Sorley MacLean
Sorley MacLean was born at Òsgaig on the island of Raasay on 26 October 1911; Scottish Gaelic was his first language. Before he went to school at the age of six, he spoke very little English. He was the second of five sons born to Malcolm (1880–1951) and Christina MacLean (1886–1974). The family owend a small croft and ran a tailoring business, but they later gave up the croft to move to a better house, which proved detrimental to their finances when the Great Depression took a high toll on the tailoring business. His brothers were John Maclean (1910–1970), a schoolteacher and later rector of Oban High School, who was also a piper; Calum Maclean (1915–1960), a noted folklorist and ethnographer; and Alasdair (1918–1999) and Norman (c.1917–c.1980), who became general practitioners. Sorley's two younger sisters, Isobel and Mary, were also schoolteachers. His patronymic was Somhairle mac Chaluim 'ic Chaluim 'ic Iain 'ic Tharmaid 'ic Iain 'ic Tharmaid; he could not trace his genealogy with certainty to the eighth generation.
Sorley MacLean
In 1934, he returned to Skye to teach English at Portree High School. After the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, he considered volunteering to fight in the International Brigades; according to his daughter, he would have gone if not for family responsibilities. At the time, his mother was seriously ill and his father's business was failing. In January 1938, MacLean accepted a teaching position at Tobermory High School on Mull, where he stayed until December. The year he spent on Mull had a profound effect on him, because Mull was still devastated from nineteenth-century clearances in which many MacLeans had been evicted. MacLean later said, "I believe Mull had much to do with my poetry: its physical beauty, so different from Skye’s, with the terrible imprint of the clearances on it, made it almost intolerable for a Gael." He believed that fascism was likely to emerge victorious in Europe, and was further dismayed by the continuing decline of the Gaelic language.