FAMOUS SCOTS (6); DOUGLAS HAIG

   [This is 6^th in a series describing Scots who had an impact outside their native land]

It is 1 July 1916, exactly 100 years ago tomorrow. A whistle blows and 100,000 British infantrymen go “over the top” to attack the German trenches near the Somme, supposedly destroyed by a prolonged artillery barrage in the preceding days. But the barrage has largely failed; only in the Southern sector of the German line has the damage been extensive. The British move towards well dug-in German regiments and they are mowed down by deadly machine-guns and enemy shellfire. It is “The blackest day in the history of the British Army” with 19,000 dead and 37,000 seriously wounded. In command of the British offensive is Scottish-born General Douglas Haig, both a villain and a hero of that blood-soaked war, which ultimately he did much to win.

Haig

 

"Over the top" at The Somme

                            

Douglas Haig (1861 – 1928) was born in iconic Charlotte Square, Edinburgh, the son of a wealthy distiller, owner of the famous Scotch whisky brand “Haig”. Educated at Clifton College, Bristol, Douglas studied at Brasenose College, Oxford, before going to the Royal Military College, Sandhurst. Douglas was a keen and adept horseman, playing polo with enthusiasm all his early life and he naturally became an elite cavalry officer. He spent some years in India, served under Kitchener in the Sudan Omdurman Campaign and in the Boer War under Roberts. Self-confident to a fault, Haig often took a dim view of the military abilities of his superior officers.

The outbreak of war in 1914 saw Haig commanding one-half of the British Expeditionary Force under fellow cavalry officer Sir John French. The British army’s first engagement with the Germans was at Mons in Belgium. The Germans were checked, but a retreat was necessary to Ypres when the French on their right flank fell back to the Marne to defend Paris. Ypres was held against German attack, much credit going to Haig. A summer 1915 offensive at Loos failed, insufficient artillery, a shortage of shells and slow deployment of reserves all contributing. Sir John French paid the price being replaced as Commander in Chief by Haig in December 1915, a position he retained for the rest of the War.

Haig was viewed as a highly efficient general though also as a rather aloof disciplinarian. He was a poor public speaker who dominated, rather than debated, when conferring with his commanders. In common with all British strategists he only reluctantly came round to the doctrine of “attrition”, that the enemy would be conquered by weariness and an inability to replace casualties. Haig had always believed in the cavalryman’s doctrine of “movement” that a frontal attack would lead to a breakthrough. Haig had a modern mind: initially slow to value the creeping artillery barrage, he soon expanded the gunner’s key role: he saw the potential of air power and used it by 1917: he encouraged the use of tanks from Cambrai onwards; strategically he appreciated that the War could only be won on the Western Front and opposed diversion of resources to the Dardanelles, Mesopotamia or Salonika.

The catastrophe of The Somme, fought over 4 months from 1^st July 1916, with 420,000 British casualties, was intended to be a joint Anglo-French operation but the French were so pressed at horrendous Verdun that their Somme contribution was minor. The first raw armies of volunteers and conscripts were deployed – Kitchener’s New Armies. With what emotion we now look back upon the sacrifices of, for example, the 36th Ulster Division, the Royal Regiment of Scotland, the “Pal’s Battalions” from so many modest English towns – like the Accrington Pals, 720 attacked on the first day with 303 dead and 281 badly wounded! With what sorrow and pride we contemplate the war memorials in every British town with their long lists of names, far too many names on those of tiny Scottish villages and the crowded British war cemeteries of Northern France and Belgium!

An Unknown Scottish Soldier's gravestone

                                            

Haig in 1917

Haig kept his position, but both the Army and Westminster were hotbeds of intrigue; Asquith was forced out of the Premiership and energetic David Lloyd George took the political helm in December 1916. Military success remained elusive. In summer 1917, the 3^rd battle of Ypres began, better known to Britain as Passchendaele, another failure, ruined by heavy rain and quagmire-like ground.

Misery and Mud at Passchendaele 1917

Germany was nearing exhaustion but with the collapse of Imperial Russia she was able to reinforce the Western Front and in early 1918 made her final thrust. Haig’s armies, strengthened by Canadian and Australasian divisions and supplemented by the Americans, deflected the blow and redeployed to Amiens.  There the Germans were sharply defeated and the 100 days Offensive began. Haig’s well-trained soldiers at last moved forward. Many enemy troops surrendered rather than fight. In a brilliant campaign coordinated by Generalissimo Foch, the Anglo-French armies drove the Germans back to their own frontiers. The Kaiser abdicated, a German republic was proclaimed and the Armistice was signed on 11 November 1918. A long nightmare had ended.

British soldiers advance rapidly from Amiens

In his remaining 10 years, Haig was honoured by a grateful nation. He was made an Earl and Parliament voted him a grant of £100,000, then a vast sum. He became a university Chancellor at St Andrews and received many honours. He devoted the rest of his life to the Haig Fund helping all ex-servicemen. His funeral in 1928 was almost a state occasion and he was buried at Dryburgh Abbey, in the Scottish Borders with a simple soldier’s gravestone.

Later generations were less deferential. The terrible casualties of the war came to be blamed on the “Brass-hats” of whom Haig was a prime specimen. Names like “Butcher” Haig were callously bandied about, with Haig allegedly regarding private soldiers as “cannon-fodder”. Much of this was entirely unjust – Oh, What a Lovely War! may be good music-hall, but it is not good history. Similarly the notion of “Lions led by Donkeys”, propagated by some historians and satirised by the likes of Blackadder, ignores the fact that British generals naturally struggled to come to terms with the new complexities and potential of industrialised war and tried to minimise casualties in a cruelly attritional conflict.

The men who died are an immortal memory. Douglas Haig made many errors but deserves honouring for persistence, skill, and determination in appalling circumstances.

SMD

30.06.2016

Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2016

SCOTTISH DIVINES

It may astonish my friends who know me for my sometimes abrasive atheism, but a fact is a fact. In my final school year in Edinburgh, aged 17, I carried away the prestigious Rogerson Prize for Divinity, for which an essay on a religious subject was required. My essay was on Presbyterianism, the main form of church government in Scotland, and my effort was the usual mishmash of prejudice, expatiating on the merits of the Scottish way with many an unecumenical dig at Anglicans and Catholics. I did not move on to take holy orders – The Church of Scotland rather lacks the requisite pomp and while I hardly qualified as an embryo Cardinal, I would have enjoyed lolling on the red cushioned benches of the House of Lords as a mitred Anglican Bishop with lawn sleeves – but, alas, it was not to be. Yet I retain an interest in ghostly matters and my native Scotland has produced over the centuries a talented bunch of divines, some of whom I here recall.

My first divine is certainly obscure: William Kethe (died 1594) was a Scots Protestant clergyman, of unknown provenance, who lived for many years in exile in Germany and Geneva. His fame rests on his translation of the Psalms into English; he is credited with the words of the famed Old Hundredth (Psalm 100), to the tune by Louis Bourgeois, later updated by Ralph Vaughan Williams:

All people that on earth do dwell,

Sing to the Lord with cheerful voice.

Him serve with mirth, His praise forth tell;

Come ye before Him and rejoice.

The long-enduring Scottish Metrical Psalter of 1650

Calvin’s Geneva church introduced the idea of congregational hymn-singing, hitherto the preserve of chanting clergymen. Kethe also translated Psalm 104 but his version was adapted and popularised in the 1830s by another Scotsman Sir Robert Grant, (1779-1838) a prolific hymn-writer and member of the evangelical Clapham Sect who became Governor of Bombay. His hymn is thought by many to be the very finest;

O worship the King all-glorious above,
O gratefully sing his power and his love:
our shield and defender, the Ancient of Days,
pavilioned in splendour and girded with praise.

