; now I can see no other way to have assembled the data gathered. The staff of the Eastern Counties Regional Libraries, Mulgrave, n s , including Kathy Fitzpatrick, Joyce Oliver-Snair, Joan Kehoe, Sharon Reid, Tara O’Neill-Ryan, and the late Mildred Carrigan, have been invaluable. I have enjoyed the cooperation of Susan Cameron (head librarian at St Francis Xavier University), Kathleen MacKenzie (St f xu ’s archivist), and Jane Arnold (archivist at Cape Breton University). Bishop Brian Dunn (Antigonish) kindly made Catholic diocesan records available. Mary Janet MacDonald was my conduit to Farquhar MacNeil in Brevig. I am grateful to old friends in Canada and Scotland, lay and clerical, who have always made me feel enclosed in a disinterested and honourable curiosity about my own native land (Scotland) and the extraordinary one I found in 1972. Dr John W. Shaw (Edinburgh) and Dr Mats Melin (Eire) read the manuscript and gave useful advice. Effie Rankin, North Uist and Mabou, shared books, articles, sources, and knowledge on Gaelic language and lore. My wife, Mary Patricia Graham, gave me an inside view of the transmission of step-dancing intra familiam and as much as and more genealogical information than I needed. The late Captain R. Colin Strelley (1905–1987), the last of the Strelleys of Oakerthorpe, living in Edinburgh (and Kincraig, in Badenoch, and Bengal), often reminded me of the influence of the Episcopal Church in Gaelic Scotland.

xxxii Acknowledgments

I wish less to acknowledge any possible errors in this work than to highlight the difficulty in championing a Gaelic cultural form that was so rarely described precisely in either language in Gaelic and Saxon Scotland between 1770 and 1845. Forgive any slips you might find. John G. Gibson, Judique, Cape Breton

The term “Scotch” is used to mean to Highland Gaelic Scottish. The use of “Scottish,” as in “Scottish Catholic Society of Canada,” mimicked the modern Scottish usage, “Scotch” having been commercially usurped by 1900. The uppercase “T” in Tales refers to the long Ossianic tales, while the uppercase “R” is used in the group dance (Reel) and “r” in the dancemusic timing (reel). The term “country” is often used to describe a kinship or a clan territory. The use of “made” as in “she made a tune,” “he made a song or poem” is almost always used by Gaels of Cape Breton fiddle music and songs. It is a common usage and includes writing: dean òran – compose a song.

Molaibh e le fuaim trompaid; molaibh e le saltair, agus le clàrsaich. Molaibh e le tiompan agus dannsadh; Molaibh e le innealaibh-ciuil nan teud, agus le organ. Molaibh e le ciombalaibh àrd-fhuaimneach. Salm CL. Rann 4, 546. Leabhraichean an t-Seann Tiomnaidh.

Praise him with the sound of the Trumpet: prayse him with the Psalterie and Harpe. Praise him with the timbrell and dance: prayse him with stringed instruments and Organes. Praise him upon the loud cymbals: praise him upon the high sounding cymbals. The King James Bible (1611), Psalm 150, verse 4 An equivalent

The ascetic and morose, who see the head of John the Baptist in every festivity where the sound of the viol invites the young men and maidens to “tread the measure,” have found considerable difficulty in giving a satisfactory explanation of the assurance that “there is a time to dance.” They need not, however, baffle themselves by rushing into absurdity to get clear of the difficulty, by asserting that the only legitimate mode of dancing is by separating the sexes, and allowing each party to consort by itself – to pirouette in a polka or flourish in gallopade, as it may find most agreeable … “Praise God in the dance” with respect to this latter we cannot see how dancing, per se, is a whit more injurious to Christian morals than singing. The one may be abused as readily as the other. [Myles] MacPhail’s Edinburgh Ecclesiastical Journal and Literary Review, no. clxxi (April 1860), 162

Introduction

The purpose of this book, as it was in Traditional Gaelic Bagpiping, 1745–1945 (1998) for piping, is to nudge into its proper place the dancing of the emigrant Gael and his or her descendants in Nova Scotia where a lot of social and intellectual Gaelicness endures. The idea that puritanical male Presbyterian clerics, catechists, and others in northwest Gaelic Scotland from 1790 to 1846 strictly discouraged the old joys of music and dancing is not new, but it is examined here more precisely. What is new, however, is the placing of the music and dance / step-dance that persists unself-consciously today in Gaelic northeast Nova Scotia, particularly in Cape Breton, into the broad (European) Scotch Gaelic cultural world perspective. The most important research conducted for this work was the fieldwork done in the language gloaming of the Gaelic northeast of the province of Nova Scotia. Step-dancing, of the tapping and brushing sort, has been socially and culturally integral there from Gaelic immigrant times to the mostly English-speaking present.1 It is into this fieldwork matrix that the Old World published record of Scotch Gaelic songs, and the record of Gaelic ethnography and general observation in English, fits – not the other way round. This work considers and evaluates various kinds of historical record for Old World Gaelic Scotland from 1770 to 1845 to explain and support what may be seen as an oblique perspective on Gaelic cultural affairs, the dominant perspective of Gaelic Cape Breton music and step-dance. This is a New World Scotch Gaelic ethnography. It examines also the cultural record of what had been an old, difficult-to-penetrate Gaelic society in central, western, and island Gaelic Scotland up to the end of the emigrations to Nova Scotia. That was a kinship society whose ancient

4

Gaelic Cape Breton Step-Dancing

blending of Christian and other, older European values had become eccentric long before 1800.2 Considerable emphasis is given to cultural Keppoch, Laggan, and Badenoch, where hope for another rising lingered even after 1755. Most of my fieldwork was done in and from Inverness County, Cape Breton. It began in 1972 when the modern, commercial recording of fiddling was restarting after a gap from the days of the old 78s but when there was little or no formal teaching of step-dancing. Where Gaelic was still spoken, this was a society that loved song, music, dance, story, and the céilidh.3 The work cites many texts on Gaelic Scotch history, published and unpublished. Some are novel, some are often overlooked by the writers who accept the almost-established attitudes of Whig Hanoverian Scotland.4 If one reads the correspondence received by Robert Dundas of Arniston (1713–1787), the Lowland lord advocate in North Britain, 1754–60, something of the absurd remove that all Catholic and Episcopalian Gaelicspeaking Scotch were from reasonable, fair consideration in Union Britain is emphasized.5 At the heart of the matter lies the fact that the written record for any step-dancing per se in Gaelic Scotland from 1790 to 1845 is scant. Catholic people were understandably secretive (the Scottish Episcopalians even more so). Almost all mentions of dancing, most in published Scottish Gaelic songs, are potentially ambiguous. Much the same ambiguity occurs in Nova Scotian Gaelic songs, but at least there is the certainty of what dancing is being described. It is step-dancing – dancing and step-dancing are synonymous. Thus, a plausible claim can be made that, given the knowledge of dancing in Gaelic and just-post-Gaelic Nova Scotia, the Scottish Gaelic references are, or at least may be, step-dancing. What alternative is there? The Gaelic northeast of Nova Scotia, until the mid-twentieth century, was a social environment peopled by the third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh generations from the immigrants. Their music and step-dance society persists. The obvious, typical, and conservative cultural nature of Scotch Highlanders still stands out. Immigrants to northeast Nova Scotia included few of the old leaders but many of the vigorous, non-landowning, yeoman middle class of the old Gaelic society, their relatives, neighbours, and dependents. Many emigrating families included three generations. Many places in Gaelic Nova Scotia, such as Mabou and Keppoch, strongly reflected the places they had come from.

Introduction 5

In the Cape Breton fieldwork, I did not use a recording device. I relied on memory and on notes made after conversations, away from the meeting. When a teacher–student bond had been formed, I could put paper on the table. There was minimum break in conversation continuity that way, and my memory improved. I may have missed some information, but gradually, the information I’d come close to getting fell into place as I spoke to other people.6 The fieldwork in Cape Breton was conducted in English. The informants were Gaels, rural and urban, almost all of whom were bilingual – a few were unilingual English. All knew that the language and way of life had been disappearing for decades. I did not often come across the secrecy that Anne (MacVicar) Grant (1755–1838) described in Laggan, Badenoch, in Essays on the Superstitions of the Highlanders of Scotland. Most people were surprised that anyone should have an interest in their thoughts and their cultural joys.7 The attitudes to traditional Scotch Gaelic dance music and dance of the various Christian churches in Scotland, from culturally broadminded to narrowly puritanical, make up a background essence of this book and are treated at the start. There is not space enough to elaborate on Episcopalianism in Gaelic Scotland but to note that it was illegal from 1746 to 1792 and that many members probably attended Presbyterian services for want of a Gaelic-speaking minister. Moderatism was spreading in the Church of Scotland, and the two services were more similar than different. What is more, traditional music and dancing were no longer eschewed in many Highland parishes in the (Moderate) last quarter of the nineteenth century. This was so for many Grants in Strathspey. Since 1661, the Episcopalian and Presbyterian churches of Scotland shared terms such as “presbyter” and “kirk.”8 The persistence of elements of older Celtic or of some blend of that and Celto-Norman Catholicism is only suggested.9 Also, generally, the several splits from the eventually dominant Presbyterian Church of Scotland began in English- / Lallansspeaking Lowland Scotland and to start with could not be effectively introduced to Gaelic Scotland for want of Gaelic-speaking ministers. Given anachronistic Scotch fiddle (and bagpipe) music and step-­ dancing in modern Cape Breton, this text conduces, plausibly, that step-­ dancing existed in a much broader demography of old Gaelic Scotland, Catholic and Moderate Presbyterian, even in some Evangelical parishes. This suggests the idea that in many ostensibly Presbyterian parishes, there was unmentioned tolerance of music and step-dance. The turning of a blind eye, and ear, often with good reason, has left us in a shortage of documentation.

6

Gaelic Cape Breton Step-Dancing

Inasmuch as the Jacobites, Episcopal, Catholic, and other Anglo- and Gaelo-Scots lost the almost eight-month war in 1746, no unromantic work of this sort exists. The classicist, historian, anthropologist, folklorist, and journalist, Lowlander Andrew Lang (1844–1912), summed it up in 1898: “It is unfortunate that, except for occasional notices, as in The Lyon in Mourning and in Political Trials, we have no account of the Highlands of Scotland from the Jacobite side.”10 After Culloden and until about 1757, the Jacobites and the Hanoverians needed secrecy, a fact often overlooked for convenience’s sake. I offer possible explanations and in the process attempt to restore a sense of the contemporary urgencies. That gap in knowledge resulting from secrecy forced me to hunt and incorporate facts, and apparent facts, from a very diffused body of record. This work fleshes out parts of a defeated consciousness of Gaelicness, a  consciousness that over decades was scattered throughout the then-­ English-Empire world. Good luck and old, proud cultural confidence have left us with the music and step-dancing of the Cape Breton Gàidhealtachd and memories of both. The direct influence of dancing-masters in Hebridean and most of Gaelic Scotland away from the contact zone was, I think, negligible.11 Although there are many stray facts, some unique and without confirmation, they sometimes reappear in unrelated references, which gives them important significance that was previously overlooked in the greater scheme of things.12 Another difficulty is simply that the number of Gaels – Catholic, Moderate Presbyterian, and other – who emigrated to Nova Scotia between 1790 and 1845, viewed (Sc) nationally, is relatively small. My work had to depend on apparent minutiae and on the breadth of understanding of both primary languages. Some 5,000 Gaels emigrated to Australia between 1852 and 1857, an even smaller number, but it is in the Australian record that we find one of the earliest mentions of actual deaths from starvation in Gaelic Scotland in 1847, 1848, and 1849.13 Does this point to shame for partial genocide? Perhaps not, but certainly shame for almost unforgiveable, thoughtless cruelties toward the poor and needy. The music and step-dance element of what was a residual and increasingly downtrodden common-man Gaelic society in the Highlands from 1746 into the mid-nineteenth century nadir was a prominent part of what was in many places a once-more-complete Scotch Gaelic social world.14 That this music and step-dancing persisted in Gaelic Scotland after 1850 is discussed here. So is the unexplored significance of music

Introduction 7

and dance in Lewis, Harris, North Uist, and western Skye to about 1825 when evictions, re-evictions, and often emotive Evangelical Christian revivalism took hold, altering the overt cultural landscape forever. In the Gaelic “countries” in northeastern Nova Scotia, step-dancing persists most strongly in Catholic parishes. Before the chief–commoner break took hold in Gaelic Scotland after Culloden,15 there is no suggestion that that music and step-dance had been dissociated from all members of some clans, from chief down. There was lots of music and Reel dancing – and people – in Raasay when Johnson visited with Boswell in 1773. And even without chiefly patronage, music and dancing persisted in Jacobite, and what had been Jacobite, Gaelic Scotland until after the emigrations to Nova Scotia had ended. There was Gaelic music and dance in Badenoch and Keppoch that persisted into the nineteenth century. With that same cultural tenacity, Gaels in “countries” like Arisaig, Heatherton, Mabou, Judique, South-West Margaree, Glendale, Iona, Boisdale, and Mira in Cape Breton (a province until 1820) and Nova Scotia bequeathed us the tight bond of Gaelic-speaking and -thinking musician and dancer. When classroom education, literacy, reformed land valuation and taxation, the application of the government’s Poor Law (1 July 1845), and the post-1845 evictions came to dominate landholding and law at all levels of society in “North Britain,”16 the delicacy of Gaelic music and step-dancing, subject to collection and intellectuality of a new sort, was almost – but not completely – overwhelmed. Professor John Stuart Blackie (1809–1895) wrote in 1876 that with the lack of a rural Gaelic middle class, “the best soil was swept away from which the blooming of popular culture proceeds.”17 The notion of improving, and of de-Catholicizing what was Gaelic Scotland, drove first the extended-family emigrations, including those evicted (until about 1815).18 Then came the postwar depression of cattle prices, insecurities, and evictions by landowning commercialists, and more families took sail. By 1850, there was Malthus and enough economic studies to make what was happening to poor Gaels seem not only reasonable and thoughtful but necessary, even kindly. In many cases, the later emigrations (from about 1830) were carried out at public or private expense.19 The British government funded reports on education, religion, and poverty in Gaelic Scotland in the 1830s and 1840s – Catholics did not take part. The Poor Law (Scotland) (1845) was, for many Gaels, an unwanted intrusion, a contradiction of hospitality. In 1854, past the low point for Scotch Gaels, the Valuation Act rationalized an older,

8

Gaelic Cape Breton Step-Dancing

looser system of land taxation, making valuable, higher / brae pasture and commonly used lands – hitherto unassessed – commerce to the mountaintop.20 This work also emphasizes the importance of kin on both sides of the ocean, particularly including trans-ocean genealogical and cultural continuities. The part played by women in transmitting step-dance steps is obvious. In the second half of the eighteenth century, kinship and marriage were also very significant in English Scotland – Hew Scott’s seven-volume Fasti Ecclesiae Scoticanae (FES ) gives very many instances of intra–Presbyterian clergy marriages and reverend sons following reverend fathers, not infrequently in the same parish.21 This work also flags the strong in-groupness of the country’s high court and political systems. Through the multi-generational family emigrations from 1790 to 1845 and the evictions over the same years, something of great cultural importance all but slipped the noose.22 It lives in Cape Breton. There was no obvious step-dancing in Glenfinnan in the 1940s or in Edinburgh in the 1950s.23 Topham noticed the compulsion to dance in 1770s Edinburgh, but that linked drive is long gone. In Gaelic Scotland, ambiguity and obscurity of meaning press on in dance references through the rest of the nineteenth century. And from mid-century, this was the time of many discerning and Gaelic-speaking collectors, including Iain Òg Ìle / John Francis Campbell of Islay (1821– 1885); fchs Rev. Dr Alexander Cameron (1827–1888) (collector of Reliquiae Celticae); Alexander Archibald Carmichael (1832–1912); f chs Rev. John Gregorson Campbell (1836–1891),24 minister of the f chs , Tiree / Kirkapol from 1861; Rev. Malcolm MacPhail (1837–1906), f chs , Shawbost (Lewis); Donald Campbell MacPherson (1838–1880), Catholic, Bohuntin, Keppoch; Presbyterian Rev. Thomas Sinton (1855–1923), Laggan, Badenoch; and Rev. Allan MacDonald (1859–1905), Roman Catholic, South Uist and Eriskay. Either these people and their helpers were not curious enough about Gaelic step-dancing, or the broader and greater cultural Gaelic richness had withered into great guardedness. Many “countries” had long been subject to evictions and to Presbyterian Evangelicalism from about 1820. In 1871, improved music and dancing were served prominently by the Gaelic Society of Inverness. Public Gaelic dance had by then become more invented than reformed.25

