Politician's Opinion

My father’s family can be tracked as far back as the Union with England in 1707 when they were working as farm labourers at Inchgall Mill, by Lochore. Like most families of the time, the Browns had to move to where the work was and so around 1880, great-great-grandfather, Alexander Brown, took over the tenancy of the East Lochhead farm and later, as the family expanded and needed more land to farm, his brother John acquired the tenancy of Wester Lochhead. By draining and reclaiming land that had previously been written off as swamp they played their small part in assisting the transition from a nation of small plots of land that were part of big landed estates through to the era of land ‘improvement’ and new farming techniques. that intensified the cultivation of Fife’s most successful crops - wheat and barley, My great-grandfather, John Brown, made the next move, -----to the neighbouring farm at Brighills, a transfer forced upon the family by the losses his father in law had incurred farming Brighills. As my grandfather recorded in a written note, the Brighills Farm was at the time of his arrival ‘in such a state that it could not grow crops of any kind.’ But just as John Brown was working out how to repair Brighills after many years of neglect, there was a deep recession -and then within a few years the family ‘s fortunes suffered again as much of the land they farmed was taken over by mine working. By 1909 the new Brighills pit employed 1400 men, growing to 1700 in 1912. The collection of nearby pits together employed over 5000 men. By the outbreak of war, Fife, with 20,000 miners, produced 10 million of Scotland’s 40 million and Britain’s 300 million annual tonnage, much of it to power the industrial revolution in Scotland, but much also exported to Germany, Russia, France and Scandinavia.

The fate of my grandfather, born at Brighills in 1878, and that of his brothers and sisters, is a fair illustration of what happened to many farming communities as the twentieth century got under way. All went to school in Auchterderran but left school as early as they could – at fourteen – to help work the land. My great-grandparents’ first child, Janet, stayed on the farm and died unmarried in 1939. Next were John and Alexander.

When they were old enough, both left for Edinburgh. Alexander became a writer and his book of poems on Fife was published before he died tragically in a tram accident in Edinburgh in 1920. The last born, James, was to die an infant.

The second sister, Lizzie, married another farmer near by, whose family had been on the Wester Colquhally farm for centuries. And that left the three youngest sons – my grandfather and his two younger brothers, David and George – struggling to find enough work to keep them on a farm already diminished in size and output by mine workings. The oldest relatives I remember meeting – my father’s father, and my two great-uncles – were all born at Brighills Farm, but my grandfather was not to remain there. For a brief moment he thought he was in luck: in his early thirties, he was promised by his uncle that the lease of the nearby Little Raith farm would be transferred to him when it was renewed with the Wemyss Estate in November 1911. At that time most Fife men didn’t marry until thirty or so. They waited because they had little security in their work and because they did not want to fall victim to a Poor Law that offered, at best, only limited and temporary payments to unemployed men.

So, on the basis of the promised tenancy, my grandfather felt he could safely marry Rachel Mavor at Easter Lochhead in September 1910, but sadly the estate owner passed the tenancy to someone else when it came up for review.

My grandfather, newly married, went in search of work. He spent the next twenty years moving around Fife.

First he went to Lochhead to work as a shepherd and then he went to New Gilston, arriving there only days before my father was born in October 1914.

This was just a few days after the outbreak of the First World War and my grandfather had to decide whether to enlist.

His cousin, who had trained to be a carpenter, joined up and became one of thousands of men from the east of Scotland who tragically lost their lives in battle. But my grandfather’s work was listed as essential for the war effort and so he stayed behind on the farms. He had gone to New Gilston on the promise that the land – which, at that point, was not enclosed – would be fenced off for sheep: without fencing it was impossible to make sheep farming profitable. When the landowner reneged on the promise, my grandfather was forced to move again, this time to act as shepherd at a nearby farm called Nisbetfield. But no labourer’s job was ever secure for long. In the fast-changing circumstances of the immediate post-war months, after the Nishbetfiled tenancy was given up by its holder, the family had to move to yet another farm, near Pitlessie. The post-war years were even more difficult for everyone. Unemployment rose dramatically. Poverty levels were so high in Fife that parish councils petitioned the Government to take responsibility for unemployment relief. Work was highly insecure then, and my grandfather had already lost both work and the tied accommodation that went with it many times. So in 1928 he used the small savings he had built up to buy his own house for the first time and the family of three moved into the village of Kingskettle. It was in the same decade that an uncle of my father’s left the Brighills tenancy the family had occupied for more than fifty years for good. By 1936 all members of the family had moved out of farming in the Lochgelly area, after more than 200 years there.

For my family, as for so many, the only connection to the land we once farmed is handed-down memories. With my grandfather with only part-time work for much of his later life and with most of the family pushed off the land, the inter-war years that caused so many to emigrate were difficult for the Browns. The next fifty years saw the collapse of all Fife’s biggest industries – mining, linen and linoleum. Some people were lucky to get on through education. My father was the first in our extended family to go to university, to St Andrews, where he matriculated during the Great Depression to study Divinity. Back then a fraction of young Scots got the chance of university. My father’s opportunity, as he acknowledged, was only made possible by a string of teachers, who invested in him as his family moved around Fife and by a repayable loan from Fife County Council.

Every Fife family has a story of its own to tell: the rest of my story is told in the book, copies of which are available from our office at Carlyle House, Kirkcaldy.’