O tell of his might and sing of his grace,
whose robe is the light, whose canopy space.
His chariots of wrath the deep thunderclouds form,
and dark is his path on the wings of the storm.

A more intellectually challenging Scottish Divine was Thomas Reid (1710- 1796). He was born in Strachan (pronounced “Strawn”), near Banchory, Deeside and, (like me!) attended Aberdeen Grammar School. He became a Church of Scotland minister and taught philosophy at Aberdeen University. He succeeded Adam Smith as Professor of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow in 1764. His Inquiry into the Human Mind and the Principles of Common Sense was a major contribution to the remarkable 18^th century Scottish Enlightenment and he was the founder of The Scottish School of Common Sense. This philosophic school remained influential, especially in the United States, throughout the 19^th Century.  

Thomas Reid, looking pinched

Reid was impatient with the paradoxes of Locke, Berkeley and Hume; he did not accept Locke’s notion of “ideas”, no more than Berkeley’s idealism and rejection of the familiar world and Hume would dispute his distinction between sensation and perception. Reid was technically “an epistemological externalist” accepting the reality of the world as generally perceived. He was later attacked by Kant and most European philosophers turned their backs on him though Schopenhauer praised him and he enjoyed a revival in the writings of G E Moore. He saw no contradiction between debating the finer points of perception and a craggy belief in the Christian God.

A decidedly odd religious enthusiast was Alexander Cruden (1699-1770). Born into a well-to-do merchant family in Aberdeen, he was yet another alumnus of Aberdeen Grammar School and graduate of Marischal College, Aberdeen. Cruden published his famed Concordance in 1737. The Concordance cross-references every word in the Bible (there are 777,746 words in the King James Version). The amazing fact is that Cruden completed this task in less than 2 years, working entirely alone without patron or financial support. To produce such a work has been described as scaling “a Himalaya of tedium” and in medieval times would have employed some 50 monks but Cruden was an obsessive type and applied himself entirely to this task. His work has never been out-of-print and still graces many a clerical library.

Obsessive Alexander Cruden

Sadly Cruden was unbalanced and was confined to asylums on four occasions. He paid wholly unsolicited addresses to several unmarried ladies or widows, in a manner we would now call “stalking”. His Sabbatarian beliefs were fanatical and he carried a sponge about him to erase graffiti he found offensive. He was litigious and wanted to stand for Parliament – a sure sign of madness! Although often a figure of fun, he was honoured by his old university and endowed a modest bursary there, which happily is still awarded.

The Lord’s my Shepherd, I’ll not want;
  He makes me down to lie
In pastures green; He leadeth me
  The quiet waters by.

I end with everyone’s favourite Psalm, the 23^rd. It is usually sung to the tune “Crimond” and it is attributed to Jesse Seymour Irvine (1836-83) whose father was a Church of Scotland minister flitting between the parishes of Peterhead, Dunottar and Crimond-the-Town, all in my native North-East of Scotland. How the memories flood back at this great psalm!

SMD

28.12.15

Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2015

MUNGO PARK and LACHLAN MACQUARIE: Famous Scots (4)

The Scots are an intrepid people and this piece celebrates two empire pioneers, one in darkest 18^th – 19^th century Africa, the other leaving his considerable mark on more temperate Australia.

Mungo Park

Mungo Park (1776-1806) was the son of a relatively prosperous tenant farmer in Selkirkshire who attended Selkirk School and was then apprenticed to the town surgeon aged 14. He enrolled at Edinburgh University from 1788-91 to study medicine and botany and it was his botanical enthusiasm which attracted the attention of the eminent scientist Sir Joseph Banks, famous for joining Captain James Cook’s first extensive Pacific voyage. Mungo was despatched to Sumatra in 1794, discovering 8 new species of fish.

On his safe return, he applied to the Africa Society and was asked to plot the course of the Niger River. In 1795 he led a small party to the Gambia and crossed Senegal, where he was imprisoned by a Moorish chieftain for 4 months. He escaped and struck the Niger at Segou following the river 80 miles downstream, the first European to do so. He turned back and covered a further 300 miles, after many vicissitudes, finally emerging in 1797 and returning to Scotland. He was assumed to have perished and was lavishly and publicly feted for his discoveries.

Mungo Park in Africa

Mungo then practised as a doctor in Peebles and became a friend of the celebrated poet and novelist Sir Walter Scott. Finding the Borders life monotonous, he mounted another expedition to the Niger in 1804. Mungo speculated (wrongly) that the Niger and Congo Rivers were connected; his expedition was 20-strong but it was soon decimated by the fevers to which the Europeans were so susceptible. He constructed two sizeable wooden boats and covered some 1,000 miles of the Niger and continually had to drive off attacks by hostile native tribes. His group was well armed with muskets and usually prevailed but his party was down to 4 white men and 3 slaves. Park then visited the prominent city of Timbuktu in modern Mali.

A local King in 1806 was offended at the quality of trinkets sent to him and unleashed his warriors. The river narrowed for the Rapids at Bussa in modern Nigeria and unluckily Park’s boat got stuck on some rocks and his party was assailed by spears, bows and arrows. He and others had to jump into the river and all were drowned. News of this catastrophe took long to reach Scotland. Park’s exploits were presented in heroic mode and he is commemorated in several places, not least with a large statue in his home town of Selkirk. Every generation has its heroes and Park’s bravery caught the public imagination.

Mungo Park Memorial, Selkirk

The merits of Lachlan Macquarie (1762-1824) were of a more conventional kind. Born into a poor but respected tenant farming family on Ulva, just off the larger Isle of Mull in the Inner Hebrides, Lachlan joined the Regiment of Foot in 1776 and immediately saw service in the American War of Independence. Returning to Britain as a lieutenant in 1784 he soldiered for years in India, serving under Sir Arthur Wellesley, later the famed Duke of Wellington at Seringapatam in 1799, the nemesis of Tipoo Sahib. Promoted and enriched, Lachlan joined General Abercromby in Egypt in 1801, was present at the retaking of Alexandria and saw the expulsion of Napoleon’s French army from Egypt. Returning to staff duties in England he took as his second wife his cousin Elizabeth Campbell in 1807. After 6 miscarriages, she was to give birth to a much cherished son.

Major-General Lachlan Macquarie

Lachlan was selected to be Deputy Governor of the mainly penal settlement of New South Wales. The prospective new Governor dropped out and Lachlan was confirmed in 1809 as Governor by Lord Castlereagh, the Foreign Secretary. He arrived with a detachment of troops in December 1809 and took the oath of office in 1810.

The colony of New South Wales was in some turmoil after the deposition of the previous Governor William Bligh (of Mutiny on the Bounty fame). The local militia did not obey the civil power but Macquarie soon suppressed disorder. There was bitter tension between the free settlers and the ex-convict settlers, who were growing in numbers. Macquarie took a notably liberal line, encouraging the ex-convicts to stay and decreeing that they should be able to resume their previous occupation and status. Thus a time-served baker, lawyer or innkeeper would return to those careers. Macquarie was the last Governor with effectively autocratic powers, but there were disputes with other vested interests and Macquarie’s 12-year governorship was controversial, though history has hailed him as a dynamic innovator and reformist.

He tried to encourage agriculture, overhauled the courts and the justice system, introduced new currency and particularly coinage and sponsored the foundation of the Bank of New South Wales. The home government saw NSW as essentially a dumping ground for convicts, to be run on the cheap. Lachlan was more ambitious for this lovely country; he wished to make Sydney a Georgian city and he laid out many streets which still survive – his Hospital is now NSW’s Parliament House. He also tidied up chaotic Hobart in Tasmania. In 1817 he formally adopted the name of “Australia” for official purposes.  

Above all, he sponsored exploration in the NSW interior and his groups passed beyond the Blue Mountains to the plains beyond and he also founded the inland city of Bathurst. An island, a river, mountain, port, hotel and many streets were named after him, to be supplemented more recently by a Hospital, University and, in 1970, an investment bank.

At last, after a critical parliamentary report on his activities written by Thomas Bigge, Lachlan resigned and returned to Britain in 1822. His administration was reckoned high-handed and he was accused of neglecting the economic potential of NSW. He was denied his promised pension until he answered the Bigge Report but this he did and a generous pension was forthcoming. He did not enjoy it for long as he died in London in 1824 from bowel and bladder ailments.

Macquarie had brought back from Sydney to Ulva exotic kangaroos, emus and not least the family’s favourite old cow. He had been an exemplary husband and father and his rule in NSW had been vigorous and game-changing. His body was laid in a small mausoleum on the island of Ulva, cared for even now by The National Trust of Australia. A stone bearing the inscription “Father of Australia” commemorates this admirable Scotsman.

The Macquarie Mausoleum on Ulva, Isle of Mull, Inner Hebrides

       

              

SMD

25.6.15

Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2015

DAVID LIVINGSTONE and MARY SLESSOR: Famous Scots (3)

[This is the third in a series describing Scots who won distinction outside their native land]

At my Scottish prep school we had three school houses, Nelson, Scott and Livingstone. Everyone knows the great Admiral of Trafalgar, or the leader of the tragic expedition to the Antarctic, but the Scots missionary and African explorer is now a fading historical figure. Yet he was hugely celebrated in Victorian Britain. Mary Slessor was then less well known but she is now admired as the epitome of feminine grit, charity and fortitude.

David Livingstone

Mary Slessor

David Livingstone (1813 – 73) was born in the Lanarkshire mill-town of Blantyre, South of Glasgow, into a working class family of 6. His father worked in the cotton mill, but was an ardent Protestant Congregationalist handing out tracts and determined to educate his children. David started work at the mill aged 10 but was schooled in the evenings. He was interested in science and medicines and wanted to study to become a doctor. His father would have preferred him to read theology and to confine himself to one book, namely the Bible. David much cherished the writings of Scots minister Thomas Dick who tried to reconcile Christianity with Victorian scientific discoveries. They agreed between them in 1836 that David would study medicine and theology at Anderson’s College in Glasgow (now part of Strathclyde University). He finished his education as a doctor at various medical schools in London, while simultaneously training as a missionary preacher at a church in Ongar, Essex.

Livingstone was an indifferent preacher but the London Missionary Society took him on for his medical knowledge and in 1841 he was sent to a mission station in modern Botswana, near to the Kalahari Desert. He focussed his interest on travelling into and mapping the African Interior, spreading Christianity and preventing the brutal exploitation of Africans by Arab slave traders. He married Mary Moffat, daughter of another Southern Africa missionary, in 1845. They were to have two children, delivered in the Interior by David.

In his first expedition 1849-51 he sighted the then unknown Upper Zambesi and in 1852 he embarked on a 4-year expedition to cross Central and Southern Africa, “opening up” large tracts to contemporary geographers and colonists. In 1855 he became the first European to set eyes on Victoria Falls and in 1856 he found the mouth of the Zambesi on the Indian Ocean. He returned a feted hero to Britain.

His missionary efforts achieved little. The African tribes had their own gods but the native kings of the Interior, beset by Arab slavers, at least did not fear unarmed Livingstone who preached earnestly from the back of his wagon. He was actually useful with his knowledge of obstetrics and his ability to treat eye problems. The sum total of Livingstone’s converts was one, a certain Sechele, influential king of the Kwema people of Botswana. They became shaky Christian adherents as they often reverted to polygamy and rain-making rites, but it was a start.