Introduction 9

By the times of these Victorian scholar-collectors, the old ruling power in subordinate-to-Westminster North Britain, the tripartite, intertwined, upper-crust oligarchy (religion-and-education, politics, law) had weakened. And although the Presbyterian clergy had been separated from the  bench since 1640, by 1840 Victorian Scotland was an essence of Presbyterianism.26 Knowledge of step-dancing in the Catholic Gaelic Outer Hebrides was scant to non-existent in 1983 when a Roman Catholic step-dancer from Inverness County, Cape Breton, Mary Janet MacDonald (Port Hood), gave public exhibitions in Catholic Barra.27 With only one possible exception, many people she met in Barra protested that her dancing was surely an Irish phenomenon or something plucked from elsewhere outside of Scotland.28 Farquhar MacNeil, Brevig, Barra, was the exception. He realized that step-dancing had been a feature in Gaelic Scotland taken to Nova Scotia. His letters to me appear in chapter 12. In 1985, to his credit, Scottish country dancer G. Wallace Lockhart, in Highland Balls and Village Halls, welcomed step-dancing as a Gaelic Scottish anachronism. Lockhart, a Church of Scotland elder in Linlithgow, innocently linked the form with the passengers on the Hector, Presbyterian emigrants to Pictou County, Nova Scotia, in 1775.29 Even in 2016, the peremptory dismissive attitude that Mary Janet encountered has not been entirely extinguished, even though Scotch fiddling and Cape Breton step-dancing have been taught at the summer school Ceòlas in South Uist from 1996. Today, scholars Catherine Foley, Mats Melin, Pat Ballantyne, and Màiri Britton are exploring the subject. The curiosity in Scotland about Cape Breton step-dancing at Aberdeen that I found on the Internet some years ago was post–Mary Janet MacDonald. Since Mary Janet, Willie Fraser (7 March 1915–22 March 2015, a Roman Catholic), and Harvey MacKinnon (a Protestant) are among the many Cape Bretoners who have gone to the Hebrides and elsewhere to teach step-dancing, I continued to think that the form had become a dead letter in the old country.30 Most indeed, but not all, of the  modern Scottish observations of step-dancing’s survival in Gaelic Scotland after 1845 were elicited post–Mary Janet (although those examples might not have been discovered had she not shown them Inverness County step-dancing that summer in 1983). To elevate the difficulty in tracing step-dancing from the Catholic Hebrides to Cape Breton, and to state a debunker’s argument, how does one deal with the fact that two thoroughgoing Catholic Gaels, Calum Beag Mac’ill’fhaolain / Little Malcolm MacLellan (1869–1965) and

10

Gaelic Cape Breton Step-Dancing

Seonaidh Caimbeul /  Johnnie Campbell (1859–1944) from Catholic South Uist, seem not to have made any observations of traditional fiddling, piping, and step-dancing? Both of them had grandparents and other kin born before and during the emigrations to Nova Scotia. If the unbroken line existed (as I believe it did), surely it would have been easily established from lots of sharp memories as late as 1890, and in a memory society, how could such an enjoyable feature of céilidh and Four-Hand wedding Reels have been left out? The modern use of the term “step-dancing” in Gaelic Nova Scotia and the near absence of its use in Gaelic or English from 1790 to 1914 in Scotland does not exclude the strong possibility that in Gaelic Scotland, many descriptions of dancing are attempts to describe the same stepdancing. “Dancing” can mean step-dancing, as it does in Inverness County. This work includes many one-off observations, on both sides. Sometimes, too, what was not written is meaningful. The references to dance and dancing in Gaelic song from Scotland receive prominence in this work. Anne (MacVicar) Grant, who saw much of Gaelic life in Abertarff in the Great Glen and Brae Laggan in Upper Strathspey between 1773 and 1801, raised another problem. She wrote (for public readership) of the old memory-rich Gaelic world that “because, in fact, their poetry, which contains their history, and the philosophy of their moral sentiment, is the only key to the knowledge of their ancient character and customs.”31 She did not often write of Gaels and Gaels’ dancing, and she gave no step descriptions of the dancing that she did write about. She was not proCatholic. She observed, however, that there were few homes in the Highlands that she knew of where there was not a fiddle – it was “justly stiled their national instrument.”32 The only other place in the Scotch Gaelic world where such a statement might be made is Cape Breton.33 Although there are no strong Gaelic MacPherson, Grant, Shaw, or Gow “Badenoch” communities in Cape Breton and northeast Nova Scotia, folk emigrated from there and from the border zone that is Badenoch-Keppoch. The significance of the Badenoch-Keppoch one in the mainland stands out in this book. It is valuable on its own and as an analogue. Politically and militarily, Badenoch and Keppoch (as well as Glencoe, Appin, and many other countries) were the last heartland of Jacobitism until 1757. Major Calum I.N. MacLeod, Flora MacNeil, and Farquhar MacNeil were not the only Scots who thought that step-dancing in Gaelic Nova

Introduction 11

Scotia was a unique anachronism. (Scot Marjory Whitelaw, editor of The Dalhousie Journals, reported, however, that her father had done such steps in the Lothians.34) All of them, Gaelic and Lowland, found the form novel in 1983. There is, however, an assortment of written observations, in English, of dancing in urban and rural eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury Scotland, some containing strong hints that it was step-dancing. These accounts include the writings of James Logan. If Gaels in general in emigration times were, as often reported, devoted and excellent dancers, could the explanation for the lack of precise descriptions be simply that there was no great distinction in setting steps of Lowlander and Gael and, as Logan stated, it was only a matter of ability and subtlety in execution? That is what I propose. The situation of step-dance in rural Ireland from 1780 until the Famine may be a usable analogue (see Catherine Foley’s Step Dancing in Ireland, Brendan Breathnach’s work, and the work of Mats Melin and Helen Brennan). In the Scottish case, steps are almost never described; to do so was (as it remains for me) very difficult.35 Prominent among such observations in English in Gaelic Scotland, for example, are the writings of early, pre–Walter Scott tourists, Martin Martin (a Gael), Edward Burt, Edward Topham in Edinburgh, Thomas Thornton in Badenoch, Rabbie Burns, Necker de Saussure, later Alexander Carmichael (Carmina Gadelica). Post-Scott, there are the four physicians (MacLachlan, MacDonald, Maclagan, and Fraser). One is reasonably tempted to deduce that the rattling of tackety boots on a wooden floor of a Highland inn at Clachan Diseart, Gleann Urchaidh / Clachan [Kirktown /  cemetery of] Dysart, Glenorchy, in 1784 (Thornton), or on some East Anglian farmer’s cart at feeing time in the 1880s (George Ewart Evans),36 or the treepling of rural East Lothian (Marjory Whitelaw and the Fletts) were all variants of Scotch Gaelic step-dancing. Occasionally, the non-culturally descriptive record of some Gael in the English record in Scotland, a tacksman or substantial tenant or someone of some prominence, may be adjoined to a culturally significant, independent report of that person, in English and / or Gaelic, from the New World written record. In a few important such cases, there is certain knowledge that some Scotch-born Gaels around 1800 were stepdancing in Gaelic Scotland and as immigrants in Gaelic Cape Breton and in Antigonish and Pictou counties (and in the Gaelic socio-cultural satellites in North America). Human memories tapped from 1972 to about 1995, mostly in Cape Breton (going back to the late 1870s), also prove that step-dancing

12

Gaelic Cape Breton Step-Dancing

existed in vigour in Gaelic Nova Scotia in the 1830s (when many families had not yet arrived from South Uist and North Morar). There is not even the slightest hint that Scotch Gaels in Cape Breton were influenced in their dancing and dances by any other form(s) until the introduction of the Quadrille around 1880. It is clear as well that people of other ethnicities, including the Acadians and the Mi’kmaw (Wilfred Prosper and Lee Cremo), chose to share Scotch music – Acadian stepdancing is another subject. In Gaelic Cape Breton until relatively recently, step-dancing was learned at home and at the céilidh and performed individually, presentatively, and in groups without close body contact. It formed the setting steps of the two known most popular Reels (the Four and the Eight), with the simple-rhythm-related travelling steps added. Step-dancing was grafted into Square Sets in Gaelic Nova Scotia in the mid-twentieth century – Scotch strathspey and reel music all but demanded step-dancing as their necessary complement. The Nova Scotia Gaelic song corpus thus offers highly reliable references to step-dancing. The written record (in English) in Scotland, then, emerges from three main sources in this work: traveller literature, published Gaelic song, and copious and complex religious records. These religious records are by and large those of the established Church of Scotland Presbyterian, but there are also a few Evangelical Christian records from 1754, including two court trials reported in the Lowland press.37 Where there is mention of dance and dancing in Scottish Gaelic song, notably from emigrant “countries,” one’s mind must always be open to the idea that step-­ dancing is being discussed. The term dannsa ceum used in contemporary Scottish school prospectuses, like the use in Cape Breton (in the early twentieth century) of the term dannsa tilgidh, are modern literal translations of step-dancing and Highland Fling.38 No steps have intruded in Inverness County dancing to require a qualification ceum (or “countari,” as in the endnote). The Scottish published historical record has long been Presbyteriandominated. That built-in group of “rational” attitudes is often considered the accepted standard. Sinclair of Ulbster’s Old Statistical Account of the 1790s contains precious few references to music and dancing in Gaelic Scotland – in his list of 164 questions, in four sections, none touches on the subject.39 The works of Presbyterian writers, enthusiasts, historians, and scholars of Gaelic Scotland, such as Charles Fraser-Mackintosh, the

Introduction 13

Rev. Dr George Henderson, and the Rev. George Calder, are still relied upon in Scotland as important.40 They are, however, often misleadingly incomplete in cultural understanding.41 There is also, at a simpler level, an omission of verses judged to be inappropriate, particularly by and for Victorians.42 The obliterative strength of the “glorious progress” of the Reformation that began in Lowland Scotland (from 1560), when “the Light and Power of the Gospel recovered us from Popery,”43 was remarkable,44 but it was not accepted everywhere in Scotland. The later scholars, whose religious stance is not determinable and deliberately not given – Alexander Carmichael, John Francis Campbell, and many others – offer belated but limited compensation. Not one of them was particularly interested in dance. Overall, there is a pronounced lack of contemporary Catholic and Episcopalian publishing houses and the concomitant, a lack of observation and scholarship on non-Presbyterian Gaelic Scotland on which to draw. Much of the oral record is gone.45 In this work on Nova Scotia Scotch step-dancing and its origins in late eighteenth-century Scotland, memories are of prime importance, but there is also data from a published and unpublished New World written record. This work includes: 1) the writer’s fieldwork from summer 1972; 2) references to what was incontrovertibly Gaelic step-dancing in Gaelic song / bàrdachd; 3) valuable step-dance references in accounts of picnics and céilidhs (1880s onward) and in the reporting of Scottish-model Highland Games in several newspapers, annually from 1868 in Antigonish and in Arisaig in the middle to late 1880s;46 and 4) the seldom-read, unpublished and published records of the Scottish Catholic Society of Canada (sc sc ) (1919–48), which are rich in references to what was called the Gluasad Gàidhealach / the Gaelic Movement that began in Iona, Cape Breton. Nova Scotia Scotch step-dancing is the one and only key to the old puzzle: What were Gaels dancing, these people who were so often highly praised by outsiders for their dancing ability and their widespread love of dance? Many a modern Scottish cantankerous, sweaty circular Reel, in my eyes in 1972, innocently expressed its own wonderment at what was still unimaginable.

1 The Religious Background in Scotland, 1746–1846

If, as George S. Emmerson wrote of Scottish dance in general, dance is “a vehicle of ecstasy, liberating the body from the mind,”1 what has the power to overwhelm, to render furtive, to replace dance, and for what reasons? The most plausible answer for a rural, mostly illiterate, policeless society is the beliefs of a Christian clergy of one sort or another.

T h e L it t l e Folk An example of the association of dancing with Na Fir Crìon / The Little Folk is “Mr P.G. Tolmie”’s “Remains of Ancient Religion in the North,” which was read to majority Presbyterian members of the Gaelic Society of Inverness on 1 February 1877. It contains assumptions about what the old Scotch Gaelic dancing was, as well as how and where it was indulged in. Tolmie’s reflections stand alone.2 He described Highland folk sitting around the fire in the old black-house listening to Tales and stories, a world he assumed that his listeners all knew or thought they did. He introduced the Little Folk “air an teintean ’san dannsadh, air mullach chnoc a’s thoman” / dancing on their hearth[s], on hilltops and knowes. While in Ireland the Little Folk dance jigs, in Gaelic Scotland “cha robh ’san dannsadh, air a chuid is mo ach righligeadh le ceum cubhaidh an cuartalan mu thiomchioll an teine.” / For the most part the dancing was reeling with fitting steps in intertwinings around the fire.3 Tolmie went on, “cha robh sin iongantach” / that was no surprise, [when] / “Bha an teine so na ni aig an robh dearbh bhith mu dheireadh na h-ochd-ceud-deug;” / The fire here was the epicentre of life at the end of the eighteenth century. He ended with “faodar a bhith cinnteach na[ch] robh an dannsadh air di-chuimhn.” / it may be certain that the dancing



The Religious Background 15

was not forgotten. So modern dancing was different, perceived as implicitly superior (including the Reels of Tulloch shown at the g s i annual meetings), but there was an older form of dancing that was commonly known but no longer done, which they all knew.4 The religious thought in Gaeldom that included notions of the Na Fir Crìon / The Little Folk who were obsessed with music and dance is only once alluded to in Tolmie’s text, although the association of music and dancing was almost always a fundamental threat to Presbyterian rationalism and anti-fantasy (except during witch persecution times).5 The bond joining musician and dancer was threatening because it was rhythmic, intense, and impenetrable. And Tales were useless lies, lacking metaphorical significance.6

T he O b s e rvat io n s o f A n n e (MacVi car) Grant ( 1 7 5 5 – 1 8 38) Anne (MacVicar) Grant was the wife of a Highland Presbyterian reverend, James Grant.7 She had Episcopalian Stewart close kin in Appin on her mother’s side whom she ignored in her writing. However, she left useful thoughts about learning about the Gael.8 She wrote of Scotch Gaels as secretive and evasive and advised readers reading observations of them to bear this in mind. She described the Gaels as “a warlike, musical, and poetical people,”9 “a concealed people.” A Highlander, “to any but his countrymen, carefully avoided mentioning his customs, his genealogies, and, above all, his superstitions.”10 She also wrote, “The polish, or at least the amenity which prevailed in their social intercourse, though it was impossible for those who were not intimately acquainted with their language and manners to understand it, formed an additional barrier betwixt them and strangers.”11 Lastly, from her position as the wife of a Highland Presbyterian minister, she observed shrewdly, and uniquely, of Gaelic Scotland that the spirit of an old religion remained in the garb of the new one (and where better than with the umbral protection of language?).12 Patronage, from a Gaelic point of view, could have been, and in innumerable parishes was, a decided although unadmittable advantage, as Anne (MacVicar) Grant remarked. In Gaelic Scotland, for as long as the leaders and the led were Gaels, bound in language, kinship ties, and shared cultural joys, there could be a large difference between outward protestation of Presbyterianism and what was actually happening culturally. By 1816, after the long war, one finds a glimpse of Gaelic attitudes to Presbyterian clergymen in central Inverness-shire. In Simon Fraser’s Airs

16

Gaelic Cape Breton Step-Dancing

and Melodies (1816), for example, in his notes to the song “Comma leam fein a Ministair” / “What Care I for the Minister,” he explains that “The Highlanders, it would seem, were as much inclined as others to resist authority assumed by the clergy, in exhorting confessions, and venting public reproofs, &c. as the words to this air appear to intimate [no words given], and they felt particularly sore upon this point, if the clergyman was a worthless person himself.”13 The main reason for the emigration of Gaels from Gaelic Scotland was the tightening grip, the pilliwinks of alien economic improvement in their “countries.” Clan land / estate sales and resales and people and family shuffling became intolerable. However, the fact that Scotch Gaelic music and step-dancing existed and were brought to Nova Scotia and Cape Breton between 1790 and 1845 and survived/s there also has much to do with two main religious struggles in Scotland and the strictures those struggles imposed. There was little systematic religious persecution of Catholics in what became Gaelic Nova Scotia. Instead, there was landownership, not tenanting. The first of the struggles was the politico-Presbyterian Church of Scotland’s efforts to obliterate Gaelic Catholicism through religious catechizing, or browbeating and education, and to obliterate non-juring Scottish Episcopalians by harsh laws from 1746 till 1792 (after the last Stuart had been safely buried). The second struggle touching on emigration was the rise of anti-patronage, anti-music-and-dancing Evangelical Presbyterianism and, to a tiny extent, the Evangelical Haldanian protoBaptists in Gaelic Scotland from about 1790. Many Gaels saw a bleak new religious world that they did not fancy. Also, among the Evangels there was, unique to Gaelic Scotland from about 1800 in the places farthest away from the Lowlands, a minor Gaelic-preaching phenomenon in which “the Men” held charismatic religious sway. They were people who could recite the Gaelic testaments from memory; some were eccentric to the point of ridiculousness, domineering. They wielded local power over the gullible and fearful. They did this even in the face of qualified ministers, and they themselves had no training and no official status.14 They too stood up loudly against music and dancing.15 This overall Evangelical movement in Gaelic Scotland, when understood in the context of the largely extended-family emigrations to northeast Nova Scotia (1790–1845), goes a long way to explaining the withering of music and step-dance in Lewis, Harris, Wester Ross, Skye,



