Rev Angus Maciver

From The Crofters’ War:

Another champion of the crofters in a Church of Scotland charge was the Rev Angus Maciver of Uig in Lewis.  The parish church in Uig had been empty for years, and there was a large glebe on which squatters cast envious eyes.  Anumber of the Free Church congregation joined the Church of Scotland and invited a Free Church minister from Glasgow, a native of the parish, the Rev Angus Maciver, to be their minister.  He accepted the call, came back to Uig but kept the glebe.  He was prominent in the mass demonstration in Stornoway in October 1884 and remained loyal to the crofters’ cause depite attempts by Lady Matheson to persuade him to desert them.

Another Lewis minister of the Established Church, Rev Ewen Campbell of Lochs, was strongly criticised for his evidence before the Napier Commission in 1883, when he suggested rather flippantly that it would be useless to created holdings on the boggy, rocky, barren soil of Lochs parish, adding that it would be far better for these poor people “to send the 42nd to shoot every mother’s son that would be put there.”  He had some sympathy for the crofters although he blamed them for encouraging overcrowding by permitting cottars and squatters, and his only solution (natural enough from one born in Nova Scotia), was emigration. p105