The British government decided to sponsor Livingstone’s next expedition from 1858-64, to find if the Zambesi were navigable; it was not, as his earlier treks had not spotted the various rapids and cataracts making the river impassable. Livingstone was out of his depth managing a large expedition. He was secretive, self-righteous and moody, resenting any criticism. His own physician Dr John Kirk wrote scathingly “Dr Livingstone is out of his mind and is a most unsafe leader.” After several unfruitful excursions trying to map the river systems, the government recalled him, judging his expedition a failure.  He had been joined by his wife but she soon died of malaria in 1862.

He managed to raise the funds to launch his final expedition from 1866 to 1873. Resigning from the missionary society, he started from Zanzibar joining the likes of Burton and Speke to find the source of the Nile. Spurning advice, he mounted too small an expedition and his native bearers and sepoys soon melted away. He enjoyed being a loner but in his final years he was wracked by tropical fevers and dysentery. He was mortified that he had to be rescued by Arab slavers; he was later horrified to witness some 400 African slaves being massacred beside Lake Tanganyika. For several years nothing was heard of him and the New York Herald financed Welsh-born but US-based journalist Henry Morton Stanley to search him out. He duly found him in the Arab village of Ujiji, in modern Tanzania on 10 November 1871 with the famously polite greeting “Dr Livingstone, I presume!”

Stanley finds Livingstone in Ujiji

Although Livingstone was the first European to see important lakes in Central Africa, he did not find the source of the Nile. He died in Ilala in modern Zambia in May 1873. Hailed as a hero, his body lay in state at the Royal Geographical Society’s offices then at 1, Savile Row (now the tailoring emporium of Gieves & Hawkes) and he was buried with full pomp at Westminster Abbey.

As a proponent of Christian missionary work and a harbinger of the imperialist “scramble for Africa” Livingstone is an unfashionable figure these days. His courage and dour perseverance is beyond doubt, but there was an unclubbable, narrow and contrarian side to him seen still in plenty of other Scots. He makes a worthy but uncomfortable hero.

Livingstone and Slessor commemorated on Scots banknotes

Mary Slessor (1848-1915) was inspired by Livingstone’s example and may have done more tangible good. She was born in Aberdeen, daughter of a poor alcoholic shoemaker. Unable to find regular work, the family moved to Dundee, which has subsequently rather adopted Mary, and she, aged 11, and her now widowed mother worked in the famous jute mills there. 

Her story is easily told. Always drawn to charitable work and a devoted Presbyterian, Mary was inspired by news of the death of Livingstone and aged 28 was sent in 1876 to a missionary establishment in Calabar, a long established port in South Eastern Nigeria, to work with the local Efik people. Contracting malaria she was invalided home to Dundee in 1879.

She returned to Calabar in 1881. With her red hair and blue eyes she was a distinctive figure; she avoided the trappings of the European missionary, wearing African clothes, eating local food, learning to speak the local Efik language and living in an African mud-hut. Another bout of malaria made her return in 1884 to her mother and sister in Dundee, but they were ill too and died soon after.  Mary became a celebrity in church circles.

Mary returned to Nigeria finally and spent 15 years in the interior with the Okoyong people, thought to be a danger to Europeans. Her practical help and determination won them over. She made a particular point of helping twins, as a local superstition held that one of the twins was an evil spirit. The mother of twins was ostracised and the twins themselves left to die in the bush. Mary brought up a number of twins and adopted one girl called Janie. Mary also fought against the custom of human sacrifice after the death of a village elder, based on the notion that the dead man needed servants and retainers in the afterlife. 

Mary soft-pedalled evangelism and concentrated on settling disputes, encouraging trade and improving the status of women. She became a judge in the native court and was a cherished influence. Weakened by her persistent malaria, Mary finally died in Calabar in 1915. She had a colonial-style state funeral there and the famed pro-consul Sir Frederick Lugard in Lagos praised her unique contribution. Her centenary has this year been marked with honour in her adoptive Dundee.

Mary was a good woman and hers was a life well-lived.

