Scottish Child Rearing Practices

Childhood Used To Be Tougher
    Six years ago I wrote a piece about John Muir and in it I quoted a section from his autobiographical, The Story of My Childhood and Youth. It is not a pretty story and you learn that times were tough for a child in mid-19th century Wisconsin. The Muir family had moved there from Dunbar, Scotland. If you have children or grandchildren, or perhaps even adult children, who are whining all the time, go to "School Days and Labour Days" and read them the short description of young John digging a well for months and almost dying in it. 
   I have just read about the experience of another young child who was the offspring of a Scottish Canadian who migrated to Montana from Nova Scotia. Like Muir's father, Norman Maclean's was both very religious and very demanding. Prayers were said on knees after breakfast and dinner and church was attended on Wednesday evenings and four times on Sundays. The father preacher was also the teacher and his pedagogical methods were a bit more stringent than those followed today. Here is a sample day:

   After breakfast, the Reverend Maclean would read aloud from Wordsworth or Milton or the Bible; then came three hours of instruction, during which Norman was made to write an essay while his father worked on his sermons. After forty-five minutes, Norman was summoned to see the Reverend, who spent fifteen minutes criticizing the essay before sending the boy away with a mandate to make it shorter. Those same events occurred the next hour and the one after that—except that, at the end of the final hour, the essay was thrown in the trash.
   The method was unconventional, the instructor was unforgiving, and the pupil sometimes spent nearly as much time crying as writing. “I cannot tell you,” Maclean later wrote, “how much of life 15 minutes can be when you are six, seven, eight, nine, or ten years old and alone with a red-headed Presbyterian minister and cannot answer one of his questions.” The saving grace of these mornings was that, when the time was up, Norman was free to grab a rifle or a fishing rod and head outdoors. About the only thing the two halves of his day had in common was the expectation that the boy would rely on his own resources and answer for his own behavior, which in the wilderness mostly just meant staying alive. 

Like John Muir, Norman Maclean survived such experiences and both went on to live productive lives and seemed not to have suffered from any of the acronyms or initialisms found in the latest version of the DSM.

   The father was tough, but his teaching appeared to work since Maclean produced "fly fisherman's prose, spinning in glittering circles overhead before landing exactly where it must..." You likely know him from the book he wrote at the age of 73, or from the movie based upon it: A River Runs Through It: and Other Stories. Those stories and Maclean are discussed by Kathryn Schulz who turns to the writing of Maclean when she is having trouble with her own (see: "Casting a Line: The Hard-bitten Genius of Norman Maclean, The New Yorker, July 8 & 15, 2024.
   

Maclean taught English for years at the University of Chicago and apparently his expectations were as high as his father's. One doubts that any of his grades were inflated.
   He did not write much academically and chose to head back to Montana to fish during the summers. He did not think the world needed "another article on lyric poetry."
   As a reader of MM you will know that I have many posts about university presses and the University of Chicago has one and had one when Maclean was looking for a publisher. They were unwilling to publish Maclean's A River..., however, since it was a work of fiction. They finally agreed to do so and it has now sold over a million copies, just in English. If you go to the University of Chicago Press website today, you will find two editions. The one from 1989 is more elegantly produced than the more recent one which has an introduction by Robert Redford who directed A River Runs Through It.

   

   If you have seen or read A River Runs Through It, you will recall that Norman had a handsome younger brother, Paul, played by Brad Pitt in the film. You will also remember that Paul was frequently drinking, fighting and in trouble. In the book he dies in Montana. 
   In real life, he was having trouble in Montana, so his older brother invited him to Chicago. One can also find trouble in Chicago and in early May, 1938, Paul was found murdered in an alley after attending a White Sox game.

Paul Maclean

    Sources:
   The New Yorker piece mentioned contains some remarks about this new book:  Norman Maclean: A Life of Letters and Rivers, by Rebecca McCarthy. It is published by the University of Washington Press which is covered in MM in, "Environmental Books."
  Locally, the London Public Library has, Home Waters: A Chronicle of Family and a River, by John. Maclean, but not A River...
  The Western Libraries has an e-version of A River... , and in storage a recording of the motion picture sound track. 
   For addtional posts about John Muir in MM, see, "John Muir" for information about his time in Meaford, Ontario, and "Working Wonders With Wood" for examples of Muir's wooden inventions.