The Religious Background 17

Raasay, and other “countries” in Gaelic Scotland from about 1825. The movement’s success played a part in making the surviving fiddling, piping, and step-dancing in Catholic and in essence moderate Gaelic Nova Scotia the invaluable anachronism that it is.16 Moderatism and Evangelicalism coexisted in the Presbyterian General Assembly in the second half of the eighteenth century: Moderatism dominated from 1752 to 1834, Evangelicalism of one sort and another in Gaelic Scotland from about 1790 – the Evangelicals (the anti-patronage ministers) split to form the Free Church of Scotland at the Disruption in 1843. The last Presbyterian Moderate is said to have died in 1845.17 In 1704, an Act against Popery and for sending in the names of all Papists to the Clerks of the Privy Council (hm’s Privy Council) restated the old 1560 abolition of Popery. In and after Culloden, the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland renewed its policy of removing Gaelic Catholics and Catholicism after 1746. But this could not be effected rigorously until the Catholic French armies were defeated in 1760, officially at the signing of the Treaty of Paris (10 February 1763) and until much was learned about Gaelic Scotland. Catholic France, shelterer of many a Gaelic Jacobite officer, evoked fear in the Hanoverian heart that the Gaels might rise again in support of Scotland’s “auld” ally, France. This period, 1748–57, is not to be overlooked. It was the last time of potential Gaelic power and influence.18 The making of Roy’s military map of Highland Scotland (c. 1750), the Elibank Plot (1752, stopped through Pickle the Spy),19 the Hanoverian surveyor David Bruce’s relating his ultra-biased information to the Hanoverian government,20 two public executions (of Episcopalian Jacobite Highlanders), and the Rev. Alexander Webster’s gathering data for his 1755 census – all are an indication of serious concern approaching alarm. Access to much of Gaelic Scotland was by the unknown ocean and by ­easily defended glens. The Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge (ssp c k ) even in 1790 admitted that it did not have a thorough knowledge of the geography of Gaelic Scotland. Outsiders knew little of Gaelic Scotland, its salt waters, its tickles and tides, and rocks and races and safe harbours. This forced clerical Lowlanders to learn something about Gaelic Scotland. Even until late 1759 (the year of a threat of French invasion),21 with the French undefeated in North America (La bataille des Plaines d’Abraham took place on 13 September 1759), the established Church of Scotland’s, and the linked Presbyterian political power’s, aggression

18

Gaelic Cape Breton Step-Dancing

toward Scotch Gaelic Catholics was moderated by a fear of possible European military retaliation supported by an attack in the rear by Gaels. State Papers (secretary of state) (sp ) show that in mid-April 1749, “a ship from Charles Edward is daily expected at Moidart or Arisaig, possibly to recover the gold left with Cluny [MacPherson].”22 Treasury Board Papers and In-Letters papers for 18 January 1754 include a letter from General Humphrey Bland to Captain Fergussone “of the [sloop] Porcupine,” asking his opinion on the best way “to prevent enemies of the Crown from landing on the West Coast of Scotland.”23 In this environment, Gaelic music and dancing was under no threat in large areas of Gaelic Scotland, including the Forfeited Estates.

P r e s b y t e r ia n E vangeli cal A l e x a n d e r W e bster, DD The first prime investigative document is “Dr Webster”’s 1755 census, “An Account of the Number of People in Scotland in the Year One Thousand Seven Hundred and Fifty-Five.” It is still used by statisticians (and was in a way a forerunner of Sinclair’s OSA ). The Aberdeen-born actuary James G. Kyd in 1952 reported that Webster’s census had been commissioned by the British government and that Rev. Webster had been selected “it would appear … [by the] Lord President [Robert] Dundas.” Robert Dundas himself appears to have been a spy in Keppoch in 1743.24 Webster knew the seriousness of his job and used blackmail to gather his information.25 The General Assembly assisted.26 The questionnaire Webster sent to the parish ministers asked for the size and geography of each parish, the number of parishioners, the presence or absence of a parish schoolmaster, and the numbers of Catholics and Seceders. In the study, he used five columns, “The Fourth [Column], the number of Papists, Protestants [Episcopalians27] and Inhabitants, and Column Fifth the Number of Fighting men [aged 18–56] in each Shire.”28 The total number of Papists in Scotland in Webster’s census was 16,490.29 The bond between Presbyterianism and law was central to Scottish nationhood. Since 1748, there had been no heritable jurisdictions (which had given Highland chiefs the power of life and death over clan members),30 and the Scottish Court of Session’s decisions could not be appealed to a higher court in Scotland.31 Webster (1708–1784)32 was an Evangelical or “High Flyer” whose love of claret had not prevented him from being elected as moderator of the General Assembly in 1753.33 His wife’s sister was Euphemia (Erskine) Boswell, Auchinleck’s wife and mother of James Boswell (1740–1795).34



The Religious Background 19

Of some relevance to this work, Webster was in Laggan, Badenoch, in 1753 when Cluny MacPherson was alive, the French gold unfound (and possibly before Dr Archibald Cameron was executed).35 Webster found that there was strong Jacobite spirit in MacKenzie of Seaforth people, on the mainland and in Lewis (which indicates cultural independence). From his population columns, Webster left the number of fighting men in Catholic Gaelic parishes to be easily calculated.36 The same politico-Presbyterian alarm is found contemporaneously in that the work to build Fort George, Ardersier, near Inverness, began in 1748 and went on until 1769. Catholic and Episcopal Scotch Gaeldom may have been a minor force, but it was not to be sniffed at until the end of the first French war. It certainly subtended whatever elements of its music and dance it chose to.

O t h e r R e l e va n t P r e s byteri an S tudi es After 1763, several anti-Catholic investigations were put into effect to set the Catholic Gaels up for conversion or removal (one way or another). In 1759–60, the General Assembly sent reverends John Hyndman and Robert Dick, with the bilingual Rev. Duncan “Rungs” Macfarlane of Drymen (1708–1791), and Patrick Simson to assess the religious situation in the Gaelic Highlands.37 The fear in 1791 was different. This time, the Hanoverian power was casting about to find a way to enlist and use, legally, Catholic Gaelic men to fight Revolutionary France; this required statutes in 1791 and 1793 giving Catholic relief.38 Again, there was no threat to the cultural habits of Gaels. Between those dates, the English Catholic Relief Act of 1778 (18 George 3, c. 60) produced riots in Edinburgh and Perth in 1779 and in London in 1780 (the Gordon Riots), which were sharp reminders to Scottish power that there should not be a Scottish variant of the act. When the 1763 peace treaty was signed, Neill McNeill’s religiondefining (Papist, Protestant, convert) Census of the Small Isles (cs i ) was conducted in 1764 and 1765 – Eigg, Rum, Muck, and Canna. McNeill adhered closely to the act of 1704, with Rev. Webster’s work as his ­pattern.39 Presbyterian Rev. John Walker, d d (1731–1803) (parish of Moffat, Lowland Dumfriesshire), was commissioned by the g a in 1764 and again in 1771 to visit and report on the work and relative value of missionaries and catechists in the Gaelic Highlands and Islands. His study was undertaken in 1765.40 Walker observed that the conversion of Highland people to Catholicism was achieved by carefully appealing to their love and revering of their ancestors and their religious principles41

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Gaelic Cape Breton Step-Dancing

and their desire “to return to the superstitions of the Church of Rome.”42 He seldom gives the number of conversions, and he may have given a window of opportunity for the chaplain MacPherson eviction of Catholics in Brae Laggan, begun in 1766. Whatever its validity, in the report he informed the g a that the “Popish religion is visibly on the increase” as a result of the “assiduity of the Romish priests.”43 Then he reported, on no given authority, that less than fifty years before (1716 or afterwards), the 700 people in Glenspean and Glenroy were Protestants. In “Strath Cluony and Glenmoriston” thirty years ago, “there was not a Papist.”44 In 1771, the s s p ck commissioned Lewis Drummond to report on the state and the success or failure of the schools in Gaelic Scotland to bring youngsters from ignorance, oppression, and uncivilized ways. Drummond spent the summers of 1771 and 1772 on his study and produced two distinct reports for the s s p ck, which the society found valuable.45 From a step-dancing point of view, the Gaelic musicians and step-dancers who emigrated to northeast Nova Scotia (and elsewhere) from about 1790 to 1845 were for the most part Roman Catholics and “Moderate” Church of Scotland Presbyterians (there may have been an Episcopal element in the latter group). They were cutting their economic losses, and many were looking for religious fairness and acceptance. They very often came out in tight family and community units. The culturally rich and conservative Catholic Gaels came from the increasingly impoverished and economically sinking Hebrides46 and insular Gaelic Scotland, as well as from Keppoch, old Clanranald country (including Moidart, Arisaig, Eigg, Canna), Glengarry (the Morars, Knoydart), part of Kintail, part of Strathglass, and interior Aberdeenshire on the mainland. The musician would have been the last they would have wished to leave behind. In these old countries, a stubborn Catholic presence had persevered, most commonly from chieftain (not landowning Protestant chief) and main tacksmen to man. The musical Moderates who danced came from a broad reach, Lewis, Harris, North Uist, Skye, Coll, Rum (Ross-shire, Inverness-shire, and Argyllshire), by and large, and like the others were victims of improver agriculture and impersonal economics and chose to get out. In Gaelic Cape Breton, where anti–traditional culture Evangelical people settled (on the North Shore), Gaelic singing was retained but, generally speaking, not the duo of instrumental music and step-dancing. Evangelical fundamentalism’s appeal appears to have grown com­ mensurately with clearances, evictions, re-evictions, and the deepening



The Religious Background 21

poverty and hopelessness of the ordinary Gael from about 1800 to the potato famine. Outside of Catholic Gaelic Scotland and persistent Moderate Presbyterian Gaelic Scotland, as well as a small presence of Episcopalianism (under that name or not), instrumental music and stepdancing in the old Gaelic atmosphere had a poor future in Victorian Gaelic Scotland.47 Until the twentieth century, Nova Scotia was neglected by the best, most objective Scottish scholars.48

S u s ta in e d O n ly b y Il l ic it Whi sky and a Vague, S u p e rs t it io u s S ac ramentali s m At the time of and after the Lowland-based Reformation, the number of parishes was cut, leaving large, difficult to serve areas of Gaeldom for one minister, if there indeed were one; Badenoch was like that. Many old religious buildings in the Highlands had been destroyed and pirated for building stone by 1786, but when they fell into desuetude is not always clear.49 The notion that the Gaelic bringers of Christianity to the pagan Saxon could forsake their religion, and that it was basically in error, is still current. In 2008, a Scottish journalist wrote that pre-1800 Lewis was “to all intents and purposes, a pagan community … sustained only by illicit whisky, and a vague, superstitious sacramentalism.”50 Presbyterian scholarship did not show much interest in the church system it had fought so hard to remove in richer Lowland Scotland. They also indulged in the study of their keenly thought out and rational religious creation and were not beyond omitting what was unflattering. The Presbyterian historian Rev. Robert Wodrow provided an example on 29 October 1733 when he withheld material from a publication of the acts of the ga .51 There may still have been a centuries-old Gaelic appreciation of, and adherence to, the sacredness of the old monastic abthanes (and perhaps Annaidean / Annats) at Laggan (Badenoch), at Applecross (Wester Ross), at Kilmuir (Skye), at Kilmallie (Lochiel), and elsewhere – the old churchyards were still used for burials, and the old wells were important to many Gaels into the nineteenth century.52

T h e “ R at io n a l” R e li gi on’s Tools U s e d to F ig h t C atholi ci sm Within the new Presbyterian national system lay the legalistic fourcourt system of Presbyterianism: congregation (kirk session), province

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(presbytery), regional (synod), and an annual General Assembly.53 Confession was replaced with confession and public humiliation (the stool of repentance). The Presbyterian system of national parishes dominated all Scotland and was a framework and conduit for government spending54 – reports on needs of relief from 1845 were arranged within Presbyterian parochial boards in the Catholic countries.55 Before the penal laws were illegalized (1829), the Catholic system in Scotland was one of missions that had no political significance. Rev. Alexander “Jupiter” Carlyle (1722–1805), Edinburgh society dancer, described his Presbyterianism as “a rational religion.”56 Jacobites such as Catholics and Episcopalians were fair game for conversion for those who thought that they had evolved the perfect Christianity, and it was beholden upon the perfectionists to share, to save souls. In a society whose chiefs and many tacksmen had deserted to commerce, life became joylessly constricted for many of the old society. Efforts to convert Catholic Gaels to Presbyterianism by threat of eviction were reported in the first decade of George III’s reign (chaplain MacPherson in 1766, Ranald 18th of Clanranald in 1769, Colin 2nd of Boisdale in 1770).57 Bishop James Grant (1706–1778), vicar-apostolic of the Lowland district, in reporting Scottish Episcopal alarm to Bishop Dr Richard Challoner in London, wrote of “a violent Persecution, which is already gone a considerable length against us in the Western Isles.”58 Given the unchallenged reporting of increasing numbers of Roman Catholics in Gaelic Scotland in the 1760s presented by ministers and at least one Presbyterian chaplain (MacPherson of Fraser’s 78th Highlanders; see chapter 3) and putting aside for the moment inaccuracies in the little Catholic reporting that exists, two main tools were used after 1760 to force the Lowland Presbyterianism, Presbyterian language, and culture policy on Catholic Gaelic Scotland.59 They were the “[Presbyterian] Society in Scotland for Propagating [non-Catholic] Christian Knowledge” (ssp ck) and a committee for the management of the Royal Bounty (r b ). Neither had a cultural remit. In anticipation of Papists’ resentment at such tyrannical intrusiveness, ministers complying with the 1704 anti-Popery act had to be offered protection from abuse and violence. First, there would be identification of Papists, then a systematic missionary catechizing, preaching, and education system to bring the Catholic Gaels up to rational, religious speed. Fear of hell was used60 wherever the technique would work.61 The ssp c k was formed in Edinburgh in 1701 at the instance of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of Scotland under royal



The Religious Background 23

proclamation in 1709. In the list of the (socially prominent) nominated, elected, and appointed in 1709 is Sir Robert Dundas of Arniston (d. 1726), one of the lords of council and session.62 Politics, law, and religion were intermeshed. The ssp c k was a model for the rb. The monarch’s Royal Bounty / r b  / Regium Donum / Royal Gift / rd was continuously and annually refreshed in the acts of the General Assembly from 1725 at 1,000 per year and at 2,000 per year beginning with King George IV (reg. 1820–30) and far into the nineteenth century.63 “Ignorance,” “superstition,” and “pernicious,” “poisonous,” and “perverting principles,” “mother of abominations,” the “Augean Stables” were among the terms used in print by members of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland to describe Catholicism.64 There was no such resort, or place, or publishing institution in which to retaliate. In 1778, the members of the General Assembly praised Rev. John Gillies’s public ranting at the feared enactment for Scotland of the English Catholic Relief Bill promulgated by the British Parliament65 – Gillies, d d (1712– 1796), a Brechin minister’s son, was minister of the College Kirk, Glasgow. Lord George Gordon did the same for London in 1780.66 In Gaelic Scotland, the Hanoverian rb bankrolled a skirmishing ­religious corps for the extirpation of Catholicism in Gaelic Scotland’s Catholic districts. In the first record of the establishing of the Royal Bounty (1725), the given was that “Popery and ignorance did increase and prevail in several places in the Highlands and Islands,” and the rb was set up to pay for preachers and catechists to get rid of it.67 It was an annual “commission[s] to some ministers and ruling elders for the Reformation of the Highlands and Islands, and for the managing [of] His Majesty’s Royal Bounty for that end.”68 The rb was administered by the General Assembly. It lasted until long after it had lost its overtly rabid anti-Catholicness, and its commission was unchanged throughout the nineteenth century and into the next. As late as 17 May 1842, the bounty was still applied to “Such parishes in South Uist, Small Isles, Glencoe, Harris, the countries of Moidart, Glengarry, and Lochaber, and the other parishes of the Synods of Glenelg and Argyle … [those] in greatest distress.”69 The inclusion of Harris (known earlier as “the Ardmanach of Lewis”70) reflects the lack of an editor’s readiness to check for changes from years before – revivalism got underway there around 1730. However, it is important that Harris was perceived as a recalcitrant district in need of Presbyterianizing: it had not presented an image of its own music and dance culture for a very long time.

