Hutchinson St Kilda

A People's History
1. Auflage 2014
ISBN: 978-0-85790-831-5
Verlag: Birlinn
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 352 Seiten

St Kilda is the most romantic and most romanticised group of islands in Europe. Soaring out of the North Atlantic Ocean like Atlantis come back to life, the islands have captured the imagination of the outside world for hundreds of years. Their inhabitants, Scottish Gaels who lived off the land, the sea and by birdcatching on high and precipitous cliffs, were long considered to be the Noble Savages of the British Isles, living in a state of natural grace. St Kilda: A People's History explores and portrays the life of the St Kildans from the Stone Age to 1930, when the remaining 36 islanderswere evacuated to the Scottish mainland. Bestselling author Roger Hutchinson digs deep into the archives to paint a vivid picture of the life and death, work and play of a small, proud and self-sufficient people in the first modern book to chart the history of the most remote islands in Britain.

Roger Hutchinson is an award-winning author and journalist. After working as an editor in London, in 1977 he joined the West Highland Free Press in Skye. Since then he has published thirteen books, including Polly: the True Story Behind Whisky Galore. He is still a columnist for the WHFP, and has written for BBC Radio, The Scotsman, The Guardian, The Herald and The Literary Review. His book The Soap Man (Birlinn 2003) was shortlisted for the Saltire Scottish Book of the Year (2004) and the bestselling Calum's Road (2007) was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature's Ondaatje Prize.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Hutchinson, Roger

Leseproben

ONE Rachel’s Unhappy Adventure in England ONE SUNDAY IN the spring of 1907 a government Fisheries Protection cruiser working out of Glasgow spotted a steam trawler netting in Village Bay, off the island of Hirta in the archipelago of St Kilda. The trawler was from Fleetwood in Lancashire and was on a routine expedition to cast her nets on the North Atlantic Shelf 400 miles from home. On that Sunday she happened to be inside the official one-mile St Kildan limit which was designed to safeguard the marine assets of the islanders. The cruiser bore down on the trawler and arrested her. When both vessels were anchored together in Village Bay some of the cruiser’s officers went ashore. Instead of a grateful St Kildan welcome, they ‘were met by a number of indignant natives, who questioned the right of the warship to arrest a friendly trawler’. The ‘natives’ were led by their young United Free Church of Scotland missionary Peter MacLachlan, who ‘loudly complained of the heinous offence of arresting a steamer on the Sabbath’. (‘The islanders,’ observed the Manchester Guardian, ‘evidently regarded this action as much worse than illegal fishing, which apparently had their blessing.’) MacLachlan then attempted to revoke the arrest of the Fleetwood vessel. He mustered a boatload of St Kildans who, in a gesture of solidarity and an attempt to stay the hand of the cruiser’s captain, rowed out into the bay and boarded the trawler. It was to no avail. Peter MacLachlan and some other islanders were still on the arrested ship when it was put under tow by the Fisheries Protection cruiser and taken to Stornoway on the island of Lewis, where its captain was fined £90 and from where the St Kildans made their slow passage back home. ‘The crew of the trawler, it is understood,’ said the Guardian, ‘had ingratiated themselves with the islