The Silent Weaver

Citation

Weeks, S. (2013), "The Silent Weaver", Working with Older People, Vol. 17 No. 2, pp. 95-95. https://doi.org/10.1108/13663661311325517

This paperback, subtitled The Extraordinary Life and Work of Angus MacPhee, is an investigation into the life of a Scottish “outsider artist”, and generally makes for a fascinating read. Hutchinson has comprehensively researched the available source material (citing nine pages of references) but the subject remains elusive, which given his insular background is hardly surprising.

MacPhee was born in 1915, and after his first early formative years on the Scottish mainland, where predominantly English was spoken, his father returned the family to a small community on the island of South Uist, in the Outer Hebrides. There they resumed their lives of pretty‐much unrelenting hardship as tenant farmers, steeped in a Gaelic speaking enclave of devout Roman Catholics.

As a youngster Angus, who left school at 14, was taught the old working ways, where ingenuity with found materials saved hard‐earned cash. Horses were integral to their farming, and bridles and harnesses were woven from the abundantly growing marram grass (otherwise known as bent, or beach grass). Growing in thick clumps and up to a foot in length, these grasses were interlaced skilfully, so that:

three strands of grass were plaited into a short string. Three of the strings were then plaited into a thin rope. Three of the thin ropes were plaited to make a thicker rope. Perhaps halfway along the length of the uncompleted plait, three new strands were introduced and bound in it to increase its length […] (p. 47).

This relatively straightforward process produced ropes as strong as bought ones. The point is tellingly made that although they wore out relatively quickly, they could be regularly replaced.

The Uists were depleted of menfolk, lost during the Great War, and when war again became inevitable, ready, prepared and trained young men rode off as horse soldiers with the Lovat Scouts. Within 15 months MacPhee was in a military hospital, and was soon afterwards discharged from the army as being “permanently unfit” for military service. As Hutchinson puts it, “to veterans of the First World War, it would have seemed [he] was afflicted by shell‐shock without having been shelled” (p. 25).

Thinking he might recover, if back with his family on the croft, he was returned back home. It was quickly established that he couldn’t manage, was incapable of looking after himself or the animals, and did increasingly eccentric things. On that sad note the first part of the book ends.

But what follows is quite intriguing, as MacPhee – having been diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1946 – spent the next 50 years in a hospital in inverness and quietly and diligently produced artifacts and items of clothing by weaving together found vegetation, wool picked from barbed‐wire fences and leaves.

Some historical aspects of Asylum life are noted: in the accounting year from 1866 – even allowing for some use by staff, the 233 patients drank 17,265 pints of beer, 681 bottles of bitter, 1,136 pints of porter, 350 bottles of fortified wine and 304 bottles of spirits.

Post‐war treatments which MacPhee experienced included ECT, linked with extended induced sleep patterns. Year later he was transferred to the farm ward, where he again tended animals and worked the land.

Being discovered by an art therapist in the 1970s brings his story to a conclusion, of sorts. A few photographs are included, mostly of his woven items, but also a couple of characterful snapshots of the Silent Weaver himself, looking affably bemused by what he probably perceived as fuss about nothing. But without his story being recorded, a fascinating part of island community culture would have lost forever.