Destined To Fail: The Ministry Of William Meirion Evans

About twenty years ago, I was fortunate to have met the Welsh historian Lewis Lloyd, only a few years before his early death. At the time he was Senior Tutor in politics at Coleg Harlech were I was a student of psychology and Welsh. Chatting informally with a group of students, he recognised my (then much stronger) Australian accent and enquired as to whereabouts I was from. I learned that he had earned his PhD at the Australian National University with a thesis on mining law. He had also published a book in the late-1980s, entitled ‘The Welsh in Australia’, which documented the impact of individual Welsh immigrants to the Australian colonies and the later federated nation. The state I came from, South Australia, has a rich copper mining heritage and we chatted about the towns of Moonta and Wallaroo, Burra and Kapunda, all places I know reasonably well as I had friends who had grown up in, or had lived in these towns and had sometimes visited them.

One of the case histories included in Lloyd’s book has always particularly interested me; that of William Meirion Evans who hailed from the Gwynedd village of Llanfrothen, about a 20-minute drive north of Harlech. William Evans had emigrated to South Australia, eventually finding himself in Burra and later in the Victorian towns of Ballarat and Melbourne, via the USA. He was a preacher and a champion of Welsh language and culture. It is said he was a good, kind-hearted man. His story has stayed with me because Llanfrothen became the village where I have lived for nearly 20 years and because William Evans enacted three ‘firsts’ in Australia. Here is a short biography.

William Meirion Evans was born on August 12th 1826 at Isallt Fawr, Llanfihangel-Y-Pennant in Caernarfonshire, now part of the county of Gwynedd. He was the son of a farming couple, Edmund and Mary, née Williams. In infancy he moved to the small cottage known as Gatws Y Parc (until a decade ago the home of a friend; photographed below), between the villages of Llanfrothen and Croesor and it is this locality in Meironydd (also part of Gwynedd) which he identified with during his years in Wales. Although there had long been a church in Llanfrothen, Evans’s parents did not attend as they were devout Welsh ‘chapel people’. They belonged to the Calvinistic Methodists, the only Nonconformist denomination of Welsh origin without affiliation to an English religious body.

It is important to emphasise the distinction in Welsh society between chapel and church. The Anglican-based ‘Church in Wales’ had long been associated with cultural 'Englishness' and 'landlordism' and catered largely to the 'aspiring' Welsh who spoke English by choice, even when their own language could be fully understood and fluently spoken. In other words, attending church was a prime social indicator of influence and wealth.

Because of this, until the 1700s the organised, state-sponsored religion of the church had relatively little impact on the lives of the majority Welsh-speaking tenant population of North Wales. About 1730, however, a Nonconformist revival, initiated by Baptists and Methodists, swept through Wales. This revival lasted well into the period between the two world wars and was characterised by the building of myriad plain, rectangular chapels, minus steeple or bell, in which fiery sermons voiced a disapproval of alcohol, gambling, dancing and games, and working on a Sunday. For fervent chapel goers this included a pacifist stance and a refusal to fight in wartime. What really marked the chapel culture out as different, however, and endeared the movement to the ordinary people was that chapel services and preaching were done exclusively through the medium of the Welsh language (and still is for the relatively few chapels that remain in Wales). Thus, whereas in neighbouring England the various Christian denominations often cut across social divisions and to some degree neutralised them, in Wales the opposite was the case and social distinctions coincided with, and were intensified by, differences in both Christian denomination and language.

Arguably, the effect that chapel culture had on the native Welsh population cannot be overestimated and the chapel was, for over 150 years, the principle symbol of Welshness in every town and village in Wales. The Sunday schools run by the individual chapels did not confine themselves to religious instruction and taught many thousands of children and adults to read and write in the Welsh language long before primary schooling became universally available (and then available only in English, a policy which was rigidly enforced even at the local level). It was at the Sunday school run by the Siloam Calvinistic Methodist chapel in Llanfrothen where the young William Evans learnt to read. Eventually he became a Sunday school teacher himself while, like many of his contemporaries in Llanfrothen, he worked as a quarryman at the nearby Ffestiniog slate mines.

At about this time, the young colony of South Australia was experiencing an economic boom resulting from finds of considerable quantities of copper. Experienced miners and quarrymen were in high demand and increasingly sourced from the mining communities of Cornwall and Wales. Seizing the opportunity, William Evans set sail for Adelaide, the capital city of South Australia, arriving on May 19th 1849. In his initial year in the colony he worked short stints at several mining concerns, firstly at the Yatala smelting works, immediately north of Adelaide, followed by the Willunga slate quarries, south of Adelaide. Later that year he relocated to the much larger copper mines of Apoinga and Burra, about 160km km north of Adelaide.

Though very far from home, Evans would not have felt alone in South Australia. The prospect of plenty of work and money had attracted large numbers of Welshmen to the copper mines at Burra, then the largest metal mines in Australia, supplying 5% of the world’s copper. In 1846 there were estimated to be about 300 Welsh-born miners at Burra. Within five years this number had tripled. One mining company arranged for the immigration from near the town of Llanelli in South Wales of an entire smelting factory, including machinery, tooling, workers and their immediate families. The majority of these workers, like Evans, were monoglot Welsh speakers and so, initially at least, they tended to live in Llwchwr, a closely-knit, purpose-built quarter of 44 lots to the north of Burra township, named after a village to the west of Swansea, to which they in turn named streets after nearby places such as Llanelli, Llysnewydd and Penclawdd.

Although only 23 years old and not an ordained minister William Evans nevertheless perceived a need to begin preaching in such a “godless place” as the Burra mining settlements. Unfortunately, however, his command of the English language was very limited and so he was only effectively able to preach to his fellow countrymen. As a result, he is now recognised to be the first person to preach in the Welsh language in Australia. Nevertheless, despite his efforts, his particular brand of Calvinistic Christianity did not catch on in Burra and by 1860, although there were two Welsh chapels established, neither was Methodist, one being Baptist and the other Congregationalist.

In 1852 he moved to the large gold mining field at Bendigo in the neighbouring colony of Victoria were he is said to have made a considerable sum of money in a very short time. William Evans returned to Llanfrothen in 1853 and, ever the traveller, he then migrated again, this time with his parents and other family members to Illinois, USA. Two years later, on June 9th 1855 he married Mary Jane Hughes, the Welsh-speaking daughter of another Welsh settler, with whom he opened a small business in Dodgeville, Wisconsin. William and Mary had two children, but both died in infancy. These tragedies did nothing to diminish his Christian faith, however, and he continued to serve as a lay preacher until, in June 1861, he was ordained as a minister at the Welsh Calvinistic Methodist Church in Columbus, Wisconsin. Like the mining settlements in Australia, Wisconsin at that time had a particularly strong history of expatriate Welsh ‘chapel culture’. In 1854, ‘Y Drysorfa’, the monthly periodical of the Calvinistic Methodists in Wales, remarked:

“It is a remarkable and comforting aspect of the Welsh character that no matter where they go if there are any number of them together they establish a social place of worship in the Welsh language. In the great cities of England, in the coal mines and iron works of Scotland, in the various states of America and now on the gold fields of Australia, the Welsh emigrant must hear of the great works of God in his own language (my emphasis).

By the time of William Evans’s ordination Mary was in poor health and because of this he returned alone to Australia, landing at Melbourne in the colony of Victoria in March 1863. He immediately headed for the Ballarat goldfields, home to a third of the Welsh-born immigrant population in the Australian colonies at the time, numbering over 2000 people. For a short time he returned to his previous lifestyle of mining and part-time preaching, and is recognised as the first ordained minister to officiate at a Welsh-speaking communion in Australia. The following year he was appointed full-time minister of the Welsh Calvinistic Methodist chapels at Ballarat, Sebastopol and Cambrian Hill. He returned again to Wales briefly in 1865, then onto America, where Mary was well enough to return with him to Ballarat. Still largely monoglot Welsh, he later wrote of how his

“utter lack of ability to speak fluently in the English language prevented me from comforting my fellow passengers who suffered during the voyage”.

1865 also saw William Evans produce another first on Australian soil: publication of the first work in the Welsh language, ‘Yr Ymgeisydd’ (‘The Endeavourer’ or ‘The Candidate’; published in Castlemaine, Victoria to coincide with an Eisteddfod, a Welsh cultural festival) This was destined for one edition only, none of which have survived. It has been claimed that William Evans became an enthusiastic supporter of Welsh language publications after the Welsh Calvinistic Methodist Connexion had a pamphlet printed by an Australian company in 1863 which contained a large number of embarrassing spelling and grammatical errors.

Inspired by the success of his first publication, William Evans and Theophilus Williams co-edited from July 1866 a monthly journal titled ‘Yr Australydd’ (‘The Australian’) which sold for a modest 6d with copies circulated throughout all the Australian colonies and as far as New Zealand. According to the minutes of meetings held by the Welsh Calvinistic Methodist Connexion, who partly funded the enterprise, the original intention was for a weekly publication but a monthly edition was deemed more feasible.

Not surprisingly given the people involved, the first edition’s editorial stated that the aim of the journal was to "gwasanaethu ein cenedl mewn llenyddiaeth, moesoldeb a chrefydd" ("serve our nation in literature, morality and religion") and an analysis of the first two year’s editions (1866-67) shows 22% of the articles to be theological in nature while general news from Wales was the province of only 3% of the content. There was a particularly strong emphasis on the social and cultural aspects of the Welsh community in the Australian colonies such as Eisteddfodau and Cymanfaoedd Canu (hymn-singing meetings). It is interesting to note, however, that a similar analysis of the final two years of ‘Yr Australydd’ (1871-72) reveals that articles with theological themes had decreased to only 13% of the content. A further notable aspect of the journal’s content was the consistent avoidance of discussion of political issues.

Another important thrust of the journal, however was to further “yr achos Cymraeg” (the survival of the Welsh language in Australia) and to do this Evans and Williams actively encouraged contributions from the readership. These often included ordinary miners and manual workers whose literacy, like that of William Evans, resulted not from formal education, but to attendance at chapel Sunday schools. Published contributions included poetry and short stories, as well as a serialised novel in 1870 entitled, ‘Cymro Yn Awstralia’ (‘A Welshman in Australia’).

Publication of ‘Yr Australydd’ ceased in 1872, for reasons which remain unclear. However, letters written to William Evans indicate that there was a drop in subscriptions from 496 to 200 due to subscribers moving away and often becoming untraceable. Ironically, the transient nature of Welsh migrants to the Australian colonies, moving to wherever work was available, was something that characterised William Evans’s own life. This, along with an increasing number of marriages to people from outside of the Welsh immigrant community, along with the inevitable gradual decline in the use of a minority language in a land where English was the Lingua Franca, probably sealed the fate of ‘Yr Australydd’. Indeed, the whole notion of ‘yr achos Cymraeg’ in Australia was, in hindsight perhaps, a venture that was always destined to fail.

The general decline in use of the Welsh language, especially among those born in Australia, was no less evident in the chapels, where a shortage of preachers fluent in the Welsh language had resulted in the substitution of English during an increasing number of services. In stark contrast to the chapel culture in Wales, by the end of the 19th century all the Welsh chapel denominations in Australia had introduced English into at least some of their services and, after 1894, even the Calvinistic Methodists, the bulwark of the Welsh language in Australia, recorded the minutes of their assembly meetings in English.

For the first time William Evans must have felt like an outsider among his own congregation because, despite having lived in English-speaking countries since his early 20s, he was still unable to hold a conversation in English, though he could read English to some degree at least, with the aid of a dictionary. Another of Evans’s editorials from ‘Yr Australydd’, this time from 1872, noted that

“One of the first things which strikes an aware person with any knowledge of the history of the Welsh in Australia is the large number who are completely unconcerned with religion if it is unobtainable in their own language. For some reason, if unavailable in Welsh, religious services in English are neglected.”

The same year an article penned by an unknown author with the nom-de-plume ‘Yr Hanesydd’ (‘The Historian’) referred to the decline in religiosity with some hyperbole:

“There is room to fear that a large number of Welsh people in this country were once religious adherents but by now are rapidly falling to such a degenerate state that there is not a minute to waste in organizing their succour.”

There is another important reason for the decline in religiosity among Welsh immigrants, however, and this lies not in the wider community but firmly at the door of the chapels and their congregations. It is the seemingly endless disagreements between the different chapel cultures. Such conflicts could be particularly vexatious, often causing rifts within families and whole villages and towns. They had plagued the contemporary religious scene in Wales and so were not unique to the Australian colonies. At first glance, unlike the differences in doctrine and theological interpretation that usually characterise differences between Christian groups, the Welsh schisms concerned governance of the chapels. While Evans’s Calvinistic Methodists had elected church governments, for example, the Independent Methodists advocated majority leadership by the entire congregation. Arguably, however, these differences did reflect theological issues as they were ultimately concerned with each denomination’s interpretation of how an individual may relate with God and the strength of the mediating role of the chapel in that relationship.

Joseph Jenkins, the famous Welsh swagman (itinerant worker, similar to the American hobo) who left his farm and family in Wales, aged 51 years, to lead an itinerant lifestyle in colonial Victoria for 25 years and who kept a daily diary for 58 years of his life, expressed in 1879, simply and eloquently, his exasperation with the schisms:

“Four miles away (in Castlemaine) there are three chapels belonging to different denominations. They are so close together that they are for ever quarrelling. Mrs Lewis and her son walked to chapel to listen to a Welsh sermon, and I walked into the bush to meet my God.”

It is interesting to compare Evans’s attitude to his new country with that of Jenkins. Jenkins had learned English and despite retaining an active interest in Welsh culture and winning the Premier Prize at the Ballarat Eisteddfod for his englyn (forms of Welsh verse with strict adherence to quantitative metre) he wrote all his diaries in English, in order to further master the language.

It is perhaps surprising that the divisions between the denominations that were so embedded in Welsh society spilled over to the Australian colonies. Being in a foreign land yet with a language in common offerred a real opportunity for Welsh emigres to rid themselves of the less desirable aspects of Welsh social and cultural baggage accumulated over the years. Lewis Lloyd describes the Welsh immigrants as undertaking:

“......a venture that was more communal than individualistic. Most had left a cherished if agitated district of a land characterised, in their eyes, by economic exploitation and social deference, a land in which an alien church milked dry a Nonconformist people.....the image of downtrodden Wales lived long in the memories of many emigrants and their Australian-born children”. 

During his time editing ‘Yr Australydd’ Mary’s illness returned and she died in 1869. On November 7th the following year, William Evans remarried, this time to a widow, Ellen Jones née Roberts and this time he fathered three healthy daughters. Five months after his marriage the Welsh Calvinistic Methodist General Association of Victoria appointed William Evans as minister and overseer of the building of their planned chapel at 320 LaTrobe Street, Melbourne. The ‘Welsh Church’, as it is now known, opened on New Years Eve 1871 and remains to this day the only church in Australia to conduct regular services in Welsh.

Undaunted by the decline in religiosity and in the use of the Welsh language, William Evans established another monthly journal in October 1874 named ‘Yr Ymwelydd’. Initially published in Smythesdale in the Ballarat area he later relocated it to Melbourne. Again the price was set at an affordable 6d. Interestingly, although the title of ‘Yr Australydd’ suggests some permanence of affinity to Australia (the correct Welsh translation of Australian is ‘Awstralydd’; ‘Australydd’ was an invented word, a deliberate amalgamation of the English and Welsh words) a translation of the title of the new journal (‘The Visitor’) is more suggestive of a temporary relationship with the Australian colonies. Or perhaps it was a wry comment by Evans on the itinerant nature of the Welsh community, and himself, at that time?

Another departure in attitude from ‘Yr Australydd’ was an increase in the amount of religious content, intended possibly, as a fightback against the decline in religiosity by the intended readership. Indeed, for the two years of publication, fully 46% of the content was concerned with theological issues. As the first edition’s editorial stated: 

“…the fact that we are without any service in the medium of Welsh at our disposal in this country, is reason in itself why we should endeavour to fill the gap and redress the deficiency....…Yr Ymwelydd is meant to be a truly religious publication of quality, and a concise, accurate, impartial and honest record of historical events – and if it is not possible to continue based on these principles, then the nation’s preference/taste is lower than we presently believe”.

Ironically, the journal ceased publication in December 1876 because the printer, a Mr Rhys-Jones, moved away from Melbourne and Evans was unable to a find a replacement fluent enough in the language. The Calvinistic Methodist Church Assembly did debate whether to continue publishing in English but this did not eventuate. Nevertheless, the Welsh language did survive in common use among some families in the Ballarat region into the early 20th century. This would no doubt have pleased William Evans as retaining the language, he repeatedly argued in his editorials, was entirely compatible with loyalty to the adopted country.

Following his retirement from publishing, William Evans opened a bookshop in Bourke Street, Melbourne, and later returned to Ballarat to open another bookshop. He died, following a long illness, on August 4th 1883 and was buried in what is now referred to as ‘the old cemetery’ in Ballarat. He continued to preach in his beloved Welsh until his last days. There are two surviving copies of an English translation of his biography ‘Memoir of the Rev. W.M. Evans’, written by an unknown author. The original Welsh manuscript has been lost. One copy resides in the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth while the other was bequeathed to the Welsh Church in Melbourne by one of his daughters.

And what of the levels of religiosity of the Welsh who stayed in William Evans’s childhood village of Llanfrothen? Well, there is very little. Siloam chapel, where William Evans learnt to read and write, has been redundant for more than two decades and now privately owned by a friend of mine. In recent years it has been used as a rehearsal room for a local rock band. The Baptist chapel in Llanfrothen, Ramoth, was converted into a private residence in the late 1990s by my sister in law and her then partner. There are two churches in Llanfrothen, the oldest, St Brothen’s is redundant and in the care of the Friends of Friendless Churches due to it’s historical merit. The second is undergoing conversion to a private residence. 

A little aside from the main road,
becalmed in a last-century greyness,
there is the chapel, ugly, without the appeal
to the tourist to stop his car
and visit it. The traffic goes by,
and the river goes by, and quick shadows
of clouds, too, and the chapel settles
a little deeper into the grass.

But here once on an evening like this,
in the darkness that was about
his hearers, a preacher caught fire
and burned steadily before them
with a strange light, so that they saw
the splendour of the barren mountains
about them and sang their amens
fiercely, narrow but saved
in a way that men are not now.

 'The Chapel' by RS Thomas


Preachers no longer 'catch fire' in Llanfrothen, or Burra, or Ballarat. One thing would undoubtedly please William Meirion Evans, however. Llanfrothen village school still teaches it’s students in Welsh and according to the 2001 census, 76% of the population are able to speak the language fluently.

Image #1 'Gatws Parc'. The home of William Meirion Evans between Llanfrothen and Croesor, Wales. Pentax K20D, Sigma 17-70mm.

Image #2 'Dry As A Bone'. Near Burra, South Australia. Praktica BC3, Sigma 35-70mm, Agfa Vista.

Image #3 'Llwybr Cae Merched'. Near Llanfrothen, Wales. Pentax K20D, Sigma 17-70mm.

Image #4 'Mintaro'. Near Burra, South Australia. Praktica BX20S, Sigma 35-70mm, Ilford xP2.

Image #5 'The Wrong Side Of Goyders Line'. Near Burra, South Australia. Pentax K20D, Sigma 17-70mm.

Image #6 'Afon Croesor'. Llanfrothen, Wales. Pentax K20D, Sigma 17-70mm.

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Tales From Tunisia

Handing the Lonely Planet Guide to Tunisia over the counter at the outdoor pursuits store, the assistant checks the title looks up at me concerned and asks “is it safe?”. “Well I wouldn’t be going if I didn’t think so” was my reply. It was a strange question indeed for a store whose clientele includes people who enjoy hanging off 200m high sheer rock faces with apocryphal names like Ressurrection, Spectre and Cenotaph Corner, usually located halfway up Snowdonia mountains. I was in Algeria at the start of their civil war in the early 1990s and I recall feeling much safer than I’m sure I’d feel with my life in the hands of 10mm thick nylon ropes and twist lock carabiners. Heights are most definitely not my thing. I seriously doubt travelling alone for a week or so in Tunisia doing nothing more onerous than taking photographs and getting blisters from walking too much could be likened to “an activity productive of terror in the reasonably sane”, as Jim Perrin, one of the grand old men of British rock climbing, describes his chosen pastime. As it turned out I was right.

True, at the cusp of 2010-11 there had been four weeks of civil unrest that had toppled the 24-year old government of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. Dissatisfaction had been brewing for years but the catalyst was a wholly unexpected event that mirrored similar past events; in Vietnam in 1963 when 66-year old Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc, poured petrol over himself which he then set alight at a busy intersection in Saigon to protest at the persecution of Vietnam’s predominantly Buddhist population at the hands of the minority Catholic government, and again in Czechoslovakia in 1969, when 21-year old student Jan Palach burned himself to death in protest of the demoralisation of the Czech people following the Soviet invasion the previous year.

That President Ben Ali, his wife Leila, and their extended familes were corrupt is surely disputed by no-one in Tunisia or elsewhere. Just using the term ‘The Family’, with it’s obvious mafia connotations, leaves no Tunisian in any doubt as to which family you are referring to. I was told that half the personal wealth in Tunisia could be linked to either the Ben Ali family by blood, the Trabelsi family of Ben Ali’s wife,or their close friends. Forty-eight members of the two families had extensive business interests as varied as banking, TV and radio stations, telecom and internet providers, to real-estate development, agriculture, car dealerships, retail distribution, an airline and even marble quarries.

When Ben-Ali and his entourage eventually fled Tunisia, hoping to relocate to France (who refused to let his plane land), then to Saudi Arabia (where he was granted asylum), he was estimated to have embezzled $US17 billion into various tax havens throughout the world. This is in addition to the 1.5 tonnes of gold ingots on board the flight that Leila had just appropriated from the vaults of the Banque de Tunisie with the help her private militia. A week after their arrival in Jeddah the Ben-Ali’s travelled to Mecca for the Umrah pilgrimage, dutiful Muslims despite what Allah had decided for them.

It was Ben-Ali’s ambitious, ruthless and manipulative wife who was the most despised member of ‘The Family’. Widely referred to as the ‘Lady MacBeth’ or ‘Imelda Marcos’ of Tunisia, she was the daughter of a humble fruit and nut vendor and a maid in a hammam. Brought up alongside ten brothers in the Tunis medina, she became a hairdresser, was married to a small businessman for three years, followed by divorce and a series of relationships with wealthier Tunisian businessmen, finally meeting Ben Ali, the newly appointed Director General of National Security. Becoming pregnant, she gave birth to Ben Ali’s first daughter while he was married to his first wife, who he divorced on achieving the presidency after orchestrating a bloodless coup in 1987. He married Leila in 1992 while pregnant with her second child. Rumour has it that she faked the results of an ultrasound to convince Ben-Ali that she was carrying a son, knowing he would be more likely to marry her. She had another daughter.

She and her family took immediate advantage of the marriage. Each of her siblings received a monthly pension and were given free access to the presidential palace. She arranged to have one of her elder brothers, Belhassan, divorce his wife to marry the daughter of influential businessman Hedi Jilani. Belhassan effectively became the second most powerful man in Tunisia after Ben Ali, and came to rule over the rest of his family like a mafia don. He proceeded to manipulate the Tunisian stock market and speculated wildly in real estate. On setting up an airline, Kathago, he routinely had spare parts stripped from aircraft of the government owned national carrier Air Tunisia. He was made a member of the board of the Banque de Tunisie where he flagrantly manipulated decision making in favour of his own and ‘The Family’ interests. Leila later cemented her hold on power by arranging to have her daughter Nesrine marry Sakher al-Materi, the son of an influential and wealthy family with a pharmaceutical empire. The young Sakher al-Materi had a meteoric rise to power with investments in the media, financial services, automotive, shipping, real estate and agriculture. It is said that Al-Materi was involved in another relationship at the time. However, after a visit from the police his then girlfriend immediately left Tunisia to live in France. Using the police to intimidate rivals was a hallmark of the Ben-Ali presidency.

Leila’s nephew Imed Trabelsi had a controlling stake in the Tunisian construction industry, in addition to operating the Tunisian franchise of the French home improvements retailer Bricorama. In 2006, Imed had his own nephew, Moaz, arranged to steal a multi-million euro yacht from Corsica which Moaz sailed to a marina near Tunis. The yacht belonged to the head of the influential Lazarus investment bank, Bruno Roger, who brought action against the pair in France. Unfortunately for him, a French court ruled the trial should take place in Tunisia. Imed Trabelsi was charged, but unsurprisingly was found innocent by a Tunisian judge. Although the yacht was then returned to Roger, Interpol issued arrest warrants for both Imed and Moaz. In 2011 Moaz was arrested in Rome and later sentenced to six years jail for a number of other yacht thefts from Italian ports.

Also in 2011, Imed was sentenced in Tunisia to two years in prison without the eligibility of parole and fined 2000 dinars for drug possession. His case was a prime example of the change in attitude in Tunisia, not just because he was found guilty, but because the judge that sentenced him was the same one who had set him free five years earlier. He was the first member of the ‘The Family’ to serve time in jail. At his appeal the hapless Imed watched the court double his sentence to four years and add another 1000 dinars to his fine. Later the same year he was sentenced to a further 18 years for fraudently writing cheques worth more than €300 million. Arrogantly, he began a hunger strike in protest.

A month earlier Ben Ali and Leila had both been sentenced in absentia to 35 years in jail and fined 91 million dinars (€45 million; $59 million; £37 million) for systematic theft of the public coffers, though it seems unlikely that Saudi Arabia will ever agree to any extradition request. Nesrine and her husband fled to Paris where they live in several suites of a Disneyland hotel accompanied by an entourage of staff. She was sentenced to eight years in jail and fined 50 million dinars in absentia for illegal real estate acquisition. Belhassan and his wife fled to a house they own in Montreal and have applied for refugee status in Canada.

Financial corruption were not the only despotic acts performed by ‘The Family’. Political dissent was not tolerated in any form. Two examples in the last year or so of Ben Ali’s reign show the petty and vindictive nature of the treatment meted out by a president in fear of his own people. Shortly after performing a 30-minute stand-up routine which spoofed Ben-Ali and several members of his wife’s family, comedian Hedi Oula Baballah was a passenger in a car which was stopped by police and found to contain drugs and counterfeit money. Very few people in Tunisia believe that these were not planted by police on Ben-Ali’s instruction. Baballah was sentenced to a year in jail and fined 1,000 dinars. After serving six weeks of his sentence Ben-Ali pardoned Baballah and he maintained a very low profile for the remainder of the time Ben Ali was in power, leading to reasonable speculation that his release was conditional on his not further criticising ‘The Family’. An example of one of Baballah’s scandalous jokes: President Ben-Ali gets stopped by the police for speeding when out driving by himself. He tells the officer that he is the President, Zine el Abidine Ben Ali, but the cop says "never heard of you," and arrests him. At the police station Ben-Ali shows his ID card card and the custody officer says, "Its OK. You can let him go. He’s related to the Trabelsis."

Less well treated was Slim Boukdhir, a freelance journalist and correspondent of the Al Arabya newspaper, who had written an article critical of Ben Ali’s family. He was abducted by unidentified men who dumped him near a park stripped of his clothes, having sustained serious injuries. Returning home after hospital treatment his house was surrounded by security forces who denied access to all visitors for four days. Soon afterwards, after writing another critical article, Boukdhir was arrested for not carrying his ID card and ‘insulting’ a police officer. He also received a one year sentence, which he served without pardon.

Ironically, the Tunisian martyr who heralded the ‘Jasmine Revolution’, not only within Tunisia, but ultimately in the ‘Arab Springs’ of Egypt and Libya, was a man not unlike Leila Ben-Ali’s own father. Twenty-seven year old street vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi had been continually harrassed and had his fruit and vegetables repeatedly confiscated by town officials in the small city of Sidi Bouzid. The last straw came on December 17th 2010 when he was assaulted and his electronic scales were taken. Some reports state that he was also slapped in the face by a female official something, as an Islamic male, he found particularly demeaning. He went immediately to the town hall and demanded the return of his scales. When he was refused a meeting with the local mayor he poured petrol over himself in the foyer and set it alight. Although he survived the immolation he never regained consciousness and died of his burns two weeks later on January 4th. Ben Ali had visited Bouazizi in hospital and promised his family he would send him to a specialist burns unit in France for treatment but this was never arranged. Bouazizi subsequently received the 2011 Sakharov Prize for Human Rights and had two squares named after him, one in Tunis and one in Paris. There are currently plans for two films to be made about his life.

The respect shown for Bouazizi by Tunisians is surprising given that suicide is strictly forbidden in Islam. The Islamic view on this is unambiguous; our lives are not actually our possessions, we each simply hold our life in trust for Allah, making human beings not fully independent entities but merely trustees acting on behalf of Allah. Although some Islamic pundits do have a more lenient attitude to suicide, towards those suffering severe depression for example, stricter interpretations of the Koran emphasise that there are no excuses. In this view Paradise is always forbidden for those committing suicide. Referring directly to events in Tunisia a fatwa from theologians at the highly influential Al-Azhar mosque in Cairo reiterated that "suicide violates Islam even when it is carried out as a social or political protest”.

This attitude may appear to negate the validity of suicide bombings but the particular brand of convoluted reasoning made possible only by religion argues otherwise. The term ‘suicide bomber’ is considered a misnomer brought about by a ‘western’ style of thinking. The primary purpose of someone strapping a bomb to themselves and causing it to explode is not to kill themselves but rather to kill as many enemies of Islam as possible. Their own death is viewed as a necessary sacrifice and so they become martyrs. Allah will thus be pleased with their confidence and conviction of belief, therefore, they cannot reasonably be called ‘suicide bombers’. The logic of this view may be sound but the morality surely stinks to high heaven (sic). This peculiar attitude to suicide is compounded by the view that such an individual who is unfortunate or inept enough for the explosion to occur before he reaches his intended targets, or who otherwise fails to kill any infidels, is deemed by some Islamic pundits to have actually committed suicide. Convoluted reasoning indeed.

My first venture outside the budget hotel I had booked into in Tunisia’s third largest city, Sousse, brought me face to face with another aspect of humanity with which Islam has considerable difficulty. An early morning stroll along Bou Jafaar Beach attracted a local guy of about my age (mid-50s) who came walking toward me smiling away as if he had found a long lost friend. He spoke very good English and enquired in the mock friendly yet exasperatingly nosy manner commonly encountered in the tourist haunts of developing countries; “where are you from?, in which hotel are you staying? is this your first time in Tunisia?, are you not with your wife?, have you been to the medina? I’d be happy to show you around.... etc etc”. Having had plenty of experience over the years with what are ultimately thinly-veiled attempts to make some money from tourists, I answered him politely and offered only as much information as I thought he may need to feel placated.

Every developing country I have visited has a seemingly endless pool of underemployed guys utilising a local brand of one-line catchphrase ultimately aimed at extracting money from the inexperienced tourist. India has a plethora of ‘tourist guides’ available to show you around, no charge of course! An added ‘bonus’ is that they all have a cousin who owns a carpet store, or perhaps makes jewellery. In Morocco every town and village has a ‘Berber Festival’ which happens to be “today only, I can take you there”. Of course, should you agree you can be sure you will pay a visit to “the carpet shop of my cousin”. Tunisia’s catchphrase is “Hello, don’t you remember me? I am chef/waiter/barman at your hotel, I would be happy to show you my city”. Rest assured, he too will have a cousin who is a purveyer of fine carpets. I naturally assumed, therefore, that my new friend’s ulterior motive was to acquaint me with the small businessmen in his extended family, but he seemed far more interested in my wife and why she was not accompanying me on my travels. We strolled further along the beach chatting together and, at the point where his curiousity seemed sated, he turned to me, put his hand on my shoulder and suggested we “go somewhere else together, somewhere quiet, we have a nice time”.

Many years ago I ran a food store which attracted a wide cross section of people including many members of the gay community. Chatting to a lesbian couple one day I asked them why they and their friends tended to shop at my place and not with one of my competitors. They looked at me a little nonplussed. “Because you’re gay” was the straightforward answer. I truly felt like I had let them down when I broke it to them that I was straight. Their laughing reply? “We honestly all thought you were gay!”. I’m pleased to say that my coming out appeared to make no difference to their subsequent food purchasing arrangements. A decade or so later I told my wife this story and she remarked that she could understand why some people might think I was gay. I remain bemused.

I suppose most people have been propositioned by someone of the same sex at some point in their lives and I’m certainly no exception, but I didn’t expect it to happen with the first Tunisian male I spoke to at any length. I’d heard a few stories of travellers being propositioned in hammams but never on a beach. After letting him down lightly, he sauntered off, a little embarrassed, I think. I continued my walk, eyeing possible ‘Kodak moments’ rather than the local men. It got me thinking though, that it was a brave thing he did, publicly with someone he didn’t know, in an Islamic country. Attitudes to homosexuality in Tunisia don’t exactly flounder in the dark ages as in Saudi Arabia or Iran, they are relatively liberal for a Koran-based culture. But they are certainly less than enlightened, probably resembling most English-speaking countries in the 1950s with homosexual acts, even in private, punishable by up to three years jail. Tunisia has yet to have any public figure acknowledge their homosexuality, no political party or politician has ever shown support for gay rights and no organisations represent the gay community. It’s a typical religious-based ‘pretend it doesn’t exist’ social climate.

Ironically, much of the cafe culture in Tunisia, at least those establishments frequented by the twentysomething crowd look, to the Western European eye at least, somewhat gay. Young men in Tunisia tend to dress with monotonous regularity, in all dark clothing. Their dark hair, all styled similarly short, their ubiquitous wearing of dark sunglasses combined with a generous bristle of fashion statement stubble presents them as an army of George Michael wannabes. The fact that these guys invariably sip their coffee in groups sans women only cements this image. The copycat fashion reminded me of when I was in India in the mid 1980s when the incongruous hairstyle of choice for hip young men was that worn by Michael Jackson.

I had one further gay related encounter a few days later. On arrival in the pictureque coastal town of Mahdia and walking from the train station to the medina, a lanky youth of about 16-years sidled up alongside and made the requisite enquiries as to my nationality and hotel arrangements etc. After broaching the subject of the whereabouts of my wife he asked me outright “are you gay?”. My response was “No, should I be?” The look of horror on his face was comical as he emitted a ridiculously long drawn out “No-ooooooo!!”. Whether he was actually gay, sizing me up as a possible trick, or just plain nosy I’m not certain. It’s just not the sort of question you’d expect to be asked from someone you’ve known for all of two minutes.

I stumbled upon a further ‘pretend it doesn’t exist’ Tunisian attitude to human sexuality while wandering around the maze of alleys that comprise the medina in Sfax, Tunisia’s second city. Unlike the old towns of Spain and Portugal, Tunisians rarely leave the front doors of their houses open. Walking past a few surprisingly open doors in an alley no more than two to three metres wide I started to notice that the inner steps to the second floor where all bathed in pink or red lights. Not expecting to see Little Amsterdam in Tunisia I simply didn’t make the connection at first. It didn’t dawn on me until, when walking past one such doorway, a not unattractive woman in her thirties very gently wrapped her arm around mine and giving me a smouldering look started to walk me upstairs.

And it really was gentle. Unlike the vendors of tourist trinkets, carpets and clothing in the tourist areas there was no verbal hard sell here. Though it was a blatant attempt to have me part with my money the approach could certainly be labelled affectionate. Another charming attempt to have me part with my cash was experienced courtesy of a barber in the medina in Sousse. Now I’m bald and what hair that does survive clings to the sides, so I usually shave myself once a fortnight to a 3mm length. I had my fortnightly shave by the medina barber who then posed proudly upright for my photograph, brush in one hand clippers in the other. The very next day he spotted me walking past his shop and, leaving his seated customer mid-shave, proceeded to offer me the very same service as the day before at just half the cost, all the while looking concerned at the state of my head, pointing out tiny anomalies in the pattern of hair growth. And then again the day after....

After politely declining my would be lovers offer of gratification I walked back down the few steps she had accomplished, back into the alley and noticed, again for the first time, the string of men of all ages just hanging around, all silent and embarassed like schoolchildren who’d been told to keep the noise down. What surprised me most, though, was that they all completely ignored the infidel with the big camera around his neck blatantly checking them all out. They could easily have ganged up on me and stolen my camera, money, credit cards, whatever, yet they just totally ignored me, even though I stuck out like a sore thumb. As I turned a corner taking me away from the red light houses, a boy aged perhaps twelve years offered me, in broken French, the services of his mother or his sister for ten dinar (about £4 / €5).

Relating my story to two young French guys in the hotel bar who had travelled extensively throughout North Africa, their first question was “êtes-vous circoncis?”, accompanied by a snipping action made with index and middle finger and youthful sniggering. What is it about Tunisia that people have to feel they must ask questions of a sexual nature to people they have only just met? It transpired, however, that those of us fortunate enough not to be circumcised would nevertheless be unfortunate enough to be charged double should a womans services be sought. Islamic prostitutes obviously need to maintain their standards, though I wonder what they would charge a Jewish punter?

Another fairly common sight in the cities is the fifty-plus western women, generally German or French, though with a smattering of British, partnered up, arm in arm, with Tunisian guys in their twenties and thirties. This seems entirely uncontroversial. It’s a sort of reverse sex tourism to that of say Thailand. Some young guys actually make a sort of living out of it. They have their food and drinks paid for, a few gifts of clothing etc and on the day their sugar mommies go back home a new planeload arrive. Most likely a win-win situation if care is taken.

The reason I hadn’t initially noticed the men hanging around outside the brothels is probably because the sight of men hanging around doing nothing is a common sight in North Africa. Go to the centre of any village, town or city and the streets will be full of men with seemingly nothing to do and nowhere to go. Unemployment and underemployment remain the prime indicators of the economy despite serious efforts to generate income from tourism and foreign investment in industry. Inward investment has come particularly from France and is simply a means by which companies can cut costs, pay lower wages and repatriate their profits. This is understandable in a market economy mentality. What I do find difficult to understand, however, is the ubiquitous sense of fatalism that many people seem to have, the all pervasive notion of ‘Insha'Allah’. It’s not so much that you hear people actually saying it (though you do), it’s the resulting sense of apathy that inevitably results from a worldview that no endeavour is worth trying unless it pleases Allah (how on earth would you know?) or that nothing at all happens unless Allah wills it.

One of the most despicable consequences of such a mentality is something I have observed in several Islamic countries. In the West, if an ambulance races up behind other cars, sirens blaring, drivers will readily perform the trickiest of manoeuvres, mounting kerbs at traffic lights etc, to let it pass. Not so in Islamic countries, where the ambulance and the fate of the person inside will often be ignored, ‘Insha'Allah’. At a more mediocre level, you will often see groups of men (and it is always men, women are obviously too busy with the household chores) standing around with nothing to do while skiploads of litter swirl around them in the breeze. This is because outside of the ‘zone touristique’ there appear to be no litter bins. Rubbish is even strewn around immediately outside establishments such as small businesses and cafes where the proprietor has obviously gone to some effort and expense to make the place look smart.

Two of the most commendable institutions in Tunisia are the universal healthcare and mandatory education systems. Despite this the numbers of children not attending school is obvious. During any schoolday you can guarantee to see kids riding on the back of scooters and donkey carts, tending the family goat or sheep herd, just walking along the road, doing anything but getting an education. Nothing emphasises the gulf between a developing and a developed country more than the attitude they have toward educating it’s upcoming generation.

“What did the last driver charge you?” he taxi driver asked. “Three dinars” I replied, even though I had no clue, as I hadn’t caught a cab in Tunisia before, though I knew they were considered famously cheap to a European resident. It was simply the amount that came into my head. If only all financial transactions were this easy. “OK”. So I jump in next to the driver and he steers the car into the flow of traffic – without first looking in his mirror, of course – causing a line of cars to screech to a halt and play a cacaphonous urban symphony on their horns. It was soon afterward that I noticed the unmistakeable sound of a wheel bearing needing replacement. About that moment the fun started. A scooter ridden by a guy in his thirties, easily identifiable with no helmet, roared close alongside the drivers side and a shouting match kicks off.

It has always struck me that both Irish and Scottish Gaelic are the finest languages in which female vocalists can sing passionately. Women singing whispered romantic songs in French definitely have the edge over other languages. Italian is indisputably the natural language for a baritone to woo his lover in a totally infeasible operatic plot. And Arabic is arguably the finest language available in which two testosterone fuelled men can have an argument. The deeply resonant tones and rapid fire delivery marked by a generous overlapping of points made ensure that you are in no doubt as to the seriousness of the ritual.

Enough coins for a good three-course couscous and chicken dinner for two, with wine, came hurtling through the window, smashing against the dashboard and windscreen. I’d never seen legal tender used as a weapon before, especially in less developed countries where they’re usually trying every ruse to get you to part with your money rather than throw it at you. My driver picked up the nearest coin and threw it back with all his might, missing the benevolently violent scooter rider and hitting a parked car. I wonder whether billionaires behave in a similar manner? While us mere wage slaves might have pillow fights for frivolity, causing feathers to rain down on our heads, do those with mega-bucks beat each other over the head with wads of notes, causing dollar and euro bills to rain down on their coiffured heads?

We came to rest at traffic lights for a moment only. Before I could open the door and extricate myself to make other travel arrangements, Tunisia’s answer to Laurel and Hardy turned onto the Avenue Habib Bourguiba (every town has one) with my driver leaning out of his window repeatedly punching the scooter rider in the stomach who, riding left-handed and wobbling perilously, was attempting to return punches of his own. The whole scene was reminiscent of those old fashioned clown acts with the clown car riding around the circus arena while they all fall off, chase the car and climb back on. Car and scooter collided several times even as we drove past the female traffic cop who appears to be a permanent fixture directing the traffic on the corner of Rue Massicault.

She is certainly a sight I have never seen before in an Islamic country. She is very tall and slim with short jet black hair. In fact she was the only woman I saw in Tunisia with short hair. Strikingly beautiful, and I cannot empasise the words striking and beautiful enough, she wears an unfeasibly tight uniform of grey trousers and jacket with a rather kinky looking small grey cap balanced on her head. She goes about her work in a decidedly no-nonsense fashion, forcefully striding toward lucky miscreants punctuating the air with short sharp blasts on a tin whistle invariably followed, her point made to the errant driver, by a majestic swivel of hip and buttocks, releasing butterflies in my stomach evry time. The whole scene is like a carefully choreographed dance and I found it impossible to walk past without stopping to admire the performance. The pistol on her hip only adds to the pervasive air of sexual allure; get her under studio lighting (if only) and she would have been Helmut Newton’s dream model. If ever a woman has taken advantage of Tunisia’s relatively (for an Islamic nation at least) enlightened attitudes to women, she is that woman. I doubt very much whether any man tells her what to do. Especially when he’s driving a car. I had been forewarned that photographing police officers would land me in dire trouble, so I am left with memories only.

Generally speaking women fare better in Tunisia than in most Islamic countries. Ironically, a man is to thank for that; Habib Bourguiba who, in 1956, became the first president of an independent Tunisia. Indeed, he is probably the only Islamic leader ever to have ‘The Liberator of Women’ etched into his lavish mausoleum in his birthplace, now the burger bar and pizza joint tourist ridden town of Monastir. He veered toward secularism and was wary of the power Islam held over the Tunisian people, preventing the country from modernising industrially and socially, having oft been quoted as referring to the hijab and niqab as ‘”an odious rag”. Bourguiba attempted to counter religious influence in three ways; by closing many madrasas (religious schools), by abolishing Sharia law and courts and by the Personal Status Code of 1956 which gave women equal citizenship status to men, ended divorce by the male simply being able to renunciate the marriage, banned arranged marriages and polygamy, and set seventeen as the minimum age for marriage for both sexes. Updates to the code within the past decade gave women further rights to property ownership on divorce and statutory rights to maternal leave from work.

The choice of western styles of dress (usually without a headscarf, albeit modest in other ways) for the majority of Tunisian women is marked in comparison to nearby Algeria and Morocco where it is generally confined to the wealthier families. Nevertheless the hijab and niqab has been making something of a comeback with younger women in the past decade or so. Whether this is due to the worldwide resurgence in fundamentalist Islam or simply a temporary fashion statement inspired by the growth in satellite TV stations from other Arabic nations I cannot say. The latter I hope.

Scooterman sped off into the distance in front of us. Because of the timing of his arrival I had assumed this was a road rage incident caused by the taxi cutting him up as he joined the flow of traffic on Rue de France. I could be wrong about that. Turning to me my driver points toward the receding speck in the distance and, while grinning like a Cheshire cat, announces with enthusiasm, “my brother!” Now whether this was a family feud or just a dysfunctional family or whether he was simply using the standard Islamic term for another Muslim I do not know, but what would likely cause psychological trauma to many people seemed to be quickly forgotten as we proceeded to make small-talk (in a combination of three faltering languages) in the unique way that taxi drivers and hairdressers worlwide are so well versed.

That night in the hotel’s bar-restaurant, after finishing my couscous poisson, I was making headway with a bottle of Magon Majus, a surprisingly good and to be recommended Tunisian red wine. Described by one British expert as “a pleasant, smooth and subtle taste with notes of forest fruits and a hint of vanilla, a beautiful length and pleasant rounded finish” and by my own relatively untrained palate as “surprisingly good, a bit like a Rioja without the oak barrelling”. I noticed one of the two business suits with I-Pads on another table straining his neck to see the cover of the book I was reading. I tilted Dan Dennet’s ‘Darwin’s Dangerous Idea’ in his direction (owned for at least 10 years and never yet read). His face lit up and he dismounted his stool and strode toward me arm outstretched for a shoulder wrenching handshake followed by what I can only imagine was a discourse on his appreciation of evolutionary theory along with a strident criticism of the Islamic version of events leading to the diversity of species. I say ‘imagine’ because he was already on his second bottle of wine and spoke French with an accent I had yet to encounter anywhere in the world. Not that it mattered much, my own spoken French is ‘trés peu’ at best and my Arabic confined to a few words, none of which could be used to convey ideas from the life sciences. His apparently teetotal mate looked on, visibly embarrassed. I too was surprised that he had made his thoughts known so loudly and in so public an arena.

There are growing parallels between Christian and Muslim attitudes toward evolution. Unlike the Bible however, the Koran contains a relatively incomplete chronology of creation. In particular, the ‘six ayums’ it supposedly took Allah to create the seven firmaments plus the Earth do not equate to the six days outlined in Genesis. Ayums tend to be defined as developmental stages, each of which is of an indeterminant time. Thus the notion of an old Earth and so the time required for species to diversify is, on the surface, compatible with Islam. Similarly, some Islamic commentators have likened verses in the Koran to descriptions of the Big Bang and expanding universe.

A surprising number of early Islamic scholars produced texts that anticipated both abiogenesis and modern evolutionary theory. The prolific Arabic author Al-Jahiz (c. 776-869), for example, in his seven-volume ‘Book of Animals’ suggested a form of Lamarkian inheritance in which environmental factors caused a ‘struggle for existence’ resulting in the survival of stronger bloodlines by the transmission of inherited characteristics. Later, Persian scientist Nasir al-Din al-Tusi (1201-1274) outlined a notion of evolution not unlike that of the 20th Century Catholic scientist, philosopher and priest Pierre de Chardin. Al-Tusi considered that the universe initially consisted of equal and similar elements. However, internal contradictions began to appear, resulting in differences between elements. These elements then evolved into minerals, then plants, then animals, and then humans. This evolutionary process was claimed to result from individual variability to adapt to environmental contingencies. Humans were deemed by al-Tusi to be at an intermediate level of evolution with any further evolution taking place in a spiritual dimension, whatever that means. In the 19th century, after initial scepticism, the later writings of the Islamic political activist and commentator Jamal ad-Din al-Afghani (1838-1897) pointed out that Islamic scholars had long written about evolutionary principles. He himself came to accept Darwin’s findings but he was unable to acknowledge that they applied to human beings also. More recently the Ahmadiyya sect of Islam have promoted modern evolutionary theory in it’s entirety albeit with deist underpinnings.

Nevertheless, at the grassroots level modern evolutionary theory has struggled to find acceptance in Islamic countries. One study conducted in 2007 by Salman Hameed, Professor Of Integrated Science and Humanities at Hampshire College and published in ‘Science’ found that as few as 8% of Egyptians agreed with the statement that evolutionary theory is probably or definitely true, rising to 11% of Malaysians, 14% of Pakistanis, 16% of Indonesians, and 22% of Turks. As with Christians, more fundamentalist Muslims are increasingly rejecting evolutionary theory in favour of an explicitly creationist view. Although the silliness of young earth creationism is notably absent and Muslims generally have respect for scientific endeavour, many do find the link between evolution and atheism to be disturbing.

This discrepancy between evidence and faith has been used to particular advantage by the Turkish creationist author Adnan Oktar, who writes under the name Harun Yayha (though some claim this is the joint pen-name of several authors). While I saw no books on evolutionary theory for sale at all in Tunisia, I did find a number of outlets for Arabic translations of Yayha’s writings, available gratis in small stalls set up outside mosques at prayer times.

If this guy were not Muslim and not an ‘old earther’, he could just about take the place of almost any Christian fundamental creationist wingnut with access to the media. First, he has no qualifications in the life sciences, he didn’t even finish his degree course in philosophy. Second, he associates with creationist organisations that are named so as to appear to be legitimate scientific bodies; the ‘Science Research Foundation’, for example. Third, he consistently misrepresents evolutionary theory, both scientifically and philosophically, in particular by his dogged insistence that not only is evolution claimed to occur wholly by random events or chance, but also by ridiculous assertions like “Darwinism, which holds that life has no purpose, is an invitation to suicide”. Fourth, he has offered a prize of 10 trillion Turkish lira to anyone who can produce a single intermediate form fossil. Fifth, he considers evolution to have “laid the groundwork for Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin” and considers academics who teach or research evolutionary theory to be ‘Maoists’. Sixth, he considers acceptance of evolution to be a religion. Seventh, he has repeatedly attempted to use legal means, with some success, to get literature dealing with evolutionary theory banned in Turkey, and similar web and blogging sites blocked. Eighth, he’s been accused of sexual impropriety. You get the drift, I’m sure.

For good measure, however, Yahya not only adds an Islamic-friendly spoonful of holocaust denial to his barmy pudding, but seriously claimed in a 2008 interview in the German magazine ‘Der Spiegel’ that “Muslims who commit acts of terrorism are really atheistic Darwinists trying to discredit Islam”. My favourite quote though, from his website: “Darwinists employ a hypnotic technique that prevents people from thinking independently or examining the true scientific evidence. The reason millions of people have been misled by Darwinism for years is that they have, either knowingly or unknowingly, been taken in by this spell”. Priceless.

Enjoying a cappucino at the cafe opposite the Grand Mosque in Sousse I saw the little handcart being wheeled along and both the free and the very reasonably priced books being put on display a half-hour or so before afternoon prayers began. The serious, informed profile of Harun Yayha adorned several covers. I watched for a quarter of an hour as the faithful walked across the square and into the mosque and what struck me most was not only how few worshippers there were but also their sheer diversity. In Morocco and Algeria, worshippers are plentiful and they tend not to dress in too western a fashion. In Marrakech, for example, lunchtime prayers in the Kasbah Mosque are attended by hundreds, with males spilling out into the street, lying full length on the footpath outside the main entrance, facing Mecca. They are invariably either dressed in traditional djellaba or, for males, something like dark trousers with a plain white shirt. In Tunisia, although available, djellabas are rarely worn by any but a few elderly men and women. Those men responding to the adhan or ‘call to prayer’ in Tunisia are generally dressed in the popular dark coloured conservative and modest western style. Surprisingly, though, there were some teenagers in clothing that would not be out of place in any western suburb: basball caps, sneakers, t-shirts with brazen logos. And, a little disturbing perhaps, young men in army boots, army fatigues and t-shirts with Arabic writing. Not serving soldiers, definitely a fashion statement. These are a minority to be sure, but they are a ubiquitous minority. 

The guy outside the mosque selling and giving away his wares particularly attracted my attention. He looked like Jesus. Or at least what Jesus would have actually looked like and not the blondish haired blue eyed myth of myths so beloved of white skinned Christians who have never quite come to terms with a saviour who would certainly have looked like a long-haired rag-headed hippy from those countries we have a tendency to invade. This guy looked to me like the real deal, long dark hair, black beard, djellaba with hood up, sandals, serene yet serious expression. He would sure have been one popular guy with many of the alternative lifestyle women at Glastonbury or the Burning Man Festival. Yet my Jesus (or Isa in Arabic) lookalike was, neither saviour, nor hippy, certainly not Jewish, but a purveyer of Islamic texts outside a mosque gate. Disseminating peace and love, maybe, but undoubtedly ignorance, primarily. I turned to the two Western dressed guys who ran the cafe, nodded at the bookseller and said something like “Il ressemble à Isa!”. I think they knew what I meant. At least they both laughed heartily. One of them suddenly looked aghast at his watch then ran toward Jesus at the mosque gate. “Late to pray”, his companion explained.

Listening to the majority of Christians talk about Islam you could easily get the impression that the two religions had nothing whatsoever in common, but nothing could be further from the truth. Take Jesus himself for example (the mythical one, not the guy outside the mosque gate). Belief in Jesus as a messenger of God is actually a requirement of being Muslim and he is referred to in the Koran as al-Masīḥ, ‘the Messiah’ and, as with Mohammed, mentioning his name is invariably followed by the phrase “peace be upon him”. A large portion of the Jesus mythology is believed; the visitation of Mary by an angel, the virgin birth, which is one of the most unambiguous teachings of Islam (Mary is actually mentioned more times in the Koran than the Bible, indeed she has a whole chapter named after her. Interestingly, Jesus is always referred to as the son of Mary, despite the patronymic Islamic convention), that Jesus was incapable of sin, that he performed miracles, including raising the dead, that he himself rose from the dead and ascended to God and will one day return to the Earth, ‘Insha'Allah’. The Koran actually refers to Jesus a grand total of 25 times, all in respectful terms, while Mohammed manages a meagre four mentions.

It would arguably be better for those of us who value rational thought if Islam was antithetical to the myth of Jesus. The Islamic adulation of Jesus gives succour to those Christians seeking an interfaith dialogue. On the surface this may appear to be a calming influence on the current sociopolitical situation. However, while fundamentalist Islamic clerics might regularly and aggressively push the infidel line, appeasement is an attitude readily exploited by anti-science creationists like Harun Yayha. His influential appeal for unity, for example, does not stop at theology. As he states, “People with true faith, who abide by the religion of the Prophet Abraham and believe in the one Allah must combine their strengths, grow deeper in faith and grow even stronger in unity in order to wage an intellectual struggle against the atheist, Darwinist system that is trying to rule the world”.

Yet creationism viewed as an objective science as opposed to an interesting mythology is a fundamentalist Christian doctrine. It could be argued that some threads of Islamic fundamentalism would not have become as popular as they have if it weren’t for inputs from fundamental Christianity. Arguments used by Haryun Yahya, such as lack of transitional fossils, the impossibility of functioning intermediate forms, the alleged unreliability of dating methods, and the statistical improbability of evolution at the molecular level are all cloned from American ‘creation research’ literature and simply given an Islamic flavour. The result has been that increasingly throughout the Islamic world, even in semi-secular Tunisia, whenever science and religion collide, it is increasingly science that is expected to genuflect before faith.

After Tunisia’s first democratic elections at the end of 2011, the moderate Islamist party Ennahda, formerly banned from participating in politics, emerged as the clear winner, achieving 90 of the 217 parliamentary seats (another moderate Islamist party, Al Aridha Al Chaabia won a further 19 seats). Ennahda have stated that they “are not going to use the law to impose religion," and intend to keep Article 1 of the 1956 constitution which states that "Tunisia is a free, independent and sovereign state, its religion is Islam, it’s language is Arabic and it is a republic”, and further, that “there will be no other references to religion in the constitution”.

This reasonably innocuous decision, however, has angered many ultra-conservative Islamists, particularly supporters of the Saudi-inspired Salafist Party. They feel betrayed because while in exile for 22 years in London, the then leader of Ennahda Rachid Ghannoucci, though widely considered to be a liberal Muslim, had nevertheless sometimes advocated a strict application of sharia law to reverse the influence of western decadence. Indeed, he has an anti-Western pedigree writing that "secularism is turning the West into a place of selfish beasts". He supported Saddam's invasion and annexation of Kuwait as well as, unusually for a Sunni Muslim, giving long-standing support for Iran’s Islamic revolution. A further image problem for the prospect of continued semi-secularism in Tunisia is that the despised, and now largely deposed elite, were traditionally the country’s strongest supporters of secularist ideals.

Whether parties like Ennahda and Al Aridha Al Chaabia are genuinely committed to maintaining a degree of secularism in Tunisia or hypocritically pragmatic in an attempt to maintain economic ties with the west remains to be seen. One small businessman I spoke to feared that Ennhada had much stronger Islamic goals than they are portraying, and were simply biding their time while exercising ‘Taqiyya’, or the Islamic right to lie to infidels, whether Tunisian or foreign. He also suggested, however, that if this proved to be the case it would not be successful as Tunisians no longer feared dictators and would not hesitate to rise up again, so Islamic parties like Ennhada must be careful to remain democratic. On the other hand, another restaurant owner told me that he thinks it inevitable that Tunisia will become Islamist and be governed by Sharia law “just like Iran is”. I am further heartened then, to have met the guy who shook my hand because I was reading a book by Dan Dennett.

Whatever their real intentions, Ennahda’s current public profile contrasts strongly with neighbouring Libya who later overthrew the Gaddafi regime with the military aid of the UK and France. Here, Moustapha Abdeljalil, the senior member of the National Transition Committee, proclaimed, in his first speech after liberation that “as of now, Sharia is the upmost form of law in the country; conflicting regulations will be overruled”. One of their first decisions was to reinstate polygamy.

Unlike Ennahda, the Tunisian Salafists are not well organised politically but are fast becoming an increasingly vocal conservative voice, with enormous influence in some regions due to their religious and charitable work. A recent government statement claimed that approximately 400 of Tunisia’s 5,000 mosques were under the direct influence of Salafist imams. In recent months, Salafists have attacked synagogues, threatened women who own businesses and women wearing skirts, albeit mostly in smaller towns. In cities they have demonstrated in support of female university students who have been refused access to lectures while wearing the completely veiled niqab, and actively intimidated male and female academics wishing to maintain the ban. In true Taliban-style they demonstrated in Tunis against the celebration of World Theatre Day 2012, assaulting actors and destroying musical instruments. Other demonstrations have targeted the presence of tourists in Tunisia. On both occasions protesters waved the black and white ‘caliphate flags’, associated with al-Qaeda and the Afghani Taliban, respectively.

The important and unpalatable point to make here is that very little activity of this nature occurred in Tunisia before the ‘Jasmine Revolution’. The removal of Ben-Ali and his myriad hangers-on has had the effect of increasing the divide between secular and Islamic attitudes in Tunisia. If ever a country can be seen as a barometer for the effect of religious pressure following the Arab Spring it is semi-secular Tunisia. Thus if Tunisia ultimately evolves from the semi-secular despotism of Ben-Ali to the full-blown theocratic despotism of Islamic fundamentalism what hope is there for Libya and Egypt and Syria?

To finish on a non-political note, it would be interesting to know why it is that when travelling through the Tunisian countryside you will encounter hectare upon hectare of olive groves, yet when eating in a restaurant the average serving in your couscous or pizza is two and a half olives!


Image #1 'Fuck Ben-Ali'
Image #2 'Post Revolution'
Image #3 'Portrait Pour Un Dinar'
Image #4 'Shy In Sfax'
Image #5 'Dark Reading Matter'
Image #6 'Call To Prayer'
Image #7 'Tunisian Blue'

Images #1, 2, 3, 4 & 7 taken with Pentax K20D and Sigma 17-70mm lens
Image #5 taken with Pentax K20D and Pentax 100-300mm lens
Image #6 taken with Pentax K20D and Sigma 10-20mm lens

Physics As Truth, Truth As Poetry

From a physicist:

"The amazing thing is that every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics:

You are all stardust.

You couldn’t be here if stars hadn’t exploded, because the elements — the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things that matter for evolution — weren’t created at the beginning of time. They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars, and the only way they could get into your body is if those stars were kind enough to explode. So, forget Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here today".

Lawrence Krauss.


From a poet:

Spirit
is Life

It flows thru
the death of me
endlessly
like a river
unafraid
of becoming
the sea

The self-penned epitaph on the grave of poet Gregory Corso (1930-2001)

'Hedd, Perffaith Hedd', Pentax K20D, Sigma 17-70mm. The title of the image is in Cymraeg (Welsh language) it is commonly seen on gravestones in Welsh-speaking areas and translates as ‘Peace, Perfect Peace’

The Rape At Rhydcymerau

They have planted saplings for the third war
On the land of Esgeir-ceir and the fields of Tir-bach
By Rhydcymerau
I remember my grandmother in Esgeir-ceir,
Pleating her apron as he sat by the fire,
Skin of her face yellowy-dry as a Peniarth manuscript
And on her old lips the Welsh of Pantcelyn.
A piece of last century's puritan Wales she was.
My grandfather, though I never saw him,
Was a character - small, vital, tough, lame,
Fond of his pint;
He'd wandered in from the eighteenth centurt.
They brought up nine children,
Poets, deacons, Sunday School teachers,
Leaders each of them in their little sphere.

My Uncle Dafydd farmed Tir-bach,
A country poet, a local rhymester,
His song to the bantam cockerel famous around:
'The bantam cock goes scratching
Round and round the garden...'
I went to him each summer holiday
Of shepherding and sketching lines of cynghanedd,
Englynion and eight-line stanzas in 8-7 measure.
He too brought up eight children,
The oldest son a Calvinist minister
Who also wrote poetry -
In our family a nestful of bards.

And now there is nothing there but trees,
And their insolent roots sucking the ancient earth -
Conifers were once was community,
Forest in place of farms,
Corrupt whine of the southern English where once was poetry, was divinity,
A barking of foxes where lambs and children cried,
And in the central darkness
In the den of the English minotaur,
And on the branches, as on crosses,
Corpses of poets, deacons, ministers, Sunday School teachers,
Bleaching, rain-washed, desiccated in the wind.

'Rhycymerau' by D. Gwenallt Jones (translated from the Welsh by Jim Perrin)

The last stanza is the one that grips me most tightly. The poem refers to a government orchestrated environmental and social catastrophe, the compulsory purchase and clearing of hill farms, and clearance of the inhabitants, throughout mid-Wales for the commercial growing of conifers for wood production. In 1951 a British government minister said “We intend to plant 800,000 acres in Wales. We intend to change the face of Wales. We know there will be opposition but we intend to force this thing through.” And force it through they did, with the help of generous tax concessions for wealthy investors, including cynically, some members of the government.

The result is an agricultural monoculture. And now there is nothing but trees. Which, when felled, have left a soil so acidic and denuded of soil, washed away by the rain through drainage ditches, that nothing other than fresh plantations of conifer can grow there. Conifers were once was community. And each generation of trees is showing a diminishing return, a desert gifted to future generations to pay for the short-term profit of the already wealthy.

Image #1 'A Curve In The Road', Praktica BC1, Sigma 35-70mm, Agfa Vista
Image #2 'Sunset on Cadair Idris' Pentax K20D, Sigma 17-70mm

Owning Assynt

Who possesses this landscape?
The man who bought it or
the poacher staggering downhill in the early morning
with a deer on his back?

Who possesses this landscape?
the man who bought it or
I who am possessed by it?

False questions, for
this landscape is masterless
and intractable in any terms
that are human.

‘A Man In Assynt’ by Norman MacCaig (1910-1996)


Although he was born in Edinburgh and worked there as a schoolteacher, the Scottish poet Norman MacCaig will always be closely associated with the wilderness region of Assynt in the Western Sutherland region of the Scottish Highlands. It is here he spent every summer since 1947 living in simple cottages, first at Achmelvich, then at Inverkirkaig, north-west and south-west respectively of the small township of Lochinver. A great deal of his poetry was written here, reflecting his deep attachment to this sparsely populated region famous for its row of idiosyncratically shaped mountains, Suilven, Stac Pollaidh, Canisp, to name a few, made up of some the oldest rocks on Earth which, due to continental drift, have travelled all the way from the South Pole.

Indeed, it was study of the geology of Assynt that led to the theory of plate tectonics. The first attempt at deciphering Assynt’s rock formations was made by James Nicol, Professor of Natural History at the University of Aberdeen. His 1861 paper "On the Structure of the North-Western Highlands" proposed an Earth far older than assumed and, in an era of wide belief in scriptural truth, was widely ridiculed. Thirty-six years later, however, Ben Peach and John Horne of the British Geological Survey largely confirmed Nicol’s ideas, demonstrating that the geology of Assynt was not continuous but riven by thrusts, faults and intrusions with Pre-Cambrian rocks atop Cambrian rocks, something that could only have taken place over an interminably long time-frame. This was the first comprehensive demonstration of plate tectonics and, along with Darwin’s still relatively fresh notion of evolution by natural selection, served to drive yet another nail in the coffin of the doctrine that the Earth was the product of an abrupt creation, no more than a few thousand years ago. A monument to the work of Peach and Horne was erected at Inchnadamph, Assynt in 1980.

Norman MacCaig had no particular interest in geology though. He saw his task as having “to woo the mountain, till I know the meaning of the meaning, no less”. Scattered among Assynt’s mountains are the hundreds of lochs and small lochans considered by many to offer the finest wild brown trout fishing in Europe. Most of these small bodies of water are accessible only to those with a robust cardiovascular system (which unfortunately MacCaig did not have in his later years) with visits often requiring an hour or so walking across peat bog, or perhaps a couple of hours of hill walking and scrambling. It was in these desolate places that MacCaig would spend hour upon hour, day upon day, fly-fishing in that unique ambience of silence interspersed only by the calls of moorland birds and the soft slap-slap of the water at the loch’s edge. One only has to read the in-the-moment, Zen-like mood of much of MacCaig’s Assynt poetry to damn forever the lie that atheists can never possess any real meaning for their lives.

And so despite how much he loved the sport of fishing – he considered his honorary life membership of the Assynt Angling Association to be the highest honour he ever achieved, and he achieved many - it was really his excuse for simply ‘being here’, “If you can’t enjoy fishing all day and catching nothing, you are no fisherman”. Or as the mountaineer and fellow fly-fisher Mal Duff once put it, “it’s about the right kind of waiting”. Fishing as meditation.

In Assynt MacCaig wrote not of lofty and learned subjects such as politics (with the possible exception of ‘A Man in Assynt’) or philosophy, but of things elemental; the rotting carcass of a deer, or an abandoned dinghy, the comings and goings in the village shop, dogs, frogs (lots of poems about frogs): “he loved everything that accepted the unfailing hospitality of his five senses” as one old friend remarked. And the elemental things are just what they are. There is practically no metaphor in these writings. 

Beside one loch, a hind’s neat skeleton,
Beside another, a boat pulled high and dry:
Two neat geometries drawn in the weather
Two things already dead and still to die.

I passed them every summer, rod in hand,

Skirting the bright blue, or the spitting grey,
And, every summer, saw how the bleached timbers
Gaped wider and the neat ribs fell away.

Time adds one malice to another one –
Now you’d look very close before you knew
If it’s the boat that ran, the hind went sailing.
So many summers, and I have lived them too.

‘So Many Summers’ by Norman MacCaig


Nevertheless, MacCaig would have been keenly aware that others did not appreciate Assynt in the same poetic way as he. For centuries Assynt had been owned in feudal fashion by wealthy absentee landlords who used the region for indulging their pastimes of trout and salmon fishing, grouse and deer shooting with scant regard for the lifestyle or welfare of the crofters (tenant farmers) who had lived there for generations. In 1913, however, attitudes toward the crofters looked like they might take a turn for the better when William Stewart, who was himself born to a penniless crofting family in the Assynt village of Nedd in the early 1860s, purchased the 24,000 hectare Assynt estate. Emigrating to Canada in 1882 with savings of only 10 shillings and starting his new life as a farm labourer, Stewart had gone on to make a fortune working as a railroad engineer in British Columbia, Canada becoming a partner in Foley, Welch and Stewart, then the largest North American railway contracting firm who had built much of the Grand Trunk Pacific, the Pacific Great Eastern and the Canadian Northern Lines. He was also a partner in Bloedel, Stewart and Welch, then one of the largest logging companies in the world.

Throughout his time in Canada, Stewart had maintained the tenancy of his croft at Nedd, which was farmed by his nephew, Donald MacCauley. One of his two sisters also resided all her life in Assynt, in the village of Drumbeg. Although he was well-liked and fondly remembered, Stewart’s philanthropic vision for Assynt never came fully to fruition. His plans were waylaid by the First World War, when he gave financial assistance to the 72nd Battalion Seaforth Highlanders of Canada and served himself by constructing railways behind the trenches and in Palestine.

In 1935, Stewart’s wife died, he himself was in failing health, and so Assynt was again put up for sale. Two bidders emerged, the Vestey family who had large landholdings in Argentina and Australia, used for rearing beef, and William Filmer-Sankey whose father-in-law, the Nazi-sympathising Duke of Westminster, owned the Kylestrome Estate which bordered Assynt to the north and was financing the deal.

The Duke of Westminster, one of the richest men in the world, had a reputation as a playboy and bon-vivant. He had a 10-year adulterous relationship with the French fashion designer Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel to whom he gifted extravagant jewels, expensive artworks, and a home in the Mayfair district of London. He also gave her a parcel of land in Monte Carlo where she later built a villa. Earlier, the Duke had served under Sir John French, the Commander-in-Chief of the British Expeditionary Force in the First World War. To perform his duties he equipped himself with a Rolls-Royce fitted with a Hotchkiss machine-gun. After the war he had a naval destroyer converted into a steam yacht. The men from the crofts who laid down their lives for King and Country were no doubt pleased for him.

The popular story is that the Duke of Westminster intended to buy the estate as a wedding gift for his daughter and son-in-law but as they had already been married for 11 years and had two children it appears to have been a peculiarly belated wedding gift. Although Filmer-Sankey won the bid, he sold Assynt to the Vestey family very soon afterward, keeping two hectares of land for himself around Loch Assynt. After divorcing his wife, Ursula, in 1940 and remaining single for two decades, 60-year old William married a 19-year old German woman, Waltraud Wirsching. They had three children within five years and both lived at Ruddyglow Park, built on the small parcel of land at Loch Assynt until his death in 1985 and her death in 2005.

It would be no exaggeration to say that the Vestey family proved to be deeply unpopular with the inhabitants of Assynt for the next almost 60 years. To put it bluntly, they treated Assynt as if it were an overseas colony and the inhabitants as if they were natives. As one crofter put it “They'd been used to dealing with native Argentineans and Australian Aboriginals, and they were amazed that the local people here wouldn't do what they were told”.

So in Australia too, the Vestey family have a terrible reputation, not only for their attitude to land ownership but for their attitude to the people who live on that land. In 1914 the Vestey family business acquired the lease of 93,000 square kilometres in the Northern Territory and East Kimberly district of Western Australia for beef-rearing at an incredibly low rent, so low that in 1980 their rent on the 16,000 square kilometre Wave Hill station, 600 kilometres south of Darwin in the Northern Territory, was was only £1,650 per annum. The vast majority of the workers on these cattle stations were aboriginal stockmen from the local tribal communities. Initially they were paid no wages, receiving only food and lodging. Later, when aboriginal workers were paid, they received only 20% of the wage given to white stockmen.

In 1946, the Vestey cattle stations found themselves running short of labour. Concerned, they commissioned a report from the Anthropology department of Sydney University. The report was scathing. The aboriginal workers were found to be living in shacks made from scrap iron and sacking. There was no provision for either a regular supply of clean water, proper sanitation or rubbish disposal. Rations were limited to flour, tea, sugar and bits of beef like the head or feet of a bullock. Their working hours were at the discretion of the station manager and child labour was widely used.

Not surprisingly, in 1966 the Aboriginal Lands Rights Movement began on land owned by the Vestey family when, on August 23rd, Vincent Lingiari led 200 members of his Gurindji tribe off the Wave Hill cattle station. They walked to the Victoria River and set up camp where they stayed until the end of the year. The Gurindji plan was to set up a co-operative venture to catch and break in wild horses and to contract their services to the Vesteys for cattle mustering, fencing, branding and other station work. Legally, however, although it was their traditional tribal land, the Gurindji were squatting on Vestey owned land and risked being thrown off the land of their ancestors. Before that could happen, however, the national media ran the story and the Gurindji people received widespread support from a range of organised groups including trade unions, student unions and several church groups.

The strike lasted for nine years and proved very costly for the Vestey family who had to ship in non-aboriginal workers who were entitled to receive proper rates of pay. It culminated in the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976. This act gave the Gurindji and other indigenous Australians freehold title to their traditional lands in the Northern Territory with rights over mining and other forms of development. Vincent Lingiari was awarded the Order of Australia and had a federal electoral district named after him. He died in 1984.

Although the Vestey family had considerably less power in Assynt than the Northern Territory of Australia, consider the similarities in the local perception of their attitude, as described by John MacKenzie of the Assynt Crofters Trust in the mid 1990s, ``Peter Hay (the Estate Manager) was from Ayrshire. He was ex-Army, and he was a game warden in the national parks of Kenya before he came to Assynt. He treated the people here as he would have done the natives in Africa. It was utterly unacceptable. He was a blustering, bombastic individual with a loud voice. His booming voice and his southern accent would engulf a shop when he entered it. People despised him.'' And further, speaking of Edmund (Lord) Vestey:

“His attitude to the place is to keep it as it is. He wants to come up here for a month in August and enjoy it as it is. He might come to the summer games occasionally. But he has no involvement whatsoever in the community. Except for resisting development.''

Lest it may be said that people who make statements such as these are simply envious of the Vestey family’s enormous wealth, consider the patronising tone of this statement from Edmund Vestey in 1993, “Who was it said, the day central heating comes to the Highlands, that’s the end of the Highlander? They’re that sort of people.”

Preventing the local community from having any say in the development of their own community was the most common complaint made about the Vestey family. Examples include refusing the building of a swimming pool in Lochinver, despite the innovative idea of it being heated by the waste heat given off by the ice plant at the fishing harbour; preventing the Highland Council from developing a site for small businesses; preventing the building of any social housing that could be seen from any property that might be owned by or used by the Vestey family; preventing the building of a new tourist centre in Lochinver; the list goes on and on.

Perhaps the worst example of the Vestey’s as unscrupulous landlords, however, involved the case of the cottars. A cottar was a homeless person who had built a house on estate land by their own hand and then lived in it. Under the crofting laws cottars have the right to buy the deeds to their house from the estate and so bequeath it upon their death. If, however, they decide to enter into a formal tenancy agreement with the estate owner, this right of inheritancy is lost. The estate, in effect, then acquires the house for free. The Assynt Estate, through their Estate Manager, were found to have targeted a number of elderly cottars and convinced them into signing formal tenancy agreements. The Vestey stranglehold over the local housing market was made worse by the number of homes that were not (and are still not) available for use by the local people. The North West Demographic Survey of 1989 found that 31% of all the housing stock in Assynt was available only as a short-term holiday let. In some areas this was as high as 50%. Such a situation has dire consequences for local people by reducing the available housing stock to rent or buy, and having the further effect of driving up prices.

 In 1989 the Vestey family portioned off the coastal crofting strip comprised of 13 villages into three lots (Torbreck, Drumbeg and Stoer) totalling 9,000 hectares and renamed it the North Lochinver Estate. Only 20 hectares of this newly fashioned estate was not used as crofting land. Nevertheless it was advertised as a traditional Highland ‘sporting’ estate for salmon fishing, grouse shooting and deer hunting with little mention made of crofting. The description of the estate in the brochure prepared by the agents John Clegg & Company of Edinburgh was particularly distasteful to the crofting community:

“One need only enter Assynt to see the great sphinx-like mass of Suilven to sense the atmosphere of unreality, almost fantasy, which permeates even the character of the people who live there. Mountains such as Quinag, Canisp, Ben More Assynt, Cul Mor, Cul Beag, Stack Polly and Conival all have the immense power to impress, and all serve to emphasise that man himself is perhaps the alien element in this landscape.”

Man himself is perhaps the alien element in this landscape? There is archeological evidence that humans have lived in Assynt for 10,000 years! As if nature does not include human beings? Whither the crofters, or Norman MacCaig? Or as one crofter observed “tells you a lot about the bastards, doesn’t it?”

A boy skips flat stones out to sea – each does fine
till a small wave meets it head on and swallows it.
The boy will do the same.

The schoolmaster stands looking out the window
with one Latin eye and one Greek one.
A boat rounds the point in Gaelic.

Out of the shop comes a stream
of Omo, weetabix, BiSoDol tablets and a man
with a pocket shaped like a whisky bottle.

Lord V walks by with the village in his pocket.
Angus walks by
Spending the village into the air.

A melodeon is wheezing a clear-throated jig
on the decks of the Arcadia. On the shore hills Pan
cocks a hairy ear; and falls asleep again.

The ten minutes are up, except they aren’t.
I leave the village, except I don’t.
The jig fades to silence, except it doesn’t.

‘Notations of Ten Summer Minutes’ by Norman MacCaig

The eventual buyer was a Mr Zeterburg, a Swedish land speculator whose company Scandinavian Property Services paid £1,080,000. The deal was largely conducted in secret: at no time were the crofters consulted or appraised of the progress of the sale. For the most part the new owner was amenable by his absence. Initially he kept the existing management team for the estate but eventually the responsibility was given to a firm of solicitors in Aberdeen. One event did irk the crofters, however. After repairing a road to a loch where he kept a boat, Zeterburg then put a locked wooden gate across the road, oblivious to the fact that it was used regularly by the local crofters. They sawed it down.

To the Vestey family owning a Scottish estate of non- or marginally profitable land was no problem. It was something that gave them (even more) social status. An indulgence. Somewhere to go in August. Zeterburg’s wealth, however, was in an entirely different league and he needed a return for his money. But Scandinavian Property Services were in no real position to develop the land as a sporting estate because their only income from Assynt was that generated from the crofting tenancies. They soon ran into financial difficulty. In 1992 Scandinavian Property Services filed for bankruptcy with Ostgota, a Swedish bank, as their principal creditor. A London-based liquidator was appointed and the selling agents who had been employed by the Vestey family to conduct the original sale were reappointed.

This time the land was parcelled up into seven lots (Torbreck, Stoer, Clashmore, Phollain Bheithe, Drumbeg, Culkein Drumbeg and Nedd; “names impossible to sound without feeling the poetry and the loss” as the novelist and poet Andrew Greig aptly puts it) with prices ranging from £38,000 to £200,000, totalling £473,000, or offers over £460,000 for all seven lots. Poignantly, the brochure used to promote the sale was almost identical to that offered in 1989. Again, little mention of crofting, except to say that ‘details are available on request’. This splitting of the land into seven lots was of particular concern to the local crofters. Many of the 172 crofts overlapped several of these lots and so a single crofter might find himself or herself having to deal with several landlords, all of whom would be unknown quantities.

This spurred the crofters to register their own company, Assynt Crofters Ltd, with the aim of raising enough money to buy the estate for themselves. Within three months a feasibility study and business plan was prepared. In addition to funds raised by the crofters themselves and other assorted local individuals, donations came from abroad, especially from expatriate Scots in New Zealand, Canada and the United States. These individual donations amounted to approximately half of the available monies. Grants and loans were also made available by Sutherland District Council and Highland Regional Council.

The Assynt crofters also devised plans to make the estate as unattractive as possible to potential bidders. In the event their bid failed, they were determined to take legal action based on a judgment in which three judges of the Scottish Land Court gave a radical interpretation of the 1976 Crofting Reform Act. They had decided that crofters could buy their land for 15 times their annual rent and then sell that land to a third party without the estate taking half of any development value, as was previously the practice. In a further attempt to make the land less appealing to those looking to buy a ‘sporting estate’ the crofters had six tonnes of fencing material flown in by helicopter and built three kilometres of fencing around the best grazing land. By improving the grazing land the crofters would be able to argue that any deer found on that land could be legally culled by themselves.

Initially eleven bids were made but all were rejected by the liquidators Stoy Hayward. Assynt Crofters Ltd were the only prospective purchaser interested in all seven lots of the estate and had offered in excess of £235,000. A second bid of £245,000 also failed. However, a third bid of £300,000 was accepted on 8th December 1992, a mere six months after the idea of self-ownership was first mooted. The celebratory ceilidh was held in the Culag Hotel in Lochinver, and is rightly remembered as a “right damn wild hoolie”. On February 1st 1993 ownership of the land formally changed hands. The estate is now run by a democratically elected Board of Directors representing each of the thirteen villages within the estate who serve for three years plus two co-opted Directors with specialist knowledge of fishing and hunting. There are now 182 crofts housing a population of approximately 300 people.

Further legislation in the form of the Land Reform Act 2004 cemented further the right of local communities to have a say in the future development of the land they call home. The Act provides the right to buy land able to contribute to the sustainable development and well-being of a local community. Once an interest by a local community has been registered, the land cannot be sold without that community's interest being taken into account. A little more than a year after the Act was passed in the Scottish Parliament a newly formed body, the Assynt Foundation, succeeded in purchasing the remaining 18,000 hectares of Assynt wilderness in a £2.9 million community buy-out of the Glencanisp and Drumrunie Estates which including the iconic mountains of Suilven, Canisp, Cul Mor and Cul Beag. This land is far more akin to a sporting estate.

Nevertheless, the feudal mentality of absentee landlords has yet to be completely eradicated from Scottish soil as recent events on the Pairc Estate on the Isle of Lewis, directly west of Assynt, attest. This 11,000 hectare estate comprises 208 crofts and 11 villages with approximately 400 inhabitants. The local crofter’s Pairc Trust had made a number of unsuccessful attempts at a voluntary purchase of part of the estate since 2004. Only the common grazing land was sought; it was intended that the 2000 hectares of crofting land would still remain in the possession of the owner Barry Lomas, an accountant from Leamington Spa in England, who inherited the land bought by his family in 1924. Exasperated by refusals to sell, the Pairc Trust invoked their right to buy under Section 3 of the Act in which crofting communities have an absolute right to buy, irrespective of the owner's objections, at a price to be independently set, if ministerial consent is obtained. This consent was obtained in March 2011.

Lomas however has asked for a judicial review in the Court of Session claiming that the Land Reform Act breaches the European Convention on Human Rights. He claims the buy-out infringes his human right to ‘peaceful enjoyment of his possessions’ (Protocol 1, Article 1 of the ECHR), and that he has a right to “defence against a deliberately targeted, hostile and political attack on a landlord who seeks to protect the reasonable value of its assets.” Of course a cynical observer might suggest that the land rental for the 205 MW, 57 turbine windfarm that Scottish and Southern Electricity have proposed to build on the portion of the estate that the crofters wish to buy is the real incentive for Lomas to fight tooth and claw to hold onto the land. Setting aside the pros and cons of such a large windfarm in a wilderness region, surely it is more reasonable, just and fair, that the “peaceful enjoyment of his possessions” should not be allowed to take priority over the livelihood, security and aspirations of 400 other individuals, most of whose families have lived on the land for hundreds of years.

Regardless of whether Lomas views Pairc Estate as a source of income from a windfarm or no more than ‘somewhere to go in August’, his attitude is both feudal and despotic, with scant regard for the lifestyle or welfare of the crofters, in the best tradition of the Vestey family in Assynt. Hopefully his attitude will be viewed by the judiciary as another example of how wealthy absentee landlords are unwilling to consider the welfare of the very people who live and work on the land. Feudal attitudes toward land ownership can never engender a sense of place in as poetic a way as Norman MacCaig has in his beloved Assynt. A millionaire of an entirely different kind. One with invisible treasures:


All day we fished
The loch clasped in the throat
of Canisp, that scrawny mountain,
and caught trout and
invisible treasures.

We walked home, ragged millionaires,
our minds jingling, our fingers
rustling the air.

And now, lying on the warm sand,
we see
the rim of the full moon
rest on a formal corrugation of water
at the feet of
a Brittania cloud:
sea and sky, one golden sovereign
that will never be spent.

‘Rich Day’ by Norman MacCaig

Image #1 'The Road To Assynt', Pentax K20D, Sigma 17-70mm lens
Image #2 'Skeleton', Pentax K20D, Sigma 17-70mm lens
Image #3 'Sadscape', Praktica BX20S, Carl Zeiss Jena 50mm lens, Konica film
Image #4 'The Edge Of The Loch At The End Of The Day', Pentax K20D, Sigma 10-20mm lens
Image #5 'Trout For Dinner?', Pentax K20D, Sigma 17-70mm lens

All images captured in Assynt