From Lossiemouth to London

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 992, 7 June 1930, Page 30

From Lossiemouth to London

Life Story of Britain s Prime Minister

A. Scots Lad's Rise to Fame

= (By

Mary Acmes Hamilton.)

THE SUN has secured the rights of this interesting biography of J lr. Ramsay] MacDonald, Prime Minister of England. The first instalment appears below. The biography will be continued each Saturday. I.—MACDONALD THE EOT \ LTHOUGH MacDonald strikes anyone who m'eets him as being, in an unusual degree, self-determined, and though that is an impression which his face confirms, self-determination operates within limits. In every human being there are deep ancestral and local strains, forces that derive ■ from his race and his place. So, in his make-up Scotland is vitally significant. Its superficial signs remain ] in the definition of his consonants, so i valuable to a public speaker, and the j breadth of his vowels, which sometimes puzzle an English audience. “Wurrld,” is a better carrying sound, with a richer meaning, than the queer - mouthful of softness to which the ; southron reduces the word, and < Labour has an added dignity when its j final “r” is sounded. On the other hand, when he told a London crowd 1 that the unemployed problem was to be solved by “thote.” there was a perceptible catch of breath before the quicker minds realised that he was referring to the use of their intelligence. He no longer speaks, as does ■ the full-blooded northerner, of a committee as if it were a comite, with a sharp accentuation of the final "e”; j but he does still refer to his col- j leagues, and declare that "there’s no' the least doubt” about this or that, although by comparison with some of his followers from the west of Scot- j land his general speech may sound ! that of a pure Sassenach. He is a Scot. But there are Scots and Scots. Between Highland and Lowland, between Fife and the Border, between Edinburgh and Glasgow, there are distinctions the Englishman hardly grasps. His homeland is Morayshire. and Morayshire, north and east of the Grampians, breeds a race in which mingles the blood of the Highlanders and that of the Norse rovers j from across the sea. No country in Scotland has a prouder her: g historic association, of legend and heroic story. Lossiemouth, where he was born on October 12, 1566, was then half country, half-fishing village. Today, so , far as the visitor sees it, it is a holiday resort, one of the Scottish golf paradises; more beautiful, however, than : most, and more romantic. Part of the village perches on a high jut of land that runs out into the I Firth and overhangs a rich plain, the historic “Laieh of Moray,” famous for its fertility and high cultivation. It looks to the sea and to the mountains, their more distant tops snowcapped throughout a large- part of the year. Today there are the usual hotels and houses to be let for summer, and the visitor sees little or nothing of the real life of the place, of the simple fisherfolk and i labourers on the land among whom MacDonald grew up; is unaware even of such, revealing incidents as the great revival which swept the Firth two years ago, and suddenly called out the strangeness, poetry and pas- j sion that lie hidden underneath their proud reticence and that rough hum- j our that can strike the sentimentalist i from the south as cruel. These things, however, were as much a part of the inheritance of young Ramsay MacDonald as the air he breathed; that magical tonic air of sea and mountains which built his uncommon powers of physical endurance. They j were pretty nearly all the inheritance « he had. indeed, although Spnie church- i yard has two gravestones, one of the ; table kind, recording his forbears for j 150 years back. He was born into 1 dire poverty. None of our conquerors i ever started with the material odds I heavier against him. The old folk ; of Lossiemouth point out with pride i the humble bouses in which he has lived there, from the tiny two-roomed ; “but and ben” backing right on to the ; railway dyke, in which, when it wore a roof of thatch (now altered), he was brought up by his grandmother, to the modest house on the edge of the moor and the sand hillocks and the dunes he now occupies when in Lossiemouth during the summer recess. This house he built for his mother, and there very soon after it was ready for her, she died (in 1911). His grandmother's cottage was poor in the extreme, but she herself was a remarkable woman much respected by all her neighbours, and still remembered for her mind and one time beauty. She had seen better days, and even in the poorest circumstances, retained the demeanour of a gentlewoman, a natural grace and i dignity of manner. Her memory was a rich storehouse of ancient lore, of witches and fairies, of tales of second sight and high adventure. She knew all the old folk-songs. Spirit and imagination salted the poor fare of the boy s earliest home and made up for shortrcommons in bread and meat. The talk of his grandmother was as good as a library; she brought him in contact with the inspiring men and deeds of the past; but so soon as the little lad could read he searched out all the books the place afforded. “I was not one of those fortunates,” said MacDonald, “who could steal to some quiet corner where there were wonderful books, and live in a beautiful or romantic world all by myself. A great three-volumed Brown’s Bible in sheep-skin, a huge ‘Life of Christ ’ which I could not lift, but whose back m green polished leather always attracted me, some collections of sermons and a few books hound in black on theology and Church history, a volume or two of the classics in their original, and some tattered odds and ends, were all I inherited by way of books. “In the neighbouring city there were booksellers’ shops, and thither I used to hasten to linger at their windows. My beginnings in general reading were made standing there, stealing from pages of books exposed to view what delight they could give me. I used to walk ten miles on Saturdays to do this. When I was the proud possessor of a penny, it was not to the booksellers I went, however. Their prices, even at their lowest, were not for me. There was a pawnbroker in the city, sold me his “rubbish ’ for next to nothing, and the lightest burden even I brought borne