SMD

27.03.15

Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2015

ANDREW CARNEGIE and SAMUEL SMILES: Famous Scots (2)

         [This is the 2^nd in a series about Scots who made an impact outside their native country.]

This piece describes two Scots who knew and wrote about Wealth. The first rose to giddy heights in the USA as a steel mogul and then flourished as a generous philanthropist; the second proclaimed the virtues of Self-Help and became a business guru, influencing aspiring 19^th century generations. They were physically similar in their bearded sagacity but their philosophies differed markedly.

Andrew Carnegie

 

Samuel Smiles

The career of Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919) is a classic rags-to-riches story. He was born in Dunfermline, Fife, where his father, William, was a handloom weaver. An uncle introduced him to the joys of books. To escape poverty they emigrated when Andrew was 12 to Allegheny, Pennsylvania where father worked in a cotton mill and mother, Margaret, made shoe bindings. Andrew worked from the age of 13 as a bobbin-boy at the cotton mill. In 1850 he became a telegraph message boy, worked hard, was promoted and educated himself when a local benefactor opened his library to poor boys.

In 1850 he became PA to Thomas Scott, managing director of The Pennsylvania Railroad Company and helped the President J. Edgar Thomson. Carnegie flourished and was promoted to Superintendent of the Pittsburgh Division. He was included in various deals Scott and Thomson did, often via insider trading which we would now call corrupt. He started to amass capital. Carnegie was grateful and cut in Scott and Thomson to many steel deals he completed later.

After playing a leading role in military transportation for the Union during the Civil War, Carnegie left the railroads for the quickly growing steel industry in 1864 to establish the Keystone Bridge Company and later Carnegie Steel, an integrated steel producer converting pig-iron to steel using the Bessemer system. This became one of the largest enterprises in the USA. Carnegie was not a notoriously hard-boiled businessman but 19^th century US tycoons were not gentle souls. In 1901 Carnegie sold his company for $480m to J. P. Morgan who was creating United Steel. Carnegie personally pocketed $225m, an immense sum at that time, the consideration being paid in 5% bonds. Carnegie was hailed as “the richest man in the world” – wrongly, he was second to John D. Rockefeller of Standard Oil. He devoted the rest of his long life to philanthropy.

Carnegie, the legendary philanthropist

Carnegie, an eager autodidact himself, sought the company of the leading minds of his time and met Mark Twain, Matthew Arnold, befriended W.E.Gladstone and was a correspondent and disciple of Herbert Spencer. Spencer was a highly influential evolutionary philosopher of Victorian England who coined the expression “the survival of the fittest”. Carnegie adopted Spencerian views on the struggle between independent Man versus the ever-encroaching State and embraced the doctrine of Laissez-Faire. (In practice Carnegie was quite happy when tariffs hindered competition and he lobbied Congress for his steel industry energetically!)

But there is no doubting the sincerity of his philanthropy. He had written in an early memorandum to himself, aged 33, that it was wrong simply to amass wealth and he proclaimed his famous dictum “a man who dies rich, dies dishonoured”. In his admired book The Gospel of Wealth, endorsed by Mr Gladstone, he recommended the first third of life for education and training, the second third for making money and the final third for giving the money away.

He started his philanthropy in 1879 with public swimming baths in Dunfermline, followed the next year with a public library there. He toured Scotland with his aged mother in 1881 and over the years he was a generous donor, especially to his home town. But he was busy in the US too; he teamed up with Enoch Pratt, associate of the earlier American benefactor, George Peabody, and focussed on public libraries; eventually, Carnegie funded over 3,000 libraries. He also lavished money on universities and medical schools in the US and in Scotland; he sponsored music too, building and owning famous Carnegie Hall in New York, opened in 1891.

Carnegie and Skibo Castle, Sutherland

Carnegie wrote in his Triumphant Democracy that the American political system was superior to the British – he disparaged the British hereditary monarchy and her aristocracy. He was anti-Imperialist, in particular an opponent of the US annexation of the Philippines. He advocated closer union of the English-speaking peoples. He kept his distance from religion, but worked for World Peace with the churches and was dismayed by the Great War.

