An anecdote recorded
and later transcribed by Calum Maclean
on 29 May 1951 from John
MacDonald of Highbridge reveals a rather
amusing explanation behind the name of a man who became something of a celebrity
in the Highlands as well as beyond. It is an understandable, if incorrect, folk
etymology. Nevertheless, it makes for a good story as related in the following
transcription:
ROWALLAN CUMMING
Bha boireannach a’ gabhail an aiseadh thairis
air Loch Nis. Agus ’s e seann-duine a fhuair i airson a h-aiseadh air a’ bhàta
agus i gu bhith air a h-aiseadadh air an taobh thall agus i a’ dol a
dh’ionnsaigh bean-ghlùine. Agus air adhart leitheach slighe bha e a’ faireachdainn
dragh a’ tighinn oirre fhèin. Agus bha i ag ràdha ris an duine a bha seo: “Row
Allan. Row Allan,” theireadh i an-dràsda is a-rithist. Agus bha i a’ cumail air
seo a ghràdha ris gus an do chuir i an duine, cha mhòr a-mach a anail. Ach rinn
e an gnothach air a cur a-nunn sàbhailte mun tàinig dragh na caraibh. Agus
rugadh leanabh gille dhi agus thug i an t-ainm air Rowallan. Rowallan Cumming a
bh’ air. Is bha e fada an Africa is na rìoghachdan thall. Agus bha e a-rithist
ann an Cille Chuimein agus e a’ dèanadh bataichean agus gan creic. Agus
chaochail e an Cille Chuimein. Tha mi a’ creidsinn gum bheil trì fichead
bliadhna bhon a chaochail e.
And
the translation may be rendered as follows:
ROWALLAN CUMMING
A woman was taking the ferry-boat over Loch
Ness. And she had got hold of an old man to take her over in the boat and she
hoped to give birth over on the other side of the loch as she was going to see
a mid-wife. And around about half-way across she felt her waters breaking. And
she said to the man: Row Allan. Row Allan,” and she said this now and again.
And she kept on saying this until the man was nearly out of breath. But he
managed to take her across safely before things got any worse. And she gave birth
to an infant boy and she gave him the name Rowallan―Rowallan Cumming was his
name. And he was for a long time in Africa and overseas yonder. And he was then
in Fort Augustus and he was building boats and selling them. He died in Fort
Augustus. I believe that sixty years have now passed since he died.
A short entry for ‘Rowallan’
from the Oxford Dictionary of National
Biography (vol. 14. p. 637) unsurprisingly gives a more factual account:
Cumming, Roualeyn George Gordon- (1820–1866),
lion hunter, the second son of Sir William Gordon Gordon-Cumming, second
baronet (1787–1854), and his first wife, Eliza Maria (d. 1842), the daughter of John Campbell and a granddaughter of the
duke of Argyll, was born at Altyre, Scotland, on 15 March 1820. The travel
writer Constance Gordon-Cumming was his sister. He was educated at Eton
College, but even in his boyhood was distinguished for his love of sport,
especially salmon fishing and deerstalking, than for anything else. He entered
the East India Company’s service as a cornet in the 4th Madras cavalry in 1838,
and on his way to India had his first experience of hunting in South Africa;
but the Indian climate did not agree with him, and in 1840 he resigned his
commission.
Gordon-Cumming returned to Scotland and
devoted himself to deerstalking; but in his own words he found ‘the life of the
wild hunter so far preferable to that of the mere sportsman; that he obtained
an ensigncy in the royal veteran Newfoundland companies. Not finding the
opportunities for hunting in North Africa which he expected, he exchanged in
1843 into the Cape mounted rifles, and once more found himself in Africa.
Unsuited to military life, he resigned his commission at the end of the year,
and after purchasing a wagon and collecting a few followers he spent the next
five years hunting, travelling widely, and exploring the interior of South
Africa. In 1848 he returned to Britain, and in 1850 he published his Five Years of a Hunter’s Life in the Far
Interior of South Africa, a book which had immense success and was
published in many editions; it made him the lion of the season. In 1851
Gordon-Cumming exhibited his trophies at the Great Exhibition. He then went
about the country lecturing and exhibiting his lion skins for some years, and
under the sobriquet the Lion Hunter he obtained great popularity and made a
great deal of money. In 1856 he published a condensed edition of his book as The Lion Hunter of South Africa, and in
1858 he established himself as Fort Augustus on the Caledonian Canal, where his
museum was a great attraction to tourists. He was a man of great height and
physical strength. He seems to have had a premonition of his death, for he ordered
his coffin and made his will just before he died, unmarried, fro heart disease,
at Fort Augustus on 24 March 1866; provision was made in his will for two
illegitimate daughters.