was Orr’s ‘Circle of the Science** knows it now ?) which I got with a j. ’ other books for one penny. ** -Novels in my youth w'ere rin-w. books. They crowded the bookaeDaw windows and were bound in paw. wiih attractive pictures on the 0 V sice, but they cost the ruinous pri~h sixpence, and were never shown 05. V so I was cut off from them. Oned, in a farmhouse kitchen I found a rn2 of Scott's 'Betrothed.' I know CO ,*J its title had lured the heart of the tevant Who brought it there .for are warm-hearted people in farm fr chens and bothies) or whether therwas such a robust admirer of Sir ter on that steading as to value tha unfortunate tale just because it *2 his. However- it had there no rvj. and I carried it away with me. 7*. haunting jingle of the wraith: Widow d wife and wedded maid Betrothed, betrayer, and betray'd—and the gripping lines at the head of some of the chapters carried athrough. Thus I had a hard in trod*, tion to Scott. It was a dull road to 9 delectable land wherein I have bee, wandering ever since, and where, & soon as I enter, youth is renewed bt magic refreshment. When I go bact in the body to the places where ‘nr young footsteps in infancy wandered; Scott meets me at my fireside, at; whether I hold Waverley* or ‘R O j, Roy,’ 'Redgauntlet’ or 'Guy Manner: ing,’ or any of the others in my hand, the Wizard is the Wizard still, th? drudgery of life ends and the di'j pass in glorious companionship with that wonderful pageant of humanir. into which Scott breathed the bread of life. This world of being arc events created by the imagination c; man suddenly expanded, and I roamei far and deep into it.” But books are only part of life bthe most intelligent of growing boyi. Natural gifts, energy and spirit mad. him, in spite of everything, leader by right divine of the Lossiemouth younf sters, champion in Their fights vriii the proud folk of the hill, and later, with Elgin, inventor and chieftain is games and raids, as later again is local politics. “My childhood was lived at a tust when the larger farmers were turniar the people off the land, and when the good, honest hatred the Scotsman has for landlords was being enronraged. and was taking firm root. Tie whole of my part o' Scotland vss Radical, and we seem to have beei horn with democratic spirit strongly developed in us. In consequence, we looked down from the moment of our birth on the people we called 'swells.' and thought ourselves quite as good as. and a good deal better than they were.” In the game of “swell” baiting be was a leader. In school, too. he was easily first, and school gave him mort in the way of real education thsr anyone whose ideas are derived Iron the English village school migi imagine. Many years afterward when the Dominie died, his most dis ! tinguished pupil—who never lost toad w ith him, and, to this day, wears tk gold watch which his first true friend left to him —wrote an appreciation 0: his teacher in which there are pa t sages that give vivid though reticen. glimpses of his own boyhood: “We had a long way to go to bin at school, and the road was bleat In the summer-time we lengthened i. for there were nests in the gorse and in the trees, and the sea was euficing. Sometimes, alas! we never go: there at all. and our ears were iea! to his whistle. Hidden behind trees, or among the whins, we saw him come to the door, survey the empty play ground, put to his lips the key upo*. which he summoned us to lesfont presently come again when there wa' no response to his call, and blew a (j short, angry* blast-all to no purpose The call of wild was upon us. The woods, the bushes, the caves, the set shore had us in thrall for the day We then thought him very angry, bn later on when we came to talking ore: those mishaps, we knew that it **“ the heart of a boy that admonished B next morning, and controlled tie strokes that made our fingers thigh and that while he stood with the instrument of torture in his hand—tie j school giggling behind us the instead of the lecture he gave us, at would have liked to say: ‘I wish I had been with you, but you know tin: that would not have done.’ We alwayt felt, however, that the penalty w** just, and that the whole transacti* had been good. He never punish® without making us fec-l that.” Schooldays end too soon for Ik children of the poor: and the bO; literally penniless, nearly went to B* as a fisherman, actually started # work in the fields. That did worry him. “I found agricultural labour w j lightful work, and r never minded tr hardness of it. Besides, a xsr. '■ never the worse for hard, bw* l * work. At that time I was struck wrthe fine lot of the ploughmen lived about us. Everyone of ther knew his Burns by heart as well * L his Bible. Besides, they used ! all to try their hands at making tiw | own songs, and in the autumn,® 1 whole countryside seemed alive 1 whistling when the ploughmen j ploughing. You could hear '-'Jttoo, across field after field, singiaS t they laboured.” But his Dominie, who had the remarkable parts of the lad. ** t approved of him staying botweenJJstilts of the plough, and arranged - his mother to take him back to sc!®; | at half-fees as a pupil teacher. 9 this stage his dreams were of » ; fessorship or a pulpit. His teacj primarily interested in , r and the classics, encouraged 1 anyhow started him on the broad ■ of general culture, and helped there as far as he could. Lack of most of the things the fortable think necessary, coEtac: . the forces they often miss or poetry, history, nationality, a j the heroic part, of the magic ■ lurks in all natural objects which associations have gathered- . of the beauty of sky, and mountains: an early deep insti® : ; recognition of the dignity of ,Lpi( i ■ the decency and self-respect of •, folk —these things moulded the ! spirit. 1 jiTo b& Continued.