Fleming The Gravity of Feathers

Fame, Fortune and the Story of St Kilda
1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-78885-668-3
Verlag: Birlinn
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 368 Seiten

Discover the true story of St Kilda. When the last 36 inhabitants of St Kilda, 40 miles west of the Scottish Hebrides, were evacuated in 1930, the archipelago at 'the edge of the world' lost its permanent population after five millennia. It has long been accepted that the islanders' failure to adapt to the modern world was its demise. Andrew Fleming overturns the traditional view. Unafraid of highlighting dark times, he shows how they sacrificed their reputation as an uncorrupted, ideal society to embrace and exploit the tourist trade. Creating a prestigious tweed, exporting the ancestors of today's Hebridean sheep, the islanders gained access to consumer goods and learned how to play politics to their advantage. This book tells the absorbing and eventful story of St Kilda from earliest times, up to the evacuation and its aftermath. Previously untapped sources and fresh insights bring to life the personalities, feelings, attitudes and rich culture of the islanders themselves, as well as the numerous outsiders who engaged with the remote island community.

Andrew Fleming specialises in prehistory and landscape archaeology. He taught at Sheffield University for 27 years and then at the University of Wales Trinity St David. His previous books include The Dartmoor Reaves (Batsford, 1988), Swaledale: Valley of the Wild River (EUP, 1998) and St Kilda and the Wider World: Tales of an Iconic Island (Windgather Press, 2007).

Autoren/Hrsg.

Fleming, Andrew

Leseproben

PREFACE

Scanning the horizon from the Western Isles of Scotland, looking far out over the Atlantic, it’s possible to make out, weather permitting, the faint and jagged silhouette of a group of islands – the celebrated World Heritage Site of St Kilda. Hirta, the only habitable island in the archipelago, covers only 6 square km; yet these fragments of a long-dead volcano have inspired more literature than any other rural locality I can think of. I’ve already made my own contribution, having published back in 2005. So why write another book?

Having done archaeological work on Hirta, I will never forget the immense vistas over the sea, the vertiginous cliffs, the tenacity of the wind, the cries of distant seals. This archipelago has mythic status – and a past more richly documented than a historian has any right to hope for. Fear of stormy seas often isolated these islands for eight months of the year, giving rise to newspaper headlines such as ‘The Lonely Isle’, or ‘Remote St Kilda’. When I was writing my first book, I found myself questioning the received wisdom. In 1930 Hirta (pronounced ‘Heersht’) was evacuated by its last thirty-six inhabitants, at their own request. This traumatic event has been presented as an overdue nemesis, triggered by the hubris of settling on a rock which is also a hard place. It has also been portrayed as representing the ‘failure’ of a community, brought about by the shortcomings of the islanders’ collective mindset; it was said that they couldn’t cope with modernity. In the late nineteenth century, a people often exploited by outsiders strove to make as much money as they could from the brief visits of tourists. Visitors who didn’t appreciate their behaviour became deeply disillusioned, complaining about decadence and the loss of innocence. Their views were reprised in the 1960s by Tom Steel, in his classic . They make for a good story. However, I beg to differ.

This is technically ‘local history’; but it is local history like no other. No other rural locality in Britain, I believe, has accumulated such a rich literature, or achieved St Kilda’s form of fame – which means that it’s possible to depend less on legal documents and administrative records than would usually be the case. Writing this book has been an interesting experiment; I have tried to create a three-way conversation between anecdote, opinion and analysis. Early commentators are often treated simply as ‘sources’. In this book, I’ve tried to give them context; actually they are often implicated in the story. Outsiders’ reactions to their experience of Hirta provide key insights. The visitors included some remarkable characters, who were often highly opinionated. The historian has to deal with generalisations which contradict one another, the baleful influence of stereotypes, the recycling of factoids. External perceptions of this iconic, semi-mythical island have always played an active role in the St Kilda story. The historian needs to be particularly alert, conscious of half-truths and nuances, significant silences and self-serving rhetoric.

Ways of making a living in challenging Hebridean environments are better recorded at St Kilda than elsewhere, as Mary Harman has demonstrated in . Discovering the islanders’ thoughts and feelings, however, is a different matter. On the numerous monochrome photographs which have survived, their faces often seem inscrutable. What lies behind the grizzled features of these men, the grave stares of the women? It was only long after the evacuation that surviving exiles were asked to recall the lives they led as youngsters. The feelings of St Kildans have to be teased out from their actions, chance remarks and anecdotes, and the words of their songs.

As I was researching this book, one thing which startled me was just how St Kilda became, in a certain sense, among mainlanders. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the archipelago’s iconic status, created by a single writer had become firmly established; Dr Samuel Johnson was among those intrigued by what they read. In those days, visiting St Kilda was mostly the preserve of those with access to a yacht. However, after 1877, when steamships carrying tourists started to puff and clank into Village Bay, the fame of St Kilda spread more widely. Ignoring the fact that there has never been a saint named Kilda, people began to attach the name to just about anything – houses, streets, ships, racehorses, posh girls’ schools. And if the name resonated for the middle classes, St Kilda also retained its prestige among the great and the good, who wore its top-of-the-range tweed, or kept its sheep in their landscaped parks, bred to an elegant black. Actually, St Kilda mattered to elites in a material sense long before Victorian times. It was only during the final stages of the preparation of this book that I came to suspect that, even if snuggling under the duvet is not the first thing we associate with Norsemen, the importance of St Kilda’s seabird feathers for top-of-the range bedding probably goes back the best part of a thousand years. If so, ‘the gravity of feathers’ has proved an inspired choice of title.

Perhaps Hirta, and not Benbecula, should have been called the Dark Island. The demise of this community was rooted in demographic catastrophe. The grim, metronomic toll exacted by infantile tetanus was fatally amplified by the effect of the 1852 emigration episode, triggered by a nine-year tug-of-war between Christian sects vying for access to the islanders’ souls. Despite the recent efforts of a Free Church apologist who is not inclined to apologise,1 it cannot be claimed that the influence of religious fanaticism on this community was altogether benign. Over the years, the islanders had discovered numerous ways of promoting and protecting social harmony, which is never a given, especially on a small island. External intervention may be dangerous. Seeking the source of the damage wreaked by a weak minister under the influence of his censorious housekeeper, I have unearthed certain sexual misdemeanours; there may well have been more. Sometimes it’s been hard to avoid noticing the St Kildans’ paranoid tendencies. I have chosen to explore the darker side of their history, the scandals and secrets, the frauds, mysteries and instances of exploitation. This is because I am interested in both the light and the shade of human experience. Like most of their contemporaries, the islanders lived their lives and created their collective history often in circumstances not of their choosing; their more troubling behaviour and attitudes need to be considered in this light. I do not believe that the St Kildans were fundamentally a nasty lot. They were well known for their kindness to shipwrecked sailors; they composed songs and religious poetry; they adored children, especially in the times when there were so few of them. And this story has its comic side, as when people eat porridge out of the chamber pots donated by well-meaning visitors, or a young girl excites envy by wearing a hearthrug to church.

Those who know the St Kilda literature will find plenty of novelties and surprises in this book. I’m probably the first St Kilda author to have taken advantage of the digitisation of tens of millions of pages by the British Newspaper Archive (BNA). This record is a moving target, having more than doubled in size since I started work. Disconcertingly, the results picked up by the scanner which serves the BNA’s search engine are by no means as predictable or as comprehensive as one might imagine. A line cast to catch one kind of fish may well hook a different species altogether, leaving the researcher gratified but also somewhat uneasy. How much more material still lurks uncaptured in these waters?

In this book, I have used incident and anecdote to provide a sense of atmosphere, the sensuous experience of living and working on Hirta (or just visiting). I’m interested in the attitudes of islanders and visitors, the flavour of their encounters, the ambience of the times. These people weren’t cyphers. To write about St Kilda, I need to involve the Rosencrantzes and the Guildensterns.

Here, I argue that the history of Hirta is not a tale of lost innocence, decadence, defeat by the forces of nature, or capitulation to modernity (all terms which should carry quotation marks). The deteriorating demographic situation made evacuation unavoidable, creating an emphatic historical full-stop. However, this history was no tragedy. By the first decade of the twentieth century, many of the islanders’ long-term problems had been addressed with a fair degree of success. In 1697 these people were living in ‘extreme poverty’; two centuries later, they were more prosperous than most of their fellow Hebrideans, as contemporary commentators recognised. In 1697 the St Kildans were described as ‘very cunning’.2 In areas where it mattered, they could never afford to be innocent.

In the late nineteenth century, with the encouragement of certain individuals, the people of Hirta became more attuned to the outside world, and more politically self-confident. Despite the newspaper headlines, ‘Lone St Kilda’ was now far from alone; Britain had taken the island of birds under its wing. As the winds of political change caught the sails of their native shrewdness, the islanders were not slow to respond; in due course they achieved their own form of independence, prosperity and...