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Gaelic Cape Breton Step-Dancing

The subject of Roman Catholicism in nearby Lewis and North Uist is seldom broached in Presbyterian documentary or anywhere else, although Episcopal Rev. Kenneth Morison (c. 1647–before 1720), who began as minister of Stornoway in 1689, presumably just post-Episcopal, was described as “well suited to repress the turmoils in Lewis between Papists [Episcopalians?] and Protestants.”71 He wore a sword in public in the service of his peaceful master, drawing Presbyterian praise for his virile eccentricity. (Martin Martin wrote that in 1703, Lewis was entirely Protestant bar one family.)72 In 1761 (new-leaf year), the ssp c k stated its mandate in a presentation to the new king, George III, by William Kerr, the 4th Marquis of Lothian: To spread, and to promote the knowledge of Christianity among your Majesty’s subjects in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, to extend that knowledge even to the Indians bordering on your colonies in North America, to banish the errors of Popery, and to root out the principles of disloyalty from the most remote corners of this part of the United Kingdom; these, Great Sir, are the objects of the attention and labours of this society.73 Also in 1761, with a new king on the throne and a brief opportunity to tighten the screws, the r b commissioners commanded catechists and missionaries to list the number of Catholics within their bounds as well as their successful conversions.74 In May 1782, the g acs , in renewing its old “commission to some Ministers and Ruling Elders for Reformation of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, and for Management of the King’s bounty for that end,” specified that the areas needing “particular regard” were “South Uist, Small Isles, Glencoe, Harris, the countries of Moidart, Glengarry, and Lochaber, and the other parishes in the Synods of Glenelg and Argyll.” Given the strident and riotous nature of antiCatholicism in Lowland Scotland in 1779 and of the Gordon (rabblerousing) Riots in London in 1780, the pot was kept at a boil.75 Time and emigration have blurred the image of persecution. In the valley of the Spey in or just before 1807, the Lowland Rev. James Hall, d d (1755–1826), in explaining what he perceived as the remarkable condition of knowledge of the “common people,” put it down to the parish school, but also to “the royal bounty … to catechists and preachers, which are scattered in the glens and other sequestered places, at a distance from the parish churches … going from house to house.”76 The



The Religious Background 25

Spey valley was not a Catholic country, but it was musical. Hall had no known interest in or knowledge of Gaelic Scotland.77 John Walker reported in about 1765 that Catholicism was spreading, was alarmed enough to recommend replacing the ineffective catechists with missionary ministers in those vast areas of Catholic presence, letting the position of catechist die out.78 Aside from adhering to a hated religion, Catholic Gaels were generally reported as remarkably hospitable Christians. And in all the Presbyterian records there are very few, if any, castigations of Catholic priests as dissolute and immoral. Fasti, on the other hand, records several ministers who were fornicators.79 The observation that the daughters of Gaels who did not attend the Presbyterian-instilling schools of one kind or another were a source of continuation of the Catholic faith is not addressed.80 Their part in passing on step-dancing steps must have been as strong once upon a time in Gaelic Scotland as it was to become in Nova Scotia. Presbyterianism was a central pillar in the improved Scotland. As mentioned above, the ssp c k in 1790–91 was still not well informed about “the remote western Highlands and islands” of all “the countries of Scotland,” so its directors drew up a tour of the west coast of Gaelic Scotland and the Inner and Outer Hebrides to be made by the secretary (Presbyterian Rev. John Kemp, d d [1745–1805]) in June 1791. He advised establishing missionary ministers where the Royal Bounty program had not had the funding to do so.81 Gaelic reactions to Presbyterian intrusiveness were few, one in the 1780s and another around 1803.82 The sspck and the rb were unaware that in 1790 500 Catholics had emigrated to Prince Edward Island and Quebec and that the priest Angus Bernard MacEachern had gone with them (rejoining family in pei).83 Worse for Lowland Catholic Bishop John Geddes, 600 were ready to emigrate from South Uist the following spring.84 Geddes began a “pedestrian Journey” in Gaelic Scotland in June and found that some of the Highland (Catholic) missionaries were actually in “great distress.”85 In May 1825, there were thirty-eight “missionary chapels” funded by  the r b serving specifically in “remote districts of the Highlands.” At the same time, seven chapels funded by the s s p ck were also working in remote Highland districts.86 (“Remoteness” included Lochtayside and Rothiemurchus in 1790.) In 1837, the ss p ck employed ten missionaries to the r b ’s thirty-five, thirty-three catechists to the rb’s eight, and 261 teachers to the r b ’s none. But by now, the growing and feared threat to Presbyterianism was the Evangelical movement.

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Gaelic Cape Breton Step-Dancing

The two organizations shared the supplying of reverends, but in Gaelic Scotland the r b much more commonly paid the salaries of ministers, preachers / pastors, and catechists in both majority Roman Catholic and Presbyterian parishes. Sifting through the volumes of FES to isolate all the “missionary” preachers in Gaelic Scotland lies beyond my mandate, but suffice it to say that they were numerous and their value to the kirk was estimable – the two Findlater brothers began as University of Edinburgh–trained missionaries.87 Both the ssp c k and the rb had persistence, some power, and some ­influence. Both mandates were accepted from about 1790 by Protestant ­revivalists of different stripes in Scotland, including itinerant proto-­Baptists, Baptists, and Congregationalists,88 as well as a less identifiable pro–Free (1843 Disruption) Church presence called “occult dissenters.”89 There has always been a strong Catholic Gaelic presence in the Outer Islands. Elsewhere, however, given the dual forces of the s s p ck and rb, as well as the relative nearness of thriving, modern English-speaking towns, it is easy to understand the rapid retreat of Gaelic and Catholicism, with their cultural cognates, in the area abutting the Lallans-speaking east coast, Dundee to Wick. In particular, along the rivers Dee and Don in inland Aberdeenshire, in inland parts of Banff, Elgin, and Nairn, and in central mainland Scotland (Dumbarton, Stirling, and Perth shires), Catholicism waged a long battle for survival. Note that in 1848–49, the town of Nairn, as described by “sportsman” / hunter-fisher Charles W.G. St John (1809–1856), was about equally divided, Gaelic and English.90

T h e A r g y l l s h ir e V a r i ant on the SSPCK a n d t h e RB The Presbyterian Synod of Argyll, not the committee of the General Assembly for managing the r b , administered its portion of the government money for preachers and catechists in Argyllshire.91 The dukes of Argyll held this control, and it guaranteed against any lengthy intrusion by the Evangels. Part of the Cameron of Locheil estate west of the River Lochy and south of a twisting line (watershed but with one tributary crossed) south of Loch Arkaig was part of Argyllshire for decades.92 By 1824, Episcopal “Appin” no longer even appeared in John Thomson’s atlas of the counties of Scotland.93 Under the Argyll umbrella of control, there is considerably more information of a cultural nature (although it is scant) from Argyllshire south, including, prominently, Islay and Kintyre (with Gigha between), than from Argyllshire north.94 However, the reporting of the



The Religious Background 27

Haldanian proto-Baptists in Argyllshire around 1800 contains useful, although generally reactionary, cultural asides.95 The same, unfortunately, is not true for Lochiel.

T he G a e l ic O r a l W o r l d : Catholi c S ecrecy Were it not for the many long genealogies researched and written in Gaelic Nova Scotia in the twentieth century by Catholics and Presbyterians, the people of hundreds of empty glens in Gaelic Scotland would have been forgotten.96 In Nova Scotia, these books were the product of the realization that the old ways and the old people were passing away. The old Scotland that the Gaels left in the emigration years I’ve chosen (1790– 1845) was oral, apart, and difficult to learn about in her time, as Anne (MacVicar) Grant stated. For example, regarding the education of Catholics in eighteenth-­century Gaelic Scotland, especially post-1746, there was insufficient Catholic data to permit Clotilde Prunier, writing in the early twenty-first century, to make a comparative study of the influences of both religions on that subject.

2 Step-Dancing in Catholic Gaelic Cape Breton and Northeastern Nova Scotia from 1790

Scotch Gaelic step-dancing was found in Catholic Antigonish County, the eastern fringe of Pictou County (including Knoydart, Lismore, and Barney’s River) in mainland Nova Scotia, as well as in Cape Breton’s Inverness, Richmond, Cape Breton, and parts of Victoria counties. There was no break in the steps’ type from that of the immigrant generations. They always answered the balanced timing of the music, and there is no record of any limit to personal creations of variations, which were considered new steps. To my knowledge, there is no study of step-dancing in Presbyterian Pictou County, although it must have been enjoyed by  the small Catholic population there, possibly as well in parishes where the Church of Scotland persisted at the Disruption (in n s , 18441) and afterwards. Two social forces working through Christianity affected Scotch music and step-dancing in Catholic society (albeit marginally and intermittently): a variably enforced anti-drinking campaign and efforts to prohibit premarital body contact and promiscuous dancing. But first, dealing with one of the rare published references in Cape Breton Gaelic song to “dancing-master”: “dancing-master” is a term not often used in the Gaelic written record. The Englishman Frank Rhodes’s study in Gaelic Cape Breton in 1957 gave it a modern currency. And yet there is an important reference in Vincent A. McI(saac?) McLellan’s Fàilte Cheap Breatuinn (1891), a collection including many of his Morar-born father Donald McLellan’s songs.2 What follows also addresses the littleknown evictions of Catholic Morar tenantry from about 1800 to post1823 by two Lovat owners.3 Donald McLellan (1807–1890) made “Fàilte a chuairtear Ghaidhealaich” /  “Welcome to the Highland Traveller,” and, under an English subtitle, there



Step-Dancing in Catholic Gaelic Cape Breton 29

is “Dancing-Master’s Notice” appended.4 Its earliest date of making seems to have been 1840, the year of the appearance of the first Gaelic pub­ lication Cuairtear nan Gleann / Highland Traveller from Scotland when Donald was about thirty-three: the words “Chi thu gur lionmhor do chaired / Air an taobh sa don Atlantic” / You’ll see that it’s many friends you have / On this side of the Atlantic suggest that Donald is recalling the first coming of the journal to far-off Cape Breton.5 Vincent wrote that “Fàilte Cheap Breatuinn” / “Cape Breton Welcome” was one of three songs his father made when aged eighty or over and that the animus against the itinerant dancing-master was because Donald had to share a bed with the man who always returned to the McLellan house late and cold. This happened when Donald was a young man. The fact that he didn’t have a wife beside him in bed may indicate that Donald was still a bachelor living in his father’s house in South-West Margaree around 1840.6 “Fàilte a chuairtear Ghaidhealaich” / “Welcome to the Highland Traveller” is given in English with song line-end markings ( / ). Only where the song bears on dancing, toward the end, and in the subtitled “Dancing-Master’s Notice,” is it given in both languages. The version below is the original accentless one of 1891. I am grateful to Effie Rankin, Mabou, for the translation, which in places I have made even more literal. Welcome to the Highland Traveller (Cuairtear nan Gleann [the Gaelic publication authored by the Moderate Presbyterian Rev. Norman MacLeod {1783–1862} / Caraid nan Gàidheal]). Welcome dear Cuairtear – how glad I am at your arrival to this country, ­winging your way swiftly throughout the mountains and glens. I am delighted that you crossed the Strait of Canso and that you are undaunted in heat-wave or in snow, bringing us all the good tales. How many pleasant and valourous stories you contain, all well worth reading: some are about Scotland and others about Ireland. You give us Fingalian legends and, although Cuairtear you are but young, you are a true and worthy Gael; you will find that you have many friends on this side of the Atlantic. Bho n’ bu dual dhut a bhi smiorail,

Because you were wont to be brave, Bi nad’ ghaidheal treun air t’-aineol; Be a hardy Gael in exile; Cur stad air damhsa na n garrach, And put an end to the dancing (of the decadent? of the dirty worthless person?)

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Gaelic Cape Breton Step-Dancing

S bheir daoine coir ort am beannachd. Si sgoil damhsa, sgoil, nu truaighe,

Good folks will bless you.

The wretched dancing school is one of woe, Sgoil nu leisgeadh, ’s nu mi-stuamachd, A school of sloth, and intemperance, Sgoil tha cailt’ do chlann na A school that is a loss to the farm folk, tuathadh, Sgoil a ni iuthrinn a bhuanachd. A school that will give hell its harvest. Se ’n damhsa freiemheach gach Dancing’s the root of all evil, dobheart, A dh’fhagas an t-anam na That will leave the soul in misery; bhroinnean; S’ e sgrios Sodom ’us Gomora, ’Twas the ruin of Sodom and Gomora, A chionn ’s gur e bu toiseach toisich. Since it was the start of evil. Cha chan mi an cor air an am so, I won’t say more for now, Ach gu cinnteach tha mi gealltain, But I definitely promise, Ma bhith’s mi am shlainte go If I’m well come summer, samhradh, Gu n cluinnt sibh an cor ma n’ You’ll hear more about dancing. dhamhsa.

“Dancing Master’s Notice”: Gabhaich sinn aran us im, ’S a h-uile ni a theid air bord; Eorna, ’s coirce, ’s gach gne shiol, Marsin, agus iasg ’s feoil, Leathair uachdar agus bhonn, Seall an toll a th’air mo bhrog; Gabhaich sinn cloth dubh na donn, Bho n’ tha n t-side lom ’s i reot. ’S e dolar cruinn air ar bois, An duais bhi’idh aguinn bhos ’s thall, Chuireamaid damhsa na d’ dha chois, Ged a bhith’ tu bodhar dall.

We’ll take bread and butter, All that goes on a table; Barley or oats, all kind of seed, Along with fish and flesh, Leather for upper and sole, Look at the hole in my shoe; We’ll accept cloth black or brown, Since the weather’s raw and freezing. It’s a round dollar on our palm, That’s our payment hither and yon, We could set your two feet a’dancing, Though you be deaf and blind.

Donald McLellan (Dòmhnall Ghobha / Donald the Smith) was a Catholic boy of about twelve when he left Glenelg Presbyterian parish – Glenelg contained the steadfastly Catholic “country” of Morar where Bishop MacDonald had his headquarters in 1745–46. This was almost certainly



Step-Dancing in Catholic Gaelic Cape Breton 31

where the McLellans lived until 1819. Donald went to a school there until 1817 when he was ten.7 He is remembered in Cape Breton as having had no taint of prudery: he wrote fondly of whisky at weddings, “stuth prieseil na braiche gun sgraing” (precious juice of the barley with no sourness). He also wrote “’S thainig temperance suarach na ’n Gall” (And contemptible temperance of the [Presbyterian] Lowlander arrived) and that temperance was “mosach nach d’fhiach” (nasty, worthless).8 He made “Rann do dh’Fhidhill” / “Verse on a Fiddle”: “Mille failt’ air an deagh fhidhill / A lionadh mu chridhe le solas” / A thousand welcomes on the fine fiddle / that would fill my heart with joy and “gu n doir i caithream air ceol dha”9 / let it give him the beat of the music.10 Concerning that particular fiddle, McLellan’s son Vincent wrote that John Y. Gunn, son of the Strath-Naver-born Presbyterian Rev. John Gunn, Strathlorne, bought the fiddle for Angus MacIsaac of Strathlorne. The reverend used to give Latin lessons free to Catholic boys heading for the priesthood. There can be no doubt that as a young boy Donald was aware of Alasdair mac Iain / Alexander son of John Gillis in Ardnamurach and possibly the latter’s father-in-law, sea-captain Donald Gillis, in Stole until 1815, both of them step-dancers and neighbours. Although there were probably a few MacLellans living along the north shore of Loch Nevis into Knoydart around 1812, many MacLellans in the northwest mainland Gaelic Scotland lived in North Morar / Morar a’ Chlaidheimh / Morar of the Sword, a “country” that had been owned by the Lovat Frasers since the 1768. In 1819, chief Thomas Alexander Fraser, of Strichen, Lord Lovat, was into his fourth year as landowner. He was the first Roman Catholic Lovat in generations. Thomas Fraser (b. 1802) succeeded his distant relative, the bereaved, avenging Archibald Campbell Fraser, as Lord Lovat in December 1815, and because he was a minor, Thomas’s trustees continued the eviction policies of his predecessor from December 1815 until at least 1823.11 (See the Fraser genealogy at the beginning of this text.) It is because of these evictions and departures, among many others, that Inverness and other counties in Cape Breton have such richness in music and step-dance.12 Cuairtear nan Gleann was published between 1840 and 1843 at a time of deep dissent in the Presbyterian church of Scotland. The Rev. Norman MacLeod (1783–1862), known as Caraid nan Gàidheal and as Tormod mac Thormoid, was from Morven, Argyllshire, and became moderator of the General Assembly in 1836 (for the normal one-year stint). His father,

32

Gaelic Cape Breton Step-Dancing

a Moderate Presbyterian, was a fiddle-player who, in the Morven manse, played for his children’s Reel / (reel?) dancing. To turn now to body-contact dancing and liquor, antipathy to these old elements represented a shift away from the late eighteenth century’s more florid drinking customs (the morning dram, the parting swig, drink on the bench, whisky as medicine13) and dancing customs. The prime agency was first the Presbyterian Evangelical movement (an international movement). It had effect from about 1790 in Gaelic Scotland, the years of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. In Gaelic Scotland, the Evangelicals responded to the perceived spiritlessness of the established Moderatism in the Church of Scotland and included Haldanian pro­toBaptism and fundamental Presbyterianism. Anti-alcohol and anti–­ promiscuous dancing touched Gaelic Nova Scotia Catholic populations through episcopal encouragement, but with no great success. From about 1820 and for a century and more in Gaelic Nova Scotia, the Christian churches, Presbyterian and Roman Catholic, tried to ­control, and if possible stamp out, alcohol consumption. This was an invidious task for the old Catholic world, considering who supported the church, over and above all the challenges of clearing. The AppinGlencoe-born Jesuit Rev. Archibald Campbell (1850–1921) wrote that he found only three wants during his eight-month mission to Gaelic Nova Scotia in 1907 – the third was lagh na “Dibhe” / a law for the Drink.14 The task of detecting stills and drinkers was more work than any one priest could undertake from around 1800 to the present in Cape Breton and rural Nova Scotia. In the timing of the Catholic Church’s setting up of parishes with resident priests, and the attendant difficulties of missions, the problem stands out clearly. Up to 1880 in Cape Breton, these are the places and dates of placement of the first parish priests: Judique (1818), Grand Narrows (1818), Broad Cove Chapel (1825), Christmas Island (1838), East Bay (1838), Mabou (1844), Creignish (1845), Boisdale (1846), Lake Bras d’Or (1848), South-West Margaree (1849), Port Hood (1865), Grand Mira (1871), Iona (1873), Glendale (1875).15 In the police-less forest world of hard labour, large families, and almost no crime, faithfulness to religion continued almost seamlessly from Catholic Gaelic Scotland. The difficulty was that most of the above parishes had been missions and then had a parish priest. It took a man with a strong constitution to handle the work, the travel. South-West Margaree, although



