Author: Now I can prove clearances were a myth Revisionist historian compared to Holocaust denier for claiming notorious evictions were 'well-meaning'

His claims have already been criticised by leading Scots academic Tom Devine, who fears the revisionist tract will lead to a "war" even more explosive than the debate on sectarianism.

Now Labour MP Brian Wilson has raised the stakes by denouncing Fry as the "David Irving of the clearances", a reference to the notorious Holocaust denier.

Fry's book challenges the accepted wisdom that the clearances were one of Scottish history's most shameful chapters, when landlords such as the Duke of Sutherland forcibly removed people from their land and replaced them with sheep.

Fry, a former Tory candidate, insists that he has the facts to back up his theory that the mass evictions of Highlanders in the 18th and 19th centuries were much exaggerated and are in no way comparable to ethnic cleansing.

He has also set out to rebut versions of Highland history that are about "arousing emotions" and which seek to invest "vile" 19th-century conditions with a "golden nostalgia".

"Scots seem to need myths to make up for a lack of reality as a nation, " Fry says. "But probe the myths and they fall apart."

Fry's arguments in the latest issue of the Scottish Review of Books serve as a foretaste of his book. Entitled Clearances?

What Clearances? , the article focuses on the most "notorious episodes" of the period and seeks to challenge the received wisdom about why so many Highlanders were forced from their land.

One such example is his take on the Sutherland clearances, events in the early 19th century that led to tenants being shifted from their fertile crofts to coastland that had little farming potential.

Although most historians accept that the Duke of Sutherland's actions symbolised an age where landlords put profit before people, Fry says the relocation was the work of a radical paternalist who wanted his tenants to have "new homes and new livelihoods from new industries".

"They [the clearances] were typical examples of social engineering which met neither the hopes of the benefactors nor the needs of the beneficiaries, but produced social disaster, " he argues.

Referring to the "so-called" Sutherland clearances, Fry says the displacement was akin to the housing policies of the post-war Labour government and was comparable to the creation of East Kilbride - "well-meaning, but in the event misconceived".

Fry says the fact that the population of Sutherland increased between 1801 and 1831 suggests that any "alleged" clearance could "not have been all that ruthless", adding that the Duke was a naive liberal rather than a tyrannical landlord.

"The Sutherlands did everything possible to make sure their tenants would still have a place on their estates:

not the same place as before, not perhaps the same place as the tenants would have chosen for themselves, but a place all the same, " he says.

But Professor Devine, author of the acclaimed The Scottish Nation, said Fry's comparison of the Highland clearances with the 1960s Glasgow slum clearance programme was "simple casuistry" and "absolute nonsense".

"The Glaswegians were desperate to get out of their houses into what was regarded as the wonderful housing opportunities available in Drumchapel and Easterhouse, " Devine says.

"It's a specious suggestion to say there is a similarity between that and moving people to the coast, because the people left unwillingly."

Another claim Fry makes, is that Scotland's potato blight in the 1840s did not lead to famine. If that had happened, he reasons, many Highlanders would have died from starvation.

"Like 'clearance', 'famine' is another term bandied about in Highland history with little regard for its meaning, " he says. "Search as you will in the Highlands, there are no mass graves to be found full of skeletons from those who starved miserably to death.

"The conclusion must be that in Scotland there was no famine."

However, Labour MP and Highland campaigner Brian Wilson says Fry is a "buffoon" for denying the famine. "There isa massive amount of evidence for it, " he says. "It is insulting and offensive to the people who died to say otherwise."

The article's final claim builds on the argument that mass emigration from the Highlands was voluntary rather than forced, something already dealt with by other historians in a less polemical way.

In the 1840s, Fry says, the population "levelled off" because the Gaels realised that attempts to improve the region had been a "complete waste of time, effort and money". So leaving the Highlands was about self-improvement.

"Highlanders could only get on by getting out, and get out they did, " he says.

He uses a similar argument to explain the exodus in the late 19th century, which he says was spurred by the desire of Highlanders for a better life than that being offered at home. Fry says that far from being coerced out of Scotland, people used their literacy to read about places that would make them more affluent, such as New York.

Fry's analysis is unlikely to stop with his book. Although Devine says fresh approaches to Scottish history are to be welcomed, he believes the Tory polemicist's contribution to the clearances could have farreaching consequences.

"When the two extremes come together, such as the people who wanted the Duke of Sutherland monument destroyed, and figures such as Fry, you can see the possibility of a war that would make the debate on sectarianism tame by comparison, " he says.

ACCEPTED HISTORY OF CLEARANCES

FROM the late 18th century and into the 19th, particularly between 1790 and 1845, tens of thousands were evicted, usually to make way for sheep farming.

The evictions were often brutal, with homes dismantled or burned. Author John Prebble said the history of the Clearances was one of "bayonet, truncheon and fire".

Whole glens were cleared on the orders of lairds, who were in many cases hereditary clan chiefs.

Some of the people were settled on poor land by the coast, where they were encouraged to take to fishing or harvesting kelp. For many it was a precarious existence.

Many others were shipped off to Canada, the US, Australia or New Zealand.

It has been argued that the land could not support its population, and that the lairds did their best by the folk in paying their passage overseas.

Others call their actions "unjust, selfish, heartless, unpatriotic, mercenary and blind to their own true interests and those of their country".

WHAT DO YOU THINK?

Were the clearances the work of a "radical paternalist" or an example of profit over people? E-mail us at letters@sundayherald. com or write to us at the address on page 16