Property Matters

 For reasons I don't recall, I told you earlier this year about some people who own really big pieces of land. Lots of land, tracts larger than some countries. One of them is Bill Gates. Well, I just stumbled upon some new examples and will present them to you quickly as the year ends. 

Rupert Murdoch

   The elderly gentlemen above is Mr. Murdoch, pictured with this wife who you may have seen before in a picture with another older gentlemen. They have many reasons to be happy, one supposes, and now they have another one, a small spread in Montana they just purchased.
"Media mogul Rupert Murdoch and his wife, Jerry Murdoch, have purchased a Montana cattle ranch spanning about 340,000 acres from Matador Cattle Co., a subsidiary of Koch Industries. The price was roughly $200 million, making it the largest ranch sale in Montana history, according to people with knowledge of the deal....
Mr. Bernall said the property spans 50 miles, from north to south, crossing two separate counties. Mr. Murphy said the ranch is home to around 4,000 elk, 800 antelope and 1,500 mule deer. There is also a 28-mile-long creek stocked with trout. The property has 25 homes, mostly for employees. "This is a working ranch," said Mr. Bernall.
They also have a few other places to live including:
The Murdoch family also owns a ranch in California. In 2013, Mr. Murdoch purchased an estate and winery in Los Angeles's Bel-Air neighborhood after learning about the vineyard from an article in The Wall Street Journal. In Mr. Murdoch's native Australia, the family owns Cavan Station, a roughly 25,000-acre sheep and cattle farm in New South Wales, according to the spokesman.

The Queen

   She will probably be at her country estate (Sandringham) where she will have almost 20,000 acres to roam around, avoiding the difficult family discussions which those of us in smaller abodes have to endure. She also has other options and just a few are noted here:

Buckingham Palace - Did you know: According to the royal family's official website, the palace has 775 rooms, including a roughly 120-foot-long ballroom and London's largest private backyard.

Windsor Castle - Details: William the Conqueror began building a timber castle just west of London in about 1070, according to the RCT. In the late 12th century, King Henry II rebuilt it in stone. It now has around 1,000 rooms and reportedly measures 484,000 square feet, with around 13 acres of grounds.

Palace of Holyroodhouse, Edinburgh, Scotland

Details: This palace was originally a monastery founded around 1128. It features royal chambers which King James IV began converting into a palace in the early 16th century. Relatively compact by royal standards, it measures 87,120 square feet with some 289 rooms, according to RCT.

Balmoral Castle and Estate, Aberdeenshire, Scotland

Details: In 1852, Prince Albert bought the 50,000-acre Balmoral Estate for his wife, Queen Victoria. He then commissioned a new castle with a reported 50 bedrooms to accommodate the royal family and their entourage.

I could go on. 

Some Canadian Content:

  A very tall WOODEN building is about to be built on the campus of George Brown College, thanks to a generous donation by Jack Cockwell, who owns a lot of woods. 

The building will be called Limberlost Place, after Limberlost Forest and Wildlife Reserve in Ontario’s Muskoka region, which Jack Cockwell bought in 1985. Mr. Cockwell, 80, had parlayed modest beginnings as an accountant in South Africa into a job at the helm at what became Brookfield Asset Management Inc....

The Cockwells also recently bought a 150,000-acre black spruce forest near Timmins. They own three sawmills in Ontario, and control about one million acres of forest in New Brunswick and Maine.

Sources: 
"Private Properties: Rupert Murdoch Buys $200 Million Ranch From the Koch Family," The Wall Street Journal, Dec. 10, 2021.
"The Houses of Windsor - Queen Elizabeth and Prince Charles Each Control Over a Billion Dollars in Property, and That is Just the Real Estate That Can be Valued: Here's a Look at Their Extensive Holdings," The Wall Street Journal Dec. 10, 2021.

You may not be able to read the WSJ, because it is behind a paywall. It is owned by Mr. Murdoch. The Montana property will probably be fenced in as well.

For the article about Mr. Cockwell, see: "'Mass Timber' Movement Breaking Ground on Ontario's Tallest Wooden Building," Peter Kuitenbrouwer, G&M, Dec. 14, 2021.

The Bonus:
If, as Proudhon stated, "Property is theft", then you can read about some of the biggest thieves in my earlier posts: Bill Gates: The Farmer and Real Land Lords. So as not to be accused of leaving out female examples, see the land lady Mrs. John L. Marion, mentioned in Sotheby's.