His game books (photocopies of which are lodged in the National Library of Scotland, Dep 175,
Box 175/4(ii)) from 1850 to 1865 are more or less a list of the amount of
things he killed and when and if it took his fancy he would intermittently give
a more expansive description of a stalk if it proved to be of personal interest.
There is also an interesting insert from an untitled publication as follows:
ROUALEYN GORDON CUMMING’S STAG’S HEAD
Now in the possession of VISCOUNT POWERSCOURT.
THE stag that bore this head was killed in
Lord Lovat’s forest of Glenstrathfarar, Inverness-shire, by the late Roualeyn
Gordon-Cumming, the celebrated African hunter. I was acquainted with him and
also with his brother, the late Sir Alexander Penrose Gordon-Cumming, and I
often had conversations with them both about Roualeyn’s adventures in Africa
and in Scotland.
I saw this head in his collection at that
time, about 1858–59, when he used to exhibit his African and other sporting
trophies by the Caledonian Canal at Fort Augustus.
He was very poor, and used to support himself
by this exhibition, where he used to attend in his Highland dress, and a
magnificent figure he was, some six feet four in height and a very powerful
man, and he used to relate his sporting adventures and explain his collections
at a charge of one or two shillings, or thereabouts. The steamers plying on the
Caledonian Canal between Inverness and Banavie had to stop at Fort Augustus for
an hour or more, passing through the locks, and the passengers used to land and
visit his exhibition. Passing down the Canal on my way from the Highlands in
1859, I landed with others and was talking to him, and I remarked this fine
head, which is 41 inches wide and has 11 points. He said, “If everyone had
their rights, that head belongs to Lord Lovat, for I shot the stag in his
forest.” Gordon-Cumming was known in Scotland as a great poacher, and was often
after deer where he had no business to be, but few darted to interfere with
him. He said that he wanted the head, as it was the widest he had ever seen in
Scotland. In those days deer forests were not so strictly preserved as they are
now, and on the hills which were grazed by sheep, stags were shot without any
interference by anyone; that was about the hear 1846 or 1846.
Through he kindness of Mr. St. George
Littledale, I got the following story of how Gordon-Cumming killed this stag.
He had it from a stalker named Colin Campbell, who had it, I believe, from his
father. I give it in his own words:
“The stag was spotted by the stalker in the
charge of the beat where the stag had his home, and, as it is very often the
case when you are keen on a good head, that is often when you do not get him.
However, the stalker, after a day or two on unsuccess, was told to keep his
ears and eyes open, in case Gordon-Cumming, who was in the neighbourhood, might
get hold of the head. Some gentlemen near by died, and the sportsmen went to
the funeral, giving instructions to his stalker not to go unless he saw that
Gordon-Cumming went; if so, if he might go. Gordon-Cumming put on his Highland
dress, and walked along the road, when he met the stalker, who asked him what
he was going to do with a rose he happened to have in his button-hole, at a
funeral? Gordon-Cumming replied that when everything was over he would leave
him a rose. The stalker got in, shifted his clothes, and proceeded to the
funeral. When Gordon-Cumming got round the corner he took a circuit route and
made for the stag, and in three hours that the head off the stag. The stalker
having heard the shot, made for the direction of the sound, where he found the
carcass with the rose by its side.”―(Signed) COLIN CAMPBELL.
Roualeyn Gordon-Cumming died in 1866, and I
bought the stag’s head at the sale of his collection in London, after his death
POWERSCOURT.
December 16, 1899.
By anyone’s standards
Gordon-Cumming led a remarkably adventurous life which eventually brought him
relative fame as well as a modicum of income. He wrote some compelling accounts
of his hunting trips such as A Hunter’s Life among
the Lions, Elephants and Other Wild Animals (1857). He spent most of his short life killing animals, in
Scotland as well as North America but especially southern
Africa where, between 1838 and 1843, he visited several times before deciding
upon his career as a big-game hunter. Between 1843 and 1848, he carried out his
hunting activities mainly in Bechuanaland and the valley of the Limpopo River.
On returning to Britain, his collection of hunting trophies was displayed at
the Great Exhibition of 1851 at London’s Crystal Palace, which was also illustrated
by a lecture delivered by him. The collection, known as The South Africa
Museum, was afterwards exhibited in various parts of Britain and would become
the core of a museum which he set up in the central Highlands.