In his retirement Carnegie lived in New York and in Skibo Castle, in remote Sutherland, Scotland. By the time he died in 1919 he had given away about $350m and his executors gave away his final $30m. His philanthropy was copied by many other rich men, an attractive feature of American life.

 -----------------------------------

Samuel Smiles (1812-1904) was a less spectacular figure but possibly more influential. Born in Haddington, East Lothian, where his parents ran a small shop. His father was a Cameronian, a member of that Puritan Presbyterian sect, but Samuel was never religious. Educated at the local school, he was apprenticed to a doctor and studied medicine at Edinburgh University in 1829-32. His father died of cholera in 1832 and his mother worked tirelessly to support her family of 10. He paid her fulsome tribute in his 1871 book Character:

“Whilst writing all this, I have had in my mind a woman, whose strong and serious mind would not have failed to support me in these contentions. I lost her thirty years ago --nevertheless, ever living in my memory, she follows me from age to age. She suffered with me in my poverty, and was not allowed to share my better fortune. When young, I made her sad, and now I cannot console her. I know not even where her bones are: I was too poor then to buy earth to bury her!

And yet I owe her much. I feel deeply that I am the son of woman. Every instant, in my ideas and words not to mention my features and gestures, I find again my mother in myself. It is my mother's blood which gives me the sympathy I feel for bygone ages, and the tender remembrance of all those who are now no more. What return then could I, who am myself advancing towards old age, make her for the many things I owe her? One, for which she would have thanked me--this protest in favour of women and mothers”

 

Although Smiles practiced as a doctor briefly in Haddington, he became politically interested in the tumultuous 1830s and turned his talents to journalism. He became editor of the radical Leeds Times 1838-42 and supported Chartism with its programme of parliamentary reform, but he shied away from the movement when its leaders advocated physical force. He married in 1843 but despaired of radical change, working from 1845 for railway companies.

 Smiles finally earned celebrity with his widely read handbook to success Self-Help published in 1859. The book, rejected by conventional publishers, eventually sold 250,000 copies and was followed by Character (1871) Thrift (1875) and Duty (1880). His Self-Help philosophy firmly placed responsibility on the individual to better himself, and struck a chord in Britain and America. Smiles saw a vital role for the state and inveighed against laissez-faire liberalism in an eloquent passage:

When typhus or cholera breaks out, they tell us that Nobody is to blame. That terrible Nobody! How much he has to answer for. More mischief is done by Nobody than by all the world besides. Nobody adulterates our food. Nobody poisons us with bad drink. Nobody supplies us with foul water. Nobody spreads fever in blind alleys and unswept lanes. Nobody leaves towns undrained. Nobody fills gaols, penitentiaries, and convict stations. Nobody makes poachers, thieves, and drunkards. Nobody has a theory too—a dreadful theory. It is embodied in two words—Laissez faire—Let alone. When people are poisoned by plaster of Paris mixed with flour, "Let alone" is the remedy. When Cocculus indicus is used instead of hops, and men die prematurely, it is easy to say, "Nobody did it." Let those who can, find out when they are cheated: Caveat Emptor. When people live in foul dwellings, let them alone. Let wretchedness do its work; do not interfere with death.

Smiles has been criticised as a Philistine and as a champion of Victorian self-righteousness, finding virtue in the lifestyle they happen to enjoy. But there is an honourable place in society for sturdy individualism and a determination to get on in life. Carnegie and Smiles would have approved of Thatcherism, which had a strong flavour of Self–Help with Norman Tebbitt’s unemployed father “getting on his bike to find a job” and Thatcher’s “There is no Alternative” being a direct quote from Carnegie’s mentor Herbert Spencer. What comes around, goes around, as they say.

SMD

13.03.15

Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2015