Isabel Grant

Early life and development

Known familiarly from childhood as 'Elsie', Grant was born in Edinburgh on 21 July 1887, but grew up with a strong sense of belonging to the Scottish Highlands and especially the area around Badenoch and Strathspey, with its ancient links to the Clan Grant. A family member of the Grants of Tullochgorm, and daughter of a colonel in the Seaforth Highlanders, she was sent to London and the care of her grandfather Field Marshal Sir Patrick Grant, Goldstick-in-Waiting to Queen Victoria, and his daughter Miss Frances Gough Grant – known as 'Aunt Fan' – when her parents were posted to India. It was Aunt Fan who accompanied Elsie on early visits to museums and art galleries in London, inspiring a life-long interest in material culture and collecting. Later visits to folk museums in Scandinavia encouraged Elsie to dream of a museum for the Highlands and Islands that would preserve and promote a better appreciation of the rapidly disappearing material cultures and Gaelic traditions of northern and western Scotland.

Writing and publications

Grant's writing career was encouraged by the economist John Maynard Keynes, for whom she worked as a researcher. Keynes published a number of articles by Grant in The Economic Review from 1912 onwards – with two appearing under her own name in 1926 and 1928. A Keynesian approach to social and economic history is evident in her first book, Every-Day Life on an Old Highland Farm, 1769–82, published in 1924. Books such as The Social and Economic Development of Scotland before 1603 (1930) and The Lordship of the Isles (1935) established Grant as a respected voice in the fields of ethnography and social and family history in Scotland and an important contributor to the cultural renewal and optimistic sense of national identity that was reawakened in her country as the modern Scottish Renaissance grew and developed during the 1930s and the decades after the Second World War. Her work was key in helping to establish the Scottish Highlands as a serious subject for modern scholarship. Other publications included: Everyday Life in Old Scotland (1931); In the Tracks of Montrose (1931); The Economic History of Scotland (1930); The Clan Grant: the Development of a Clan (1955); The MacLeods: the History of a Clan, 1200–1956 (1959); the magisterial and hugely influential Highland Folk Ways (1961); The Clan MacLeod: with their Rock-built Fortress they have Endured (1966); Angus Og of the Isles (1969).

Reviews

Alexander, John (1975), review of Highland Folk Ways, in Burnett, Ray (ed.), Calgacus 2, Summer 1995, p. 57, ISSN 0307-2029

Highland Folk Museum

In 1930 Grant organised and curated the 'Highland Exhibition' staged in Inverness, with some 2,100 artefacts gathered and exhibited as a 'national folk museum'. She founded the Highland Folk Museum in 1935, using a personal legacy to acquire a disused former United Free Church on the island of Iona. Nicknamed Am Fasgadh (Gaelic for 'The Shelter'), the Highland Folk Museum's remit was "...to shelter homely ancient Highland things from destruction", and Grant collected assiduously to that end; by 1938 the collection had outgrown its home. In 1939 the museum moved to larger premises on the mainland at Laggan, Badenoch: a village in the central Highlands, where Am Fasgadh was sited for the next five years. The outbreak of the Second World War, and resultant restrictions on movement along the west coast and islands of Scotland, meant that Grant was unable to collect during this period, while petrol shortages contributed to a general reduction in the numbers of visitors to the museum. In 1943 she purchased Pitmain Lodge, a large Georgian house, together with three acres of land near to the train station at Kingussie, about twelve miles east of Laggan, and on 1 June 1944 the Highland Folk Museum opened once again to the public.

In 1939, Grant wrote in Scottish Home and Country, the magazine of the Scottish Women's Rural Institute. I began to long for a Folk Museum for the Highlands more than fifteen years ago. I happened to go on a cruise to Scandinavia, and, like most visitors to Norway, Denmark and Sweden, was delighted with the Folk Museums - the museums devoted to the homely, everyday life of the people of these countries. One saw fine examples of the old country crafts - weaving, embroidery, woodwork and the like - the implements, furniture the people had made and used. One saw rooms, house, even villages re-erected and completely replenished, exactly as they had been when they were the homes of bygone country folk."The collections at Kingussie were developed "...to show different aspects of the material setting of life in the Highlands in byegone days" and included vast arrays of objects: furniture, tools, farming implements, horse tackle, cooking and dining utensils and vessels, pottery, glass, musical instruments, sporting equipment, weapons, clothing and textiles, jewellery, books, photographs and archive papers with accounts of superstitions, stories and songs, and home-crafted items of every shape and description, including basketry, Barvas ware and treen. The site at Kingussie also enabled Grant to develop a suite of replica buildings: including an Inverness-shire cottage, a Lewis blackhouse and a Highland but-and-ben. These buildings and the use of 'live demonstrations' to interpret exhibits for visitors sealed the Highland Folk Museum's popular reputation as the first open-air museum on mainland Britain.

Honours

The University of Edinburgh awarded Grant with an honorary doctorate (LL.D) in 1948 for the creation of the Highland Folk Museum. In 1959, in recognition of her contributions to scholarship, she was made a Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (MBE).

Death and legacy

Grant continued to publish late into life, and her home on Heriot Row in the New Town of Edinburgh was a popular meeting place for the capital's academics and young scholars. She died in Edinburgh on 19 September 1983, and is buried at Dalarossie in Strathdearn.

In November 2022 Grants' work featured in the GLEAN exhibition at Edinburgh's City Art Centre of 14 early women photographers working in Scotland. The photographs and films, that were curated by Jenny Brownrigg, included Grant, Helen Biggar, Violet Banks, Christina Broom, M.E.M. Donaldson, Ruby Grierson, Marion Grierson, Isobel Wylie Hutchison, Johanna Kissling, Margaret Fay Shaw and Margaret Watkins