By 1858
Gordon-Cumming came to make his home in Fort Augustus within the former
soldier’s barracks. Beside the Caledonian Canal he exhibited his trophies which
attracted many visitors before his untimely death.
An
extract from Gordon-Cumming’s letter reads: “You must understand that the
greatest difficulty to a good hunter in Elephant hunting is to find them, and
then one man can kill one Elephant in the troop, and not more, especially if
they be bulls, for bulls separate the instant they are attacked, and the fight
generally lasts from 10 minutes to an hour, according to the denseness of the
first or the savageness of the Elephants; one bull this year took 57 bullets
before he fell…”
For Gordon-Cumming, it seems that big game hunting was
primarily a sport, and a test of courage and athleticism. A far bigger threat
to the wildlife of Africa came from commercial hunting. Elephants were hunted
for their ivory from the sixteenth century and in our own day their numbers
have become dangerously reduced by hunters.
Although it recounts some of the information already given
a local account of this colourful character adds some detail about his time in
Fort August which may now be given:
One other famous figure connected with Kilcumein and
the old Fort calls for a word in passing. Roualeyn George Gordon-Cumming, the
famous lion-hunter, was closely connected with the place. Here it was that he
finally erected his museum of magnificent fastnesses by Loch Ness offered him a
shelter and a refuge; the last decade of his life was spent beneath the shadow
of the Fort, and he died within its walls.
The second son of the Baronet of Altyre, he
successively entered the service of the East India Company, the Royal Veteran
Newfoundland Company, and the Cape Mounted Rifles, but all were given up in
turn to satisfy his craving for “the life of the wild hunter.” Collecting a few
followers he plunged into the heart of Africa and spent five years in the
pursuit of every kind of big game. On his return to England he published a
book, and exhibited his unique collection of skins and trophies at the great
Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851. As an immediate result he became famous and
was everywhere feted as the “Lion-hunter.” Finally settled at Fort Augustus in
1858. A contemporary writer says of him “In appearance he was remarkable for
his height and his massive symmetry of build. With handsome Highland features
and the eye of an eagle he was verily a king of men.” He delighted in marked
eccentricities of dress and might be seen parading Princes Street in Edinburgh
in top-boots, a Gordon tartan kilt with plaid to match fastened by a large
brooch, huge shirt frills, surmounted with a brass helmet as a head-piece and
quantities of jewels, with silver fish-hooks in his ears. On wet days the whole
was secured with a ponderous umbrella. At Fort Augustus he used to meet the
tourist steamers with a number of retainers similarly attired in grotesque
costume, and, preceded by a magnificent goat, would lead the way to his museum.
In warm weather he discarded this gorgeous raiment and went about clad only in
a shirt and stockings. Sometimes his hair was allowed to hang in long ringlets
down over his shoulders, and at other times was caught up in a lady’s net and
fastened with numberless hairpins. Many are the anecdotes still current of his
sayings and doings in the district which cannot be related here, but which
remain a rich harvest and easily to be obtained for the humorist and the
antiquarian. His museum stood at the south-eastern corner of the canal bridge
on the site now occupied by the wooden hall next door to the Catholic school.
When the Established Church was rebuilt some years
ago, the roof of Roualeyn Gordon Cumming’s museum was used to cover it, and the
timbers that once enhanced the charms of the lion-hunter and his wild-beast
show, now serve as the framework to an honest Presbyterian congregation, and
form a setting to the Geneva gown.
As is often the case
which stories such as these, primarily historical narratives often containing biographical
material. there is a kernel of truth and thus they should not be dismissed as
hearsay. It is always a useful device to attempt to winnow the historical wheat
from the legendary chaff.
References:
NB
SSS 10, pp. 919–920
Roualeyn
Gordon Cumming, Five Years of a
Hunter’s Life in the Far Interior of South Africa (London: John Murray,
1850)
―――,
Five
Years’ Hunting Adventures in South Africa (Glasgow: Thomas D. Morison,
1850)
Andrew
J. Macdonald, Glen-Albyn or Tales and
Truths of the Central Highlands (Fort Augustus: The Abbey Press, 1920), pp.
76–78
Images:
Portraits
of Roualeyn Gordon Cumming
Attack
on Four Patriarchal Lions
Cover
of A Descriptive Catalogue of Hunting
Trophies, Native Arms, & Costumes from the Far Interior of South Africa
Gordon
Cummings Wilds Sports