Step-Dancing in Catholic Gaelic Cape Breton 33

a parish since 1849, was served (with the exception of about a year) from Broad Cove until 1873. Judique and Creignish were served in the 1850s alternately by one priest. Creignish until the 1840s had been a mission of Ship Harbour; in the 1850s, Creignish had Ship Harbour / Port Hawkesbury and River Inhabitants (including Glendale) as missions.16 It is no surprise that once in a while, a pastor enjoyed the leisure of a glass. The fight against body contact in dancing involved the withering of the Eight-Hand Reel, but this loss was certainly not complete even by 1920 in Catholic Cape Breton.17 Music and step-dancing were not always detached from the glass, and that threesome was behind Fr Kenneth MacDonald’s (Mabou, 1868–94) excessive reaction against traditional music and its instruments. In no Catholic Scotch family was step-dancing or its music unknown. The same was true for Moderate Presbyterian families and communities in Cape Breton, but step-dancing was eschewed in many families where ministers promised post mortem retribution. From 1844, all of these people joined the Free Church of Scotland, at least nominally. The North Shore was an Evangelical community where dancing was seldom done, but there was an arc of Presbyterian music and step-dance in Inverness County on the east and north shores of Lake Ainslie. Step-dancing remains popular in Catholic parishes, although Gaelic is struggling to achieve a revival in a world where most speakers in the old lines are at or past retirement age.18 From about 1860, a culturally conservative Cape Breton Scotch community existed in the Codroy Valley in southwestern Newfoundland where step-dancing continued. Moreover, since about 1880, step-dancing has been a significant social enjoyment in the growing Cape Breton industrial area – Sydney, Sydney Mines, Sydney River, Dominion, Glace Bay. Since about the same time, Scotch step-dancers and fiddlers were living in  Toronto and Windsor, Ontario, in greater Boston, in New York, in Detroit, and elsewhere. The conservativeness of step-dancing, and perhaps the influence of typical satellite conservativeness in these Scotch urban communities, forms a subordinate conservatism after the Scoto– Nova Scotian one. From about 1880, the attraction of earning an income from fishing in American waters or in urban industry lured young people from the farm in Cape Breton and Nova Scotia. In greater Boston, there was a strong Scotch presence with some obvious social cohesion. The Scotch shared some dance-hall space with Boston Irish, but there is no evidence of serious “Irishing” of Scotch dancing or of Scotch Gaelic. The

34

Gaelic Cape Breton Step-Dancing

stock market crash of 1929 drove many Gaels home. Urban American Scotch Gaels three generations later still return home regularly to keep the ties binding. The fascination is the still socially tight, welcoming Gaelic and quasi-Gaelic anachronism in North America. Three varyingly powerful influences touching Scotch step-dancing from about 1890 must be treated as framework facts. The first is the appearance and rapid spread in Scotch Gaelic Nova Scotia of the Square Set from about 1890. This was a four-couple dance, a Quadrille, or a Lancers. The most likely source for the intrusion of this dance, in a number of varieties, is the greater Boston Scotch satellite. Until about 1945, some maintain, these sets did not contain Scotch step-dancing setting steps, but then it was Gaelicized to include step-dancing to both jig and reel timing. The second influence is what appears to have been a belated Cape Breton rough equivalent of the Gaelic revivalism that happened in the late nineteenth century in Catholic Ireland and Presbyterian Scotland and that began in and began as a Cape Breton Catholic feature in Iona, Victoria County, in 1919. But the underlying cause in Cape Breton was different. It was the rapid rural depopulation to fast-growing industrial towns in Cape Breton and elsewhere and Catholic episcopal fears of emerging unionism, materialist atheism, and the loss of behavioural influence and control. Concern was even greater, since the Catholic episcopal town was / is Antigonish, a relatively isolated, non-industrial university town. The agency that took up the challenge to rural Gaelicness was the Scottish Catholic Society of Canada (s cs c), founded by priests (Donald M. MacAdam [1867–1924] in particular) in Iona, Cape Breton, in 1919. Its mandate included the revival of Gaelic language and Gaelic cultural life, and the first edition of its publication, Mosgladh / Awakening, had the headline, “Ar dleasdanas d’on [sic] Ghadhlig” / Our obligation to the Gaelic.19 The third influence is the fiddle revival that began in 1972 in Cape Breton following the one-off Canadian television program, Ron MacInnis’s “The Vanishing Cape Breton Fiddler.” The premise of MacInnis’s program was that the old Scotch / Gaelic fiddling was slipping away, along with the use of the language.20 The program brought tradition and modernity together; it rattled staid thinking, and its influence was profound. There are uncounted examples of step-dancing, by Nova Scotian Catholics and to a lesser extent Presbyterian Gaels, at home and in the northeastern United States over more than a century. And the basis for this book is my research into this step-dancing, particularly in Cape Breton, from my first exposure to it in 1972 at a Catholic wedding in



Step-Dancing in Catholic Gaelic Cape Breton 35

Arisaig, Antigonish County (the groom was from Creignish, Inverness County, the bride an Arisaig MacDonald).21 I sought out as many of the older, Gaelic-speaking fiddle-players and step-dancers as I could. Most were living in Inverness County. I was lucky enough to meet Theresa MacLellan, Dan R. MacDonald, Donald Angus Beaton, Dan Hughie MacEachern, Sandy MacLean, Angus Allan Gillis, among many.22 My oldest informant was Lisa Kennedy, then living in Inverness Manor. She had been an itinerant spinner in her earlier life and was 105. She and one or two others, including Katie MacDonald, Troy, were impressionable children living in a thoroughly Gaelic world before the Square Set came to Cape Breton.23 In general I have chosen six areas of Catholic Scotch Cape Breton as examples: 1) greater Judique, including points south, north, and east; 2) greater Mabou; 3) South-West Margaree; 4) Glendale and Kingsville; 5) Iona and Boisdale; 6) East Bay. The first two are addressed here, the others in following chapters.

J u d iq u e a n d Envi rons Judique and environs encompasses Judique North, Judique South, River Denys Road, Little Judique, Judique Intervale, Shore Road, Hillsdale, St Ninian, Upper South West Mabou, Campbell Road, Centennial, Judique Banks, Rear Judique Banks, Little Judique Ponds, Glencoe, Long Point, Craigmore, Creignish, Low Point, and Troy. MacDougall’s History of Inverness County (HOIC ) shows that heads of Highland family immigrants to Judique, Inverness County, came from Moidart, North and South Morar, Eigg (at least four families), Uist, and Strathglass, but also Easter Ross, Lochaber, Arisaig, Glengarry, and one from Dornie in Kintail. Why Catholic Judique still has a reputation as the place of superior step-dancers is unclear, but the old phrase, “Judique on the floor,” is still used as a reminder of the importance of step-dancing in the Catholic parish. The “floor” could be the plank floors in homes but also the temporary outdoor stages that were used for the old parish picnics and games in the early automobile age.24 Not everyone in the parish was or is Roman Catholic, but there is no Presbyterian, United, or any other Christian church within it. Judique in 1907 had more than 300 families and impressed the visiting Jesuit missionary Gael, Archibald Campbell, Ballachulish, Appin, as much more vibrantly Catholic than the Highlands that he knew.25

36

Gaelic Cape Breton Step-Dancing

There are some good step-dancers still living there, although the old Gaelic farming life and its sturdy old shingled barns are almost gone.26 Among the difficulties a researcher meets in some of these Gaelic interviews is the power of the published word. There is also a commonly found carefulness attending the sharing of personal information, and a preference for evasiveness and secrecy on the part of some persists today. Often implicit is the fear of offending others. Anne (MacVicar) Grant would have recognized that characteristic in Mabou had she been there in 1900. Judique, unlike most other Catholic Highland parishes in Cape Breton, can point to one published mention of dance and dance teaching that is  frequently repeated as fact. In John Lorne MacDougall’s History of Inverness County (1922) and in A.D. MacDonald’s Mabou Pioneers (MP ), an immigrant family of Judique MacMillans is mentioned as “(The Dancers).”27 Under the heading “MacMillans (The Dancers),” MacDougall (c. 1851–1928) reported the arrival, no date, of Allan MacMillan, a dancer, “from Lochaber.”28 A.D. MacDonald (writing post-1922) gave the date as 1817 and confirmed that Allan left Lochaber.29 MacMillan took up land in Rear Little Judique in 1820.30 This “dancer” information has been used and re-used in print without question to support various observations. MacDougall, however, was limited to using the information sent to him in response to his expressed wishes for Inverness County family genealogical data.31 MacDougall gave no description of the kind or kinds of dancing the immigrant Allan MacMillan did, how he acquired it – from whom in Lochaber or elsewhere – or to whom he passed it on in Cape Breton. Some members of Allan’s family simply claimed that he taught dancing in classes in Judique and Creignish. MacDougall did not specify his sources. According to one older woman of the MacMillan family, now living in the Catholic parish of Mabou, the MacMillans did not live long in Judique. She knew nothing about any MacMillan dancing other than what MacDougall had written.32 Neither MacDougall’s nor A.D. MacDonald’s family histories have been thoroughly corrected. It is not known if any of MacMillan’s descendants followed in his footsteps. Duncan Dan D. MacIsaac (1907– 1987), a Judiquer and a contractor who knew Judique local history well, never raised the MacMillan dancer subject in any of my conversations with him.33 None of the step-dancers in two prominent Judique stepdancing lineages (and extended families) – Graham (originally from Easter Ross) and MacDonald (from Eigg) – has ever mentioned to me



Step-Dancing in Catholic Gaelic Cape Breton 37

since 1972 that anyone had learned any dancing at any MacMillan class or from any MacMillan in a céilidh or other surroundings. In one way or another, all good Scotch step-dancers in Cape Breton were teachers, some more protective of some of the steps they did in public than others were. In general, step-dancing as perceived in and from 1972 is not a prescriptive art. With few elements, body held fairly firmly erect, little arm movement (“gracelessness”), action from the hips down, particularly the feet, it permits and welcomes inventiveness and thus is almost impossible to judge except subjectively. There are no prescribed forms or orders in which steps are to be danced. Timing and talent are the guidelines. MacDougall wrote about those two step-dancing lineages, Grahams and MacDonalds, but no one thought to tell him about step-dancing. Informants perhaps did not see themselves as culturally unusual. Perhaps they feared offending others. Perhaps they were modest. To the north, Big John Gillis (1880–1975), South-West Margaree, a remarkable stepdancer in a family that had been step-dancing since leaving Ardnamurach, North Morar, in 1826, is still talked about in Inverness County.34 He was not mentioned for his step-dancing in MacDougall’s History while others were. Like the Presbyterian MacLean dance teacher who emigrated to Nova Scotia and settled in Scotsville35 in the early nineteenth century, the  MacMillan dancers owe their celebrity to material published and accepted at face value. MacDougall was an Inverness County, Cape Breton, Gael. He wrote more about the family of old Loyalist soldier John Graham in Judique than he did of the MacMillan (dancers). There is no word in HOIC of step-dancing in the Graham family’s line, which lasted in Judique (and elsewhere) over four, perhaps five, generations. In the 1920s, old Stephen Graham (1833–1934) was living with his son Angus S. Graham (1873– 1946) on the old farm in Judique and was one of the old Scotch stepdancers who learned to dance in Judique during the immigration years. Most of the farm is still in the family, and descendants still live in the parish, among them a prominent step-dancer whose style has been likened to old Stephen’s (Mary Patricia Graham).36 Other Grahams in the extended family step-danced, including Angie John Graham (dec., b. 1882),37 whose photograph appears in my Old and New World Highland Bagpiping (in which he is step-dancing al fresco to an unnamed piper). With regard to the term “lineage” as applied to musical talent and stepdance talent, many Gaels believe that step-dancing ability, like fiddling ability, is heritable. Leisure-time conversation is still often devoted to

38

Gaelic Cape Breton Step-Dancing

tracing lines of step-dancing ability in extended families. In the Graham family in Judique, for example, at least two members of the family believe that Stephen Graham the step-dancer, and all of his descendants who share the talent, received the gift from his mother, Euphemia O’Handley (immigrants from Catholic South Uist who came to Cape Breton from Prince Edward Island).38 A defence of step-dancing remaining relatively unchanged in Judique parish, as in other Gaelic Cape Breton parishes, from those immigrant days (1790–1845) has to include the possible influences of the Square Set (1890–1910) and then the cleric-led sc sc beginning in 1921. In the latter case, the sc s c had a strong cultural component, and the priest-leader in Judique, Stanley P. MacDonald, who was prominent in the society, had ready acceptance and unquestioned authority. He was ordained in 1917 and is associated more with the old coal-mining community / parish of Port Hood. There are no records of any permanent cultural changes effected by the s c sc ’s cultural agenda in the parish – but, in Judique in 2013, no person of eighty or over consulted had any memory even of the s c sc , let alone Judique’s St David’s Council.39 They remembered some of the events and talked about them if prompted but either did not know or remember the organization involved. As Farquhar MacNeil (Brevig, Barra) discovered in the case of MacLachlan’s Hebridean dancing in Barra, which he himself taught, some formally taught dancing introduced from the outside disappears quickly. In 1972, as today (2014), it is generally believed that the Eight-Hand Reel was a feature of Nova Scotia Gaelic society brought west over-sea by the Gaelic Scotch immigrants. Englishman Frank Rhodes’s research in 1957 contains the observation that the (body-contact) Eight was (had been?) perceived as a threat to morals by the Catholic hierarchy and ­discouraged from the pulpit. However, the available Catholic diocesan church records held in Antigonish do not identify Reel dancing as proscribed for Gaels. Perhaps there was a hiatus of a decade or two before the four-couple Quadrille made its flamboyant and commanding entry in Gaelic Inverness County. It also included body contact, which the Catholic Church frowned upon. The Square Set and Lancers were not to be denied in rural or urban Cape Breton, but there are no published descriptions from Gaelic Nova Scotia of the Eight, nor is there any lament for its disappearance in Gaelic song or prose. The Scotch Four is different. Between 1972 and 1982, however, a few people in Inverness County claimed to remember the Eight-Hand Reel. Some claimed that they still danced it, but many older, more knowledgeable Gaels said that the



Step-Dancing in Catholic Gaelic Cape Breton 39

claimants were confusing the reel-time figure or figures of the Square Set or Lancers with the Eight-Hand Reel.40 However, in the 1980s Duncan Francis MacDonald / Donnchadh mac Fhransais ’ic Ghilleasbuig saor / Duncan son of Francis, son of Archibald the Carpenter, Little Judique (c. 1913–1994), was interviewed, and his memories of the Eight appear to have been genuine.41 As a boy he had been inveigled by seven adults to make an Eight in a home in the Rear of Judique (also called Upper South-West Mabou). At seventy-three, in 1986, Duncan Francis remembered what he had done, and a description of that is now held by the National Library of Scotland.42 The “Carpenters” are the Judique MacDonald step-dance lineage mentioned above. Thus, it may be that a variety of the Eight-Hand Reel was brought out from Eigg, South Uist, or some other Catholic west coast or Hebridean country. Stephen Graham (b. c. 1833) was one of the step-dancers remembered by older people to this day.43 He step-danced in Judique during the later years of the Gaelic immigrations. Catherine MacDonald (101 in 1978) /  Ceiteag an t-Saoir / Catherine the Carpenter, although born about fortyfour years after Graham, in 1877 in Upper South-West Mabou, saw him dance. She lived in Gaelic, although she became bilingual, in a world that included many immigrants from Gaelic Scotland. She was a granddaughter of John son of Rory MacDonald from the Island of Eigg in the Small Isles. Stephen Graham was also the grandchild of a Scotch immigrant (John Graham), although John son of Rory MacDonald from Eigg arrived in North America more than fifty years later than John Graham who fought in the American Revolutionary War in the South. From whom old Stephen Graham learned his steps is not known. Katie the Carpenter was interviewed and photographed at her son-inlaw Sam Batherson’s home in Troy, Inverness County, in the summer of 1978. She was Ceiteag nighean Ghilleasbuig, ’ic Iain, ’ic Ruairidh / Katie daughter of Archibald [b. 1841], son of John, son of Roderick. She had been a good step-dancer. There was no report that in any way she danced differently from the best living step-dancers in 1978. Her brother Angus the Carpenter MacDonald was in her opinion the remarkable step-­ dancer. She learned her steps from her father, Archibald, an “awful slick dancer.” She said that her paternal uncle Rory MacDonald (son of the immigrant John MacDonald) had taught step-dancing in Judique. Katie the Carpenter lived in the time of the Four-Hand Reel and the Eight-Hand Reel, but she did not talk of them, only about solo stepdancing. Duncan Francis MacDonald was a nephew of hers. The environment was completely Scotch Gaelic and Catholic, and, as elsewhere, the

40

Gaelic Cape Breton Step-Dancing

fabric of marriage relationships strongly supported song, music, and stepdance culture, as well as Gaelic. The parish priest from 1857 until 1877 was Fr Allan MacLean, born in Clanranald’s Arisaig in 1804. In the male line, Katie’s grandfather, Iain mac Ruairidh Dòmhnullach / John44 son of Rory MacDonald, had come from the once-Clanranald-held Catholic island of Eigg.45 Rory was a brother of the parish priest Father Anthony MacDonald (c. 1769–1843) of the Lesser or Small Isles (Eigg, Canna, Rum, and Muck).46 The emigration was a typical family emigration and may have occurred in 1822.47 Many of these pre-1840 emigrants were still of the relatively wealthier and more adventurous Highlanders without whom running a rural Roman Catholic church in Scotland was difficult.48 In Catherine’s parents’ generation, the MacDonald siblings included a Florence, who (step-)danced, and Anthony (b. c. 1840) and Joe, who were pipers,49 the Rory who taught dancing in Judique,50 and Catherine’s father, Archie the Carpenter MacDonald (1841–1912). She then mentioned nine in her own generation, naming five including herself who were musical. She and her brother Angus the Carpenter (1887–1980) were the step-dancers, and John Rory (1878–1930) was a fiddler (and the father of Dan Rory MacDonald [1911–1976], the remarkable fiddlercomposer). Other siblings included Mary (1882–1973), who married Angus MacKay, Kingsville, a blacksmith and father of fiddler Alex Francis MacKay and Jimmie MacKay (1913–1992), seannachaidh /  lorist, storyteller, self-taught literate in Gaelic.51 The MacKays left Kintail, Sutherland, as Presbyterians but became Catholics in Cape Breton for want of another church. Duncan Francis MacDonald’s younger sister Rachel (Francis) MacDonald’s memory of the transition period from Reel to Square set in Glencoe was recorded on 27 July 1998.52 At the time, Rachel (21 November 1914–27 July 2010) was in the nursing home in Port Hawkesbury, when she died at ninety-five. She was a Gaelic speaker and a step-dancer. She remembered the four-couple Square Sets that were often danced at the schoolhouse in St Ninian and the importance there of boxbidding in etiquette and proto-courtships.53 The priest in Judique from 1930 to 1960 was the stern, powerful, and feared Father Lachlan MacDonald (b. 1883), who is still remembered as scouring the neighbourhood of a dance or “do” to confront those who transgressed on matters alcoholic and moral.54 He was, however, not involved in trying to stop step-dancing. Rachel MacDonald also remembered seeing the Eight-Hand Reel danced in Glencoe, Inverness County, where she settled when she married



Step-Dancing in Catholic Gaelic Cape Breton 41

Donald Hughie MacDonald, Glencoe (son of the Eight-Hand Reel dancer remembered by Peggie “the [white] miller” MacDonald), who was interviewed in Judique in 1982.55 Rachel was a daughter of Francis MacDonald, son of Archibald the Carpenter MacDonald. Her sister Mary Flora (MacDonald) Gillis (b. 16 December 1921) lived on the Hillsdale Road in Judique North and only remembered dancing Square Sets.56 As far as the Eight-Hand Reel is concerned, it appears to have been a retention of an old Eight-Hand Reel in inland, forest Glencoe, Inverness County, from immigrant times.57

Bàrdachd T o u c hi ng Judi que The search specifically for step-dancing observations in immigrant years in Judique, even not given as such, may reasonably be fruitfully conducted in Gaelic song. The case for the parish of Judique lies in the Gaelic poetry / song of a minor Argyllshire bàrd, Iain Mac-Dhughaill / John MacDougall (1820–1891), Ardgour. In his work, there is a surprising and strong link with Gaelic Nova Scotia.58 MacDougall’s religion is not known, but the first thirty-six pages include a song about a young Roman Catholic Gaelic MacLean woman then living in Arisaig, who had lived in Moidart (both highly Catholic MacDonald countries). Another song also touches on dance, but later and from Glasgow. Perhaps taking a leaf from Anne (MacVicar) Grant’s book, this John MacDougall wrote his “Roimh-ràdh” / Foreword as a poem / song in his book Dain agus Orain le Iain Mac-Dhughaill a Aird-ghobhar, fagus do Ionar-Lochaidh / Poems and Songs by John MacDougall, from Ardgour, near to Inver-Lochy (1860). He observed that to write in prose would be to ensure its never being read. Poetry / song was different. MacDougall was living at Inversanda in the southeast of Ardgour in 1841, roughly west across salt Loch Linnhe looking to the Pap of Glencoe.59 He had a Highland upbringing and wrote that he had had the opportunity to get to know the customs of old and young Gaels, always in Gaelic, as his childhood and boyhood was. He was well acquainted with Cladh Mhuilinn / Clovulin (Ardgour); he was also taken to Inverlochy Castle, but he had travels / visits in (Catholic) Arisaig and Moidart, as well as in (Presbyterian) Mull and Morvern. His love of Gaelic originated in his first years and went on at least until he was twenty-one when he appears to have lived in that language. He certainly never lost his love for it. Almost all of his poetry is in Gaelic. He did not mention religion, nor did he write anything about Rev. MacCallum’s presence in Arisaig around 1841.

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Gaelic Cape Breton Step-Dancing

MacDougall’s more pointed and highly significant mention of dancing is found in his earlier song, “Do Mor ni’c ’Illeathain” /  “To Sarah MacLean,” a daughter of Alexander MacLean, Arisaig, which deals with persons and their doings around 1844. The song’s important lines as far as dancing is concerned are: Bu ghrinn leam air ùrlar thu Le mùirn air do chuir suas; Gu h-éibhinn, eutrom, ionnsuichte, Neo éisleineach, brisg, dlùthcheumach, Neo-mhearachdach ’s gach cùrsa dheth, ’S glan tionndadh anns gach cuairt;

Neat you were to me on the floor With joy after praising you; Delightfully, light, cultured, Spirited, clever, close-stepping, Correct in each course / turn[?] of it,

And crisp turning in each round / whirl; A’ freagradh fonn nam pong Answering so nimbly the music of ro-lùghar, the beats, ’S a’ chruit-chiùil ri fuaim. While the violin was playing. ’N uair ghlacadh tu ’m piano When you’d take to the piano Bu ghàirdeachas do m’ chluais – ’Twas a pleasure to my ear – Gu ceòlmhor, éibhinn, stòlda, ceutach, Musically, delightful, steady, comely, In each element you won. Anns gach beus thug buaidh.60

These few lines, given my choice of translation of several words, may be something more than just an oblique reference to step-dancing in Catholic Arisaig-Morar in the first half of the nineteenth century. For one thing, it is common enough today for individual stage step-dancers in Gaelic Nova Scotia to make tight circles for show (presumably deiseal / south, or sun-wise, in older times). The recurring problem is that few people describe step-dancing in words because it is difficult to do and because the form is not something that took book-learning in the Gaelic world to obtain – it was like songs, instrumental music, and Tales / tales. The tapping out of time and then the use of counterpoint (using non-tapping movement and pauses) are the obvious features, but in a four-note bar of common time in a reel, there are two equal beats, not one, giving a more balanced and rhythmic result. MacDougall seems to have tried more than others to catch the neatness, the timing, the close-stepping. Also, he wrote nothing about movement of the arms and reported no clicking of thumbs or hooching; he does not use “fling,” and he did not mention a group dance.



Step-Dancing in Catholic Gaelic Cape Breton 43

An example of the generalness of observation is found in the muchloved lighiche / doctor in Morvern, Iain Mac-Lachain / John MacLachlan (1804–1874), youngest son of MacLachlan of Rahoy.61 Writing of dance in 1869, he left these lines: Am sònruicht’ de’n oidhche ’n uair rachadh iad, cruinn, Bu shunndach ’s bu chridheil an ­fhidheal a’ seinn; Na gruagaichean teisteil, ’s na fleasgaichean treun, A’ dannsadh gu h-innealt, ’s ri mireag gun bheud

At that special time of night when they got together, Joyously, boldly / heartily did the ­fiddle sing; Pure maidens, and the strong young men, Dancing orderedly / containedly, and a-sporting innocently62

Apart from the fiddle and the innocence of the dancers, one knows not a lot.63 John MacLachlan’s songs are considered in chapter 11. In John MacDougall’s song to Sarah or Sally MacLean (“Do Mhor ni’c ’Illeathain”), he noted that Mor / Sarah read Gaelic, that being the earliest language she learned in her Catholic home among her MacLean family in Alasary (Moidart) (1816), Laggan (Ardnish, Arisaig), Strath (Arisaig) (1835), and Ardnafuaran (old port for Eigg and the Small Isles) (Arisaig) (1841).64 MacDougall wrote that she got her good looks from her parents, hospitable folk who had a piano and kept a house with full pantries of victuals.65 Although MacDougall did not name Sarah’s mother, he did name a brother, John MacLean, who in 1844 was living in Glen Forslan (Moidart), àrmunn / a hero who was hospitable, active in following herds (sheep) in droves from the north (1844 may be the date of the song’s composition). In any case, MacLean was a farmer and a businessman /  merchant (fear-malairt) evaluator.66 Whoever MacDougall was, he is recorded as living in the first house (of seven) reporting in Inversanda farm in the 1841 census of Ardgour.67 His name follows two unplaceable MacLean ladies, Janet MacLean (70) and Ann MacLean (45). The farm of Inversanda lies in Ardgour to the north of River Tarbert at the Loch Linnhe end of Glen Tarbert, a neck of land that all but makes Morvern an island and marks two MacLean holdings on Loch Linnhe. The farm and buildings are tucked under the hills of Druim an Iubhair / Ridge of the Ewe (tree) touching the west shore of salt Loch Linnhe and watching the tarbert (isthmus). If he was related to the two women, if they were related to Alexander MacLean of Ardgour or to Alexander MacLean at Ardnafuaran in Arisaig, or to both, is not yet

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known. MacLean of Ardgour (d. 1930) was a Gaelic speaker (a rarity at the time), as was his widow, who raised her daughters in Gaelic.68 There is not much personal detail about MacDougall. He lived in Inversanda, Ardgour, or nearby from about 1820 and later lived in Barr (Morvern), Oban, Glasgow, and Port Glasgow or nearby and was completely bilingual. His religious persuasion is not known, although the upper stratum in Ardgour was not Catholic.69 His songs show no profound commitment to either teetotalism or drinking, just deep fondness for his language. His family, so far, seems less interesting and far less culturally significant than Mor ni’c ’Illeathain’s. His song to her includes a few lines of minor panegyric on her brother John MacLean, and with him and his lifetime presence and local acumen as focuses, a good deal is known about her father and the other siblings, fourteen or fifteen of whom left Scotland forever in what seems to have been three pulses, around 1800, 1840, 1854.70 Old Alexander MacLean (d. 1848 aged about 87–91) was married to one known wife (a Catherine MacVarish, b. c. 178071) but had children when he married her, suggesting one or more earlier marriages or some other kin network (including the adoption of nephews and nieces). The MacLean siblings and half-siblings, sixteen or seventeen by Alexander MacLean’s two (conceivably more) marriages, included Fr Allan MacLean (1804 / Arisaig, Scotland–1877 / Judique). All indications are that his was a large, fairly well-to-do Roman Catholic Moidart and Arisaig family. One of the family members, Charles, held the tack of Letter Morar in South Morar before emigrating to Australia in 1842 (not from Letter Morar). At least three of the family went there, including Sally / Mor the dancer (in 1848), object of John MacDougall’s song of praise. She probably cared for her ailing father into her early thirties until he died. Five of Alexander MacLean’s children are known to have emigrated to Cape Breton – Fr Allan MacLean, who was priest in Creignish (1855) and Judique (resident in Judique from 1857 to 1877), his sister Isabella (his housekeeper), Donald (b. 1803), Margaret (b. 1826), and another sister, the wife of Hugh MacEachren, Arisaig, Scotland.72 Fr Allan and Isabella are buried under gravestones in Judique. He was a piper and dancer73 as well as a maker of songs,74 known as “one of Inverness County’s most colourful priests.”75 He spent his boyhood in Alasary in Moidart, then spent years in Spain (earning the cognomen Sagart beag na Spainne / The Little Priest from Spain)76 studying for the priesthood. He served as parish priest in Barra from 1837 to 1839, then was demoted to assistant to Fr John Chisholm in South Uist from 1839 to 1850. He had been accused



Step-Dancing in Catholic Gaelic Cape Breton 45

of being a drinker by an earlier priest at Barra, Fr William MacIntosh, a serious temperance man with the urging of new conviction.77 In Bornish, South Uist, Fr Allan MacLean shared a living and home with his superior (Chisholm), a Strathglass man who loved and strongly encouraged old Gaelic customs.78 MacLean served there from 1839 to 1850. Thus, in the Outer Hebrides MacLean saw the cruel treatment and evictions by “kindly” John Gordon,79 the new Protestant-commercialist owner of Catholic South Uist and Barra. He lived through the early crop failures in the late 1830s and then the potato disaster of 1845–47 (it was worse in the Outer Islands than on the mainland80). He knew at firsthand the scale of the emigrations; he knew who had already left for Cape Breton and the prospects and needs overseas. But Allan MacLean also broadened his cultural and linguistic awareness to include what he and Chisholm found in the Outer Hebrides, the Gaelic cultural heartland. The bravest had been leaving for Inverness County, and elsewhere, as long as fifty years before Allan MacLean got there in 1855. Given his appreciation for Gaelic culture in Moidart and in the Catholic Outer Hebridean Islands, it comes as no surprise that he fitted in well and he sang. Matters then boded well for the enjoyers of a handsome dram in the parish of Judique, Inverness County, Cape Breton. The presence of Fr Allan MacLean in Judique did nothing to deter old customs and joys.81 What has to be borne in mind is that many Catholic Gaels from South Uist emigrated to Cape Breton during MacLean’s eleven years in South Uist. One of the later families was from Bornish itself, where Fr Allan MacLean and Fr John Chisholm were living. There is no indication of any break in cultural continuity from old Barra and South Uist to Cape Breton and Nova Scotia. MacLean was loved in Judique. There is a photograph of old Bodach Bhornais in the latter years of the nineteenth century, propped up by two stalwart sons outside the New World home on River Denys Mountain,82 a few miles of hilly track east of Fr MacLean’s church in Judique (the Bornish MacDonalds are still known as the Bornish MacDonalds and the Bornishes). John MacDougall’s description of Sarah / Sally / Mor nic ’Illeathain’s dancing has to be construed as individual step-dancing. Another of MacDougall’s songs in which dancing is mentioned is “Dan-Gheall, Do Chomh-chruinneachadh nan Gàidheal ann an Glascho, sa’ bhliadhna 1858, a’ nochdadh gach Buannachd a tha ’Sruthadh o’n Cùisean-gheall ’s o’n Cluichibh” / “Prize-Song, to the Gathering of the Gaels in Glasgow in the Year 1858, Showing Each Victory Flowing from the Prize-Competitions [?] and from the Games.” The relevant lines are:

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Na dannsaireach fileanta, Sgiobalta, lùthmhor, Gur taitneach air ùrlar, ’s gur boidheach iad: ’S gu’m faicear na h-uaislean A bualadh am bas An àm gluasad an cas air a’ chòmhla dhoibh; A ’freagradh le mire Do phongaibh an inneil An ceileir bu bhinne na’n smeòrach leinn – Ceòl caithreamach pìoba, Gun dith no gun uireasbhuidh83

The elegant dancers, Neat, strong, Delightful on the floor, beautiful: And the gentlemen are seen Clapping their hands When they move their feet on the half-door to them; Replying merrily To the beats of the instrument The sweetest music of the thrush to us – The regular beating music of the pipe, Without defect or want

The big event was held on the park of the Tigh-Oilein / Education Building (college? university?). To begin with, the dancers are on the floor (ùrlar), then they are air a’ chòmhla / on the half-door or door-leaf,84 a personal board for dancing. Such things were commonly used in Ireland for stepdancing, and in Inverness County, Nova Scotia, particular attention was given to specially set-up, temporary dancing floors.85 Setting that first nod in the direction of Gaelic tradition to one side for the moment, by 1858 the British army had standardized notes for its bands, and it was probably about the time that something like standardized sets of b ­ agpipes for the Scottish regiments were being introduced. This was a Glasgow Highland Games; it was a yearly event, and in this song MacDougall wrote of the crowd’s being led in by bagpipers. He also wrote of spòrsgheall / competition sports, including Clach-neart / the stone of strength and iomairt a’ chabair / caber contest.86

Ju di q u e a n d t h e S c o t t is h Catholi c Soci ety o f C a n a da (S CSC) Judique’s St Andrew’s parish was not involved in the Scottish Catholic Society of Canada until 7 December 1927 when a parish meeting was held and the decision was made to form St David’s Council, Judique. About 100 people attended. The first meeting was set for the first Tuesday of 1928, and meetings would be held monthly thereafter.87 Judique may have left off joining the sc sc for almost ten years because Mabou to the



Step-Dancing in Catholic Gaelic Cape Breton 47

north had not joined (and never did), but when Judique did, it was in a rush. A local man, Duncan MacLellan, a second-year law student at Dalhousie University, was a booster, but the main force was Judique’s parish priest, Fr Stanley P. MacDonald. He was parish priest at Judique from 1927 to 1930, and the old hall was built in 1928, perhaps into 1929.88 MacDonald was also editor of the society’s reviving publication, the then-monthly Mosgladh / Awakening, and he was the society’s high chief. He wrote that the society was just emerging from stagnancy.89 Judique caught the bug, and relics remained at least until the hall was torn down on Heritage Day, 19 February 1996 (in a scheme to make the parish profitable and modern, government-grant-attracting). On the first Tuesday of February 1928, 150 people joined St David’s Council (twenty-five were required for council formation). Under Stanley MacDonald’s leadership, council members were selected. The chief was Angus S. Graham, son of ninety-five-year-old Stephen the step-dancer. At that meeting, it was decided to offer Judique parish as the venue for the s c sc national convention of 1928 with a “Mod” to take place the following day. This happened, but as a warm-up, on 8 May 1928, the St David’s Council held its first Gaelic entertainment in the parish hall. At the sc sc ’s national convention in Judique in 1928, the organizational balance was tipped in favour of what became that year the Extension Department at Saint Francis Xavier University in Antigonish. The pattern for these sc sc entertainments was often a mixture of Cape Breton Gaelic and modernized Scottish intrusion. The obvious template for parts of these council events was the Antigonish and other Highland Games, which in 1919 offered step-dancing.90 The terminology used by the sc sc – Mod, Games – had flexible meanings. On 20 April 1928, the Bishop Fraser Council, New Waterford, for example, held an at-home for the Bishop Cameron Council, and the program included piping, violin, Gaelic songs, a violin duet, “step-dancing,” and a “Scottish reel,” which was a Four.91 The same month, there was a “Gaelic Entertainment at Glace Bay” reported in Gaelic. Here the content included bagpiping, fiddling, Gaelic songs, an eight-voice Gaelic choir (Scottish), “Coisir nam Piob” /  Pipe Band (Scottish), three individual “Dannsa Gaidhealach” / Gaelic ­Dancing (by Albert Bass, D. MacIntyre, and Michael MacIntyre), two simple unidentified individual “Dannsa” / Dances and a “Ruidhle Cheathrar” / Reel of Four (by three MacIntyre siblings and Seonaid Campbell).92 In the Judique hall, the first St David’s Council “entertainment” (8 May 1928) was a “full program.” For many, it meant standing-room only. The event began with a Gaelic address by Fr Stanley P. MacDonald. Again, the

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event contained both Scottish and Gaelic elements, but the latter were clearly dominant. There was a Highland Fling performed by the Misses A. MacEachern, E. Gillis, and B. MacDonell.93 The individual pattern could have been the Antigonish or other Maritime Scottish-type Highland Games. Otherwise, there was a Scotch Four for juniors and another for seniors. Perhaps most interesting was an Eight-Hand Reel, although no names are attached to it or to the two Four-Hand Reels danced.94 That they relied on step-dancing setting steps is as certain as the sun’s return tomorrow morning. Any body contact that may or may not have been in the old Eight-Hand Reel(s) was acceptable to the Catholic priest by that time. At the wishes of the Glendale Montrose Council, headed by Gaelic speaker and enthusiast John N. MacLennan (c. 1875–1930), the Judique concert in May was repeated in Glendale in June 1928. Both parishes were thoroughly Gaelic-speaking.95 In Sydney on 15 June, “St Kentigern’s [sixth annual] Competition” was held, and the only remark in Mosgladh that illuminated the popularity of modern Scottishness was that there were so many “entrants, the Highland Fling and Sword Dance competitions will be held in the afternoon.”96 This is a measure of the greater success of modern “Highland dancing” in an urban area of Cape Breton. Its value, however, cannot be assessed. It is not unreasonable to speculate that many Scotch Highland dancers in Sydney were also step-dancers. The experiences in very Gaelic-speaking and -thinking Judique and Glendale suggest that the “Highland” dances were of less interest. And if they were not even slightly alien affectations, then the durability of the older Gaelic form is all the stronger. The Mosgladh of June 1928 advertised the national convention of the s c sc for Judique on Tuesday, 17 July. The “Judique Mod,” a public competition, would follow the next day, 18 July. (This was by no means the first sc sc Mod held in Cape Breton.97 A “Mod” had been held at the Strand Theatre in New Waterford on 10 August 1926, according to the Sydney [Post].98 Judique’s new hall had not yet been completed. There was inter-council fraternizing and a little tartan pomp, visitors from away, council masses, bone-rattling cars on rutted roads.) The events at the Judique Mod were to be bagpipe music, violin music, Highland Fling (senior and junior), Sword Dance (senior and junior), and Gaelic singing. The results appeared in the following month’s paper. The Highland Fling and the Sword Dance prizes for first and second went to Sarah Higgins, Sydney Mines, Patricia Jessome, Florence, and Ruth Coakley, also of Florence. The number of competitors was not given.



Step-Dancing in Catholic Gaelic Cape Breton 49

The piping competition, however, was won by Inverness County Gaels. Gordon MacQuarrie, Victoria Line (now Melford, just north of Glendale in the River Denys watershed), was first; Alexander MacDonald (“the Indian teacher”), Whycocomagh, was second. There were other pipers in Judique, those who met the Jesuit missionary priest Archibald Campbell, but they were not named if indeed they took part. In the amateur piping, Cape Breton Gaels also won. Michael MacIntyre from Caledonia Mines was first, and D. MacDonald from Glencoe was second. First and second in the “violin” were local Gaels, John A. MacDonald, Port Hood, and Gordon MacQuarrie, Victoria Line. Although both MacQuarrie and Alexander MacDonald played step-dance-timed music on the pipes, the Judique Mod so far was a Highland Games without most of the sports elements. But two events had been added to the competition advertised in Fr Stanley MacDonald’s Mosgladh – senior and junior violin. First and second in the senior event were Hector MacMaster, New Waterford, and Mrs Catherine Landry, Little Judique. In the junior event, first and second were Roddie MacDonald, Sugar Camp, and Annie L. MacEachern, Judique. The star performance was in the tug-o-war, which the lighter Judique team won against New Waterford, taking the Walker Shield.99 In my many conversations from 1972 to 1982, only four men, unprompted, remembered Highland Games in Inverness County. Alex Graham recalled (to his oldest daughter) the event in Judique; Willie “the piper” Gillis and Angie MacDonell, both of Inverness, talked to me about an Inverness Games (perhaps more than one). In Inverness (begun as a town around 1902, formerly Sithean), there was a “Highland Games” in August 1929 held in conjunction with the annual convention of the s c sc .100 Finally, John Angus (Jack) Collins of Scotsville spoke in some detail about a Highland Games that he had attended in the Margarees in which his maternal uncle, piper-fiddler Allachan Aonghais Dhuibh / Little Allan [son] of Black Angus, Allan MacFarlane (1878–1938), had piped for the Highland Fling. No one dated any event, and no one talked about the organizing body, the sc sc . I greeted each statement with disguised doubt. Rightly or wrongly, there is an obvious inclination to link Duncan Francis MacDonald’s clear remembrance of dancing the Eight-Hand Reel as a boy in the Rear of Judique to the s cs c. He would have been about fourteen years old. There is, however, no other evidence of the teaching of the Eight-Hand Reel in the parish of Judique. Alex Graham the step-dancer,101 Judique, son of Angus S. (chief of the St David’s Council), had a strong and very reliable memory and, to my

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knowledge, did not speak of the sc s c, although he did remember a Judique Highland Games. He had two photographs of what looks like a parish picnic, with its rustic bough-roofed, elevated stage.102 Fr Malcolm MacDonell (1919–2015), parish priest in Judique from 1971 to 1978 and former president of St Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, talked of being railroaded into competing in a race in the Judique outdoor games. He offered no memory of a St David’s Council of the s cs c or of any Highland Games.103 He was from Upper South-West Mabou (the Rear of Judique).104 Mary Archie (Graham) MacDonald, Judique, a few years younger than Fr Malcolm MacDonell, had and has no memory of St David’s Council, although she, like MacDonell, remembered the running track that Fr Stanley P. MacDonald had made (presumably in 1927 or 1928).105 This lack of memory of the sc sc is ubiquitous in rural Gaelic Cape Breton. And any memory of the fairly intense s cs c-sponsored Highland Games / Mod experience in 1928 has gone, bar the tug-o-war phenomenon in Judique, which lasted into the 1980s. This lacuna was found, for example, in an interview with Mary Josephine (Campbell) MacMillan of Gussieville, Hillsdale Road, Judique around 2011.106 She was born in the 1940s but was the oldest daughter of another of the local family historians in Judique, Gussie Campbell (b. 1914). Gussie Campbell and Alex Graham were often sought out for local information and generously gave of their knowledge.107 The old Cape Breton county seannachaidh / lore-bearer Joe Neil MacNeil (1908–1996), bearer of a deep repertoire of Gaelic stories and Tales, history and lore, never talked about the scsc, although almost certainly he attended events arranged by the society when he was a young person. He always maintained that his knowledge was much less than that of many of the Gaels who went before him.108 One reference to Gaels dancing in the bàrdachd / poetry of emigrant Gaels is John Murdoch MacRae’s (Iain MacMhurchaidh) “Bhiodh fleasgaichean donn air bonnaibh ri ceòl” / There dark-haired lads would dance heel and toe to the music, which occurs in “Dean cadalan sàmhach, a chuilean mo ruin” / “Sleep Softly, My Darling Beloved.”109 “Air bonnaibh” means “on soles,” making “heel and toe” a developed translation. MacRae settled in the Carolinas and died there around 1780. A more unexpected reference to dance occurs in two unattributed lines added to the song “O, ’S alainn an t-aite” / “O, Fair Is the Place” that was made in Judique by an immigrant from South Uist, Michael MacDonald: “’S bòidheach, speisealta na beicean” / Neat and reverent the gestures / “A ni chlann, a ni chlann.” / That the kin make, that the kin will make.110



Step-Dancing in Catholic Gaelic Cape Breton 51

In the note explaining “La Fhéill Mhìcheil” / “St Michael’s Day,” Sister Margaret MacDonell (whose home was in inland Judique parish) reported that she was given the two lines by A.A. Beaton, formerly of St Ninian, on 2 September 1973. She stated that Beaton described beic “as a sign of recognition common in Catholic Scotland in [anti-Catholic] penal times. It was a gesture made with the feet, a quick shuffle, by which a priest was made aware of the identity of his fellow Catholics. The tradition lingered among emigrants in Nova Scotia. Mr Beaton recalled a specific instance in 1903 when one of his neighbours greeted a Highland priest with the ‘beice,’ and the greeting was duly acknowledged.”111 This is a solitary memory, a usage found nowhere else, yet confirmed or repeated in modern Gaelic. Whether or not it was some ancient element of monasteriales indicia / old monastic sign language, or of some Celtic parallel, remains to be discovered. It is not mentioned who the Highland priest was, but had it been in 1907, it almost certainly would have been Archibald Campbell, sj, from Ballachulish in the parish of Lismore and Appin. (Another solitary example of clandestine contact between Catholic priest and people is the priest-as-vagabond-fiddler, using disguise to spread knowledge of where mass was going to be said and heard. This was reported by Odo Blundell as happening in Catholic Glengairn [1606], in the inland, mountainous, east-draining Dee watershed in Aberdeenshire.)112

S q ua r e S e t s in Judi que Alex Graham (b. 1913) also danced Square Sets in Judique in the old hall and said that the Judique Square Set was a Lancers. He would not dance if more than four couples were involved, which was the state of things in 1972 in some places. However, although Square Sets certainly were a strong feature in the new halls, the reason that many of the halls were constructed was in keeping with the broader vision of the revived rural community of the Scottish Catholic Society of Canada (from 1919).

G r e at e r M abou This area includes Mabou, Mabou Harbour, Mabou Coal Mines, NorthEast Mabou, MacKinnon’s Brook, Poplar Grove, Glenora Falls, Melrose Hill, Brook Village, Glencoe, Glencoe Mills, Upper Glencoe, and sometimes Port Hood. Note that Port Hood established the St Peter’s Council of the sc sc in 1921 and that Glencoe formed the Bishop Alexander MacDonald Council of the sc sc on 20 July 1930.113

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Port Hood’s coal seam attracted capitalists and workers from far and near at the turn of the century when the railway line was laid down to serve the mine. A community hall was built in 1901, before the Gluasad Gàidhealach / Gaelic Movement,114 and there was a hotel. Although amid a Gaelic world, the growing settlement signified its importance in English. Local newspapers in English make almost no reference to Scotchness. Peggy “the miller” (MacDonald) MacIsaac, a step-dancer who danced the Four- and the Eight-Hand Reels before leaving for Detroit in 1927 at nineteen, was living in a trailer in Judique when I spoke to her in April or May 1982.115 She was born in Catholic Glencoe Mills in forest southcentral Inverness County in 1908. Peggy was one of the two most important twentieth-century links given here to Scotch step-dancing tradition dating back to the second half of the eighteenth century in Catholic MacDonald country in Lochaber, Canna, and Eigg. Glencoe Mills had a church from the 1870s and was a mission served from 1844 by the first resident parish priest of Mabou, Alasdair Mór / Big [great] Alexander MacDonald (b. 1801 in Lochaber; Mabou parish priest 1844–65).116 It was and is a relatively remote settlement lying to the northeast of Glencoe, which is on very poor mountain soil. From 1865 to 1894, Glencoe Mills continued to be a mission, served by Fr Kenneth MacDonald, Mabou, the abstinence-promoter and by-times fiddle confiscator. The next parish priest was the Rev. Dr John F. MacMaster, a son of “Lochaber”117 (b. c. 1867, Antigonish; served 1894–1937; died 1942; organizer of the famous Mabou Scotch Picnic of 1897). Some detail of the Catholic Church’s influence in greater Mabou from 1800 affords a background for assessing the strength and vitality of traditional music and dance there during the first fifty years of Scotch settlement, from about 1800 to 1850.118 In fact, there was little to interrupt Scotch music and dance at all. Generally, the population density in this landlord-less forest country, the difficulty of travel in winter and spring, and the demands of a priest’s work had a bearing on social and cultural affairs. In greater Mabou, however, the bonds of kinship between priests and people were strong – that is, until Fr Kenneth MacDonald, whose irascible anti-alcohol crusade emphasizes the continuance of music and step-dancing. There was no church, glebe-house, or resident priest in Mabou until 1844. An early priest, Fr Simon Lawlor at Broad Cove Chapel to the north, was Irish and did not speak or understand Scotch Gaelic; he died in 1839 in Guysborough in mainland Nova Scotia. Two other parish priests were Gaels, but they too were very overworked irregulars to greater Mabou.



Step-Dancing in Catholic Gaelic Cape Breton 53

The step-dancing in greater Mabou, however, has very much to do with Keppoch country in Lochaber and Wester Laggan.119 The MacDonalds, or MacDonells, were resolutely Jacobite in 1715 and 1745, taking Campbells and Beatons with them.120 They held much of the land (north of Spean) by threat of force, in their minds honourably, according to John MacDonald’s “A Keppoch Song.” They were vulnerable as soon as British law reached the Spean, the Ruaidh / [River] Roy, and the Catholic Wester Laggan in Badenoch / Keppoch.121 There had been rievers among them who thieved beasts in Lowland eastern Scotland.122 They were not accommodated in any way by the victorious British government after Culloden (where Keppoch was shot), although the estate was not forfeited, and they were despised and feared by the established Church of Scotland.123 By comparison, the son of the long-sought (by James Wolfe) Protestant Jacobite MacPherson of Cluny was restored in his Cluny estate in 1784. An unusual bardic mention of dancing in Gaelic Scotland crops up in Donald C. MacPherson’s An Duanaire (1868). It involves a song by John MacIntosh, a Brae Lochaber man who died in Glasgow in 1852, “An Tàillear mac Gill-Eathain” / “The Tailor MacLean,” which contains the following lines: “’S grinn an dansa air thu air clàiridh” / Neat the dancer you are on the boards / “’S bìnn leam starraraich do dha chois”124 /  Melodious to me the pattering of your two feet (Caithream is a more common way in song than starraraich or buille to express beating of the feet in Scotch Gaelic verse). The song is undated but probably was made before 1850. Most Keppoch people were gone by then, many to p e i and Cape Breton.125 No amount of fighting for Simon Fraser’s 78th (1756–57) by a young Raonul mac Alasdair / Ranald son of Alexander [MacDonald] of Keppoch in taking Louisbourg and Quebec ameliorated the Keppoch people’s condition (an argument for a religious split in the 78th is advanced in the case of the chaplain of Laggan, chapter 3). The Hanoverian government, through its spies, was aware of the planned Jacobite rising set for 1759. Then the Hanoverian victory over the French at Quebec in September 1759, followed by the naval victory at Quiberon Bay / Bataille des Cardinaux off the Loire in November 1759, scotched the last attempt at a rising to support the French. The taking of largely Catholic Quebec cancelled any hopes for a multi-religion presence in the countries of the officers of the 78th Highlanders. Soon, dismay at the dwindling significance of the old Catholic Gaelic Keppoch, north of the Spean, fast-rising rents, and evictions / decreets of removing rid Keppoch of most of its old stock by 1845. Many came

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to greater Mabou, directly and indirectly, MacDonalds / MacDonells (Bohuntin, Baron, Carpenter, Tulloch), Campbells (Pipers, Bleeders, Brewers), Rankins, MacInnises, a MacKillop family (Bohenie), and Beatons notable among them.126 Some came to Cape Breton via p e i . The difficulty for an outsider is in reconstructing a Gaelic society from the inevitably scattered record, like placing jigsaw pieces, of what once was a tight-knit kindred-world.127 There was very little if any Irish presence in greater Mabou, and had there been, it could not have withstood Scotch acculturation (as it hadn’t near Antigonish). Two important advantages in working in Glencoe Mills genealogies are that many people lived into old age, and, living in the forest rear concessions, some of them were relatively recent immigrants to Nova Scotia.128 Their places of ­origin in Scotland also suggest some homogeneity of Reel figures and step-dancing. The Rev. Alexander Mór MacDonald was a Keppoch man of Bohuntin and Crannachan stock. He was chosen vicar-general (episcopal deputy, 1851–65) in Antigonish diocese by Bishop Colin F. MacKinnon (ep. 1851– 77).129 He had served both Judique and Mabou from 1845 to 1846, briefly in 1847, and again for six months in 1855 (when Allan MacLean, Moidart, began at Judique). MacDonald was the first resident pastor at Mabou (16 January 1844); he had relatives living in the parish, including a cousin at one remove born in Glenfinnan in 1794,130 and he built a / the Mabou church and glebe-house.131 The main MacDonald family through which one traces the continuity of step-dancing from Keppoch country to greater Mabou, and (Catholic) West Lake Ainslie in the early nineteenth century, is the MacDonalds of Tulloch in Glen Spean. There surely were others, but because of their social prominence, a record of the MacDonalds is available – they were British army officer class in the late eighteenth century. Peggy “the miller” (MacDonald) MacIsaac belonged to the Tullochs and the Bohuntin MacDonalds. She was a daughter of Alexander “the white miller” MacDonald (1859–1929), Glencoe Mills, a lover and encourager of Gaelic tradition; his was the céilidh house in the little community. The “white miller” was Alasdair mac Ghilleasbuig ’ic Dhòmhnuil an t-saoir (Dòmhnullach) / Alexander son of Archibald [1817–1909], son of immigrant Donald the Carpenter MacDonald (b. 1770, of the Bohuntin family, d. 1825).132 Donald the Carpenter MacDonald married Lochaberborn Margaret MacDonald (1784–1870), daughter of Captain Angus MacDonald of Tulloch of the 84th Royal Highland Emigrants (1759– c. 1828). They settled at remote but coastal Mabou Coal Mines in or



Step-Dancing in Catholic Gaelic Cape Breton 55

before 1817, as did another daughter of Captain Angus “Tulloch,” who is discussed later in this chapter. Archibald MacDonald expanded from his first grist mill at Mabou Coal Mines to build another at Glencoe Mills.133 He also made a prominent marriage – to Jessie MacDonald, a daughter of architect-contractor Angus “Cross” MacDonald from Glenturret (by Crieff, Perthshire).134 Alexander “the white miller” had his father’s drive and gumption. In Alexander’s daughter Peggy MacDonald’s early years and until she left for Detroit, there was no hall in Glencoe Mills.135 Nor was there any teaching of step-dancing (she and her sister learned from her older brothers at home). One of her lasting childhood memories was of watching the older people in Glencoe Mills dancing the Eight-Hand Reel when she was too young to take part. Her father, the “white miller,” brought in the first organ in 1917 to accompany the fiddle for céilidhs at his home when she was six.136 Peggy remembered both Four-Hand and Eight-Hand Reels danced in her father’s house in Glencoe Mills between 1911 and 1927. By the latter date, Square Sets were beginning to be danced, but the older generations preferred to dance Reels, particularly the Scotch Four, into the 1920s. When Peggy “the miller” left for Detroit in October 1927, her father gave a going-away party – the older people danced the Eight while the young people danced a six-figure Saratoga Lancers.137 Peggy gave the names of the dancers of the Eight as Donald Hughie MacDonald and his wife Isobel; Angus “Cannach” MacDonald and his wife; Alex “the white miller” MacDonald and his wife Jessie MacLeod (daughter of Duncan138); and Angus J. Campbell of nearby Dunakin and his wife Mary Anne Campbell. Donald Hughie MacDonald was the son of an immigrant, Hugh, born at and from Ruaidh / [River] Roy in Keppoch, Lochaber. Hugh came out with his parents and siblings around 1822 and settled at Glencoe (Mills), Inverness County;139 Hugh’s son Donald’s wife was Isobel Campbell from Glencoe (Mills). Angus J. Campbell from Dunakin was a grandson of Keppoch Lochaber immigrant Aonghas Pìobair / Angus “Piper” Campbell (styled on his father); Dunakin is given as “Glencoe” in MP .140 His wife, Mary Anne Campbell, was the daughter of Dougald Campbell (Upper Glencoe, d. 1916), son of Donald, who left Lochaber in 1838 or 1843.141 His mother was Mary Anne MacDonald, who died in 1946 aged eighty-five (born c. 1861) and who was a granddaughter of John MacDonald from Glencoe, Argyllshire, then via Kinloch Laggan, who settled first at Glencoe, Cape Breton.142

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Angus “Cannach” MacDonald (b. c. 1865) was a son of John “Cannach” MacDonald from Catholic Canna (b. c. 1840). John “Cannach”’s father, John “Cannach” MacDonald (b. c. 1816), died on the crossing to Nova Scotia (c. 1843). The drowned man’s wife, Margaret MacArthur (b. c. 1820), must have handled the family emigration and settled with the help of neighbours and relatives. This emigration may have included several families from Canna and Lochaber, where step-dancing was common in both Catholic communities. The immigrant “Cannach” family “eventually” settled at Glencoe (Mills), no date known (1840s?).143 According to Rev. Alexander D. MacDonald, author of Mabou Pioneers, John “Cannach” MacDonald (apparently John junior, b. c. 1840) first married Mary MacDonald (daughter of Aonghas Ghilleaspuig / Angus Archie from Ruaidh, Keppoch, Lochaber) in 1822.144 Their son Angus “Cannach” / from Canna was the district’s informant for Mabou Pioneers, so the difference between the years of birth of his parents (John, b. 1840, and Mary, b. 1822) and the marriage date given (1822) may be the result of misunderstanding or transcription error.145 Either Mary MacDonald was a granddaughter, not a daughter, of the immigrant Aonghas ’Illeasbuig, or there was another John “Cannach” MacDonald. Canna, long associated with Christian Iona, was a Catholic island belonging until 1827 to Clanranald (who had milked the island and its people for a huge income from kelp). It suffered a post-famine clearance in 1851, which was an anti-Catholic clearing. Angus “Cannach” MacDonald of Canna stock married Catherine / Katie MacIsaac of (majority Catholic) Eigg stock in 1892, and they it was who danced in the Eight-Hand Reel at Peggy MacDonald’s going-away party at the “white miller’s” in Glencoe Mills in 1927. Angus lived into the 1940s, and Katie died in 1946 aged seventy-seven (b. c. 1869).146 Katie MacIsaac was a daughter of Hugh MacIsaac (c. 1869–1947), son of Hugh MacIsaac, who emigrated from Eigg in 1843.147 Even allowing for a missing generation on one side, the going-away Reel in 1927 was danced by folk with near roots in Canna, Eigg, and Keppoch country, Lochaber. The emigration years covered run from 1822 to 1843. The dancers were all Catholics, and most had a grandparent born in Gaelic Scotland. The fiddler for the going-away Eight was Duncan Peter Campbell (28  August 1881–14 October 1961), son of Patrick / Peter Campbell (c. 1838–1906) and grandson of the immigrant Angus “Piper” Campbell148 from Keppoch, Lochaber. The setting steps were Scotch step-dance steps. The “white miller”’s home was the social and musical centre. To confirm the enduring importance of the Four in Glencoe and Glencoe Mills, I also



Step-Dancing in Catholic Gaelic Cape Breton 57

spoke with Margaret Duncan Peter (MacEachern) Campbell (b. 1888), Glencoe Mills, who immediately praised Peggy MacDonald as a fine Scotch Four dancer.149 Scotch cultural richnesses could be found in industrial Detroit. Peggy “the miller” danced many Scotch Fours there to the playing of Little Jack MacDonald (b. 1887 at Troy, raised in Judique, lived long in Ontario, and sometimes claimed by Glengarry County people as a native there). Johnny Archie MacDonald (1893–1974), the fiddler from Little Judique Ponds, played there,150 as did Ambrose Beaton from Black River, Inverness County,151 who was remembered playing the chanter for the Four. Mabou never had an sc sc council in Fr John F. MacMaster’s time there, and until 1930 there was no Glencoe Mills council either. Then, given the association of Donald Hughie MacDonald to Ruaidh, Lochaber, and of Angus J. Campbell to the same “country” and their dancing of Fours and Eights at Glencoe Mills before 1927 (almost certainly in the years of the First World War), it is clear that these dances had not been practised to satisfy any clerical culture–revivalist’s wishes in and from July 1919 or for St David’s Council in Judique in 1928. They were natural Gaelic step-dance Reels that had been brought from Lochaber. The interview with Peggy “the miller” (MacDonald) MacIsaac indicates that it is also quite possible that Duncan Francis MacDonald of Little Judique (b. 1913) was drafted, as a boyish eighth dancer, in an Eight-Hand Reel simply for customary fun.

Mary “T u l l o c h ” ( M ac D o n a ld) Beaton (1795–1880) an d M à i r i A l as da ir R ao n ui l / Mary Alasdai r R a n a l d  /  M a ry ( B e aton) MacDonald Before anything was written and published, it was widely known by  Catholic Gaels in northeastern Nova Scotia that Mary “Tulloch” (MacDonald) Beaton had run some sort of “dancing school” at Mabou Coal Mines in one of the most sequestered and old Scotch Catholic communities of Mabou parish.152 The importance of women to the transmission of Scotch step-dancing in the home is aptly emphasized here. The well-remembered fiddler and step-dancer Màiri Alasdair Raonail /  Mary Alasdair Ranald Beaton (known also as Mary MacDonald, Mary Hughie, and Little Mary), raised in nearby MacKinnon’s Brook, was the modern source. She learned the fiddle from Mary “Tulloch”’s son, Old Alex Beaton (b. 1837).153 She also learned step-dancing from Old Alex,

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but through her mother, Peggy (MacIsaac) Beaton.154 As an old man, an excellent fiddler and step-dancer, Old Alex used to visit Alexander R[anald] Beaton’s home twice a week to teach Mary and her older ­sister the fiddle. After the fiddle lesson, Old Alex would teach Mary’s mother step-dance steps. Mary MacMacDonald and her sister learned by watching.155 In my first conversation with Mary MacDonald, in the Mira area south of Sydney in the mid-1970s, she did not know if Mary “Tulloch” had a building for her dance classes or if lessons were given at home and outdoors in the summer months.156 Mary “Tulloch” married John Beaton, born in 1794 in Lochaber (and a neighbour); he became the first Roman Catholic justice of the peace in Cape Breton. There was no mention of any music or dancing other than that which fitted into the Tulloch, Brae Lochaber, and Mabou Coal Mines Scotch tradition. The Beatons, from Brae Lochaber, some via Prince Edward Island, settled in Mabou Coal Mines in 1809 during the European Napoleonic War. This part of what is now Inverness County was almost exclusively Scotch. Another step-dancer exemplar from whom Mary Hughie MacDonald picked up steps was her father’s first cousin Curly Sandy Beaton, Alasdair mac Iain, ’ic Alasdair Bhàin, ’ic Alasdair an Tàillear / Alasdair son of John, son of Fair Alasdair, son of Alasdair the Tailor. She talked of him animatedly and with humorous and unsentimental nostalgia. He danced the old Scotch Fours, and she talked about seeing him dance at a home in Glenville, presumably his married daughter’s home.157 Mary MacDonald did not talk of any of the formal “hornpipe” component, such as that which came with the step-dancing taught by the North Morar Alasdair Gillis family in South-West Margaree down to Big John Gillis.158 At the céilidh of St Kentigern’s Council of the scsc on Wednesday, 2 November 1928, at nearby New Waterford’s Bishop Fraser Council premises, and after the opening pipers (MacDonald and MacLeod), “Mrs Hugh MacDonald, better known in her native Mabou as ‘Nighean Raonuill ’ic Aladair [sic] Bhain’[ / {Màiri} nighean Raonuill ’ic Alasdair bhàin /  daughter of Ranald son of Fair Alasdair], displayed wonderful talent in her violin selections, ‘Colum Brogach,’ ‘Tulloch gorm,’ ‘Cameronian’s Rant,’ ‘Lord MacDonald,’ and other strathspeys, and reels were played with a lilt which set the listeners’ toes a-tingling.” 159 Half a century later, in the mid-1970s, Mary MacDonald showed up at one of the early Glendale outdoor fiddle festivals organized by Fr John Angus Rankin, Glendale. She played the fiddle, and she danced. Later,



Step-Dancing in Catholic Gaelic Cape Breton 59

she  was at a céilidh at Alex Francis and Jimmie MacKay’s farmhouse in Kingsville. Nothing unusual was reported about her music, except that it had a very strong, unforlorn, gripping Highlandness. Her step-dancing was only remarked on for its slightly novel but nonetheless unusually rich Highlandness. On 3 August 2011, Douglas MacPhee, New Waterford,160 told me about certain unusual features of Mary Hughie’s step-dancing. He demonstrated a slapping of the heels of feet drawn up alternately behind her – arm and hand use is uncommon in Scotch step-dancing to this day, although there tends to be no stiffness.161 Nobody mentioned to me that the South-West Margaree Gillis family from North Morar (1826) used arm movement. Besides the relative isolation of, south to north, Mabou Coal Mines (Coal Mines Point), MacDonald Glen (Finlay Point), MacKinnon’s Brook (Cape Mabou), and Sight Point, there are several intra-community marriages that persisted with the language. These bonds affirmed the cultural tastes and linked them with typical Scotch conservatism. Ties were ­sustained with east Prince Edward Island by some of the Coal Mines Gaels. The last Lochaber-born immigrant to Mabou Coal Mines was Alasdair “breac” MacDhòmhnuill / Speckled [pock-marked] Alexander MacDonald, who died in late 1918 at ninety-one (b. c. 1827). The Tulloch MacDonalds were descended from the Bohuntin Mac­ Donalds (of Keppoch), all firm Catholics. The farm on the north of the Spean lies east of Mùrlagan / Murlaggan,162 which in turn lies east of Achluachrach (Beaton), all falling under the contested superiority of the Presbyterian MacIntosh chief.163 The Tulloch MacDonalds had a part in the battle at Maol Ruadh / Mulroy between Keppoch and MacIntosh in 1688. They, and others, suffered for it immediately (homes burned and crops destroyed by professional soldiers and dragoons, although few, if any, fatalities) and then gradually through displacement after Culloden in 1746. Even though the Keppoch men and all other MacDonalds chose not to fight on 16 April 1746 (although Keppoch himself invited death and was shot down leading no one), vengeance was nursed along implacably. It was supported by the policy of the Presbyterian establishment, controllers of the Forfeited Estates and the anti-Catholic factors chosen – Keppoch was not formally forfeited, but the people were systematically abused. Two among the many fatalities at Maol Ruadh / Mulroy were Lachlan Mackintosh of Aberarder and his two brothers and MacPherson in Benchar.164 Those four deaths in battle were significant in the deCatholicizing of Wester Laggan parish in 1770.

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The reason for much of greater Mabou’s strong cultural significance in music and step-dancing is the result of the downfall of Catholic Keppoch power after the final success of Hanoverian MacIntosh (a regiment whose clan supported and fought for the Stuarts in 1745–46 under “colonel” Anne [Farquharson] Grant). Coll of the cows (Keppoch) had resisted MacIntosh in 1667 and 1688, and after Culloden, at long last, MacIntosh exercised his legal right to Glen Roy and Glen Spean, something that Keppochs had denied him for generations.165 By 1845, almost nothing was left of Scotch culture in Brae Lochaber, certainly not in strength enough to persist through the itinerant dance teachers in late Victorian times.166 Shepherds and sheep took over the economy, with few exceptions.167 The same is true for other Catholic countries in Gaelic Scotland – Knoydart, the Morars, Strathglass. The anti-Catholic element is seldom included in the winners’ record. Returning to Tulloch, Captain Angus MacDonald (1759–