Ancestral Voices, Highland Homecomings and High Society: The Lochbuie Family of Mull, c. 1855–1920

Abstract

No history of the Scottish diaspora in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries would be complete without taking account of the provenance and disposal of repatriated wealth. A case study is the family saga of the Maclaines of Lochbuie, whose estates lay on the island of Mull in the Inner Hebrides. Our account begins with Donald Maclaine (1816–1863), the twenty-second laird, who, as a partner in the Batavia (Jakarta) mercantile business of Maclaine Watson, made his fortune from the trade in sugar cultivated by forced peasant labour in the Dutch East Indies (present-day Indonesia). It was the profits from this trade that he used to repurchase the family’s ancestral lands that had been forfeited to their creditors a decade earlier. Donald Maclaine’s enthusiasm for the Highlands was inherited by his Indies-born son, Murdoch Gillian Maclaine (1845–1909), the twenty-third laird, whose life and times, together with those of his wife, Marianne Schwabe-Maclaine (1850–1934), form the main focus of this paper. That enthusiasm extended to the patronage of Gaelic culture and to Highland revivalism in general, but it was also under his stewardship that his family’s cosmopolitan lifestyle revived the less welcome tradition of the ‘luxury trap’, wherein expenditures incurred in London high society also had to contend with declining rentals during a prolonged agricultural depression. Financial pressures of this kind appear to have compelled the twenty-third laird to redevelop Lochbuie in accordance with a late Victorian reimagining of the Highlands as a sporting estate. This was not a gamble that paid off, however, and a once-off infusion of colonial wealth proved inadequate to sustain Lochbuie, which was irretrievably lost to the family during the (brief) tenure of Kenneth Maclaine (1880–1935), the twenty-fourth laird, despite his somewhat unconventional efforts to bolster the family fortunes by taking to the boards in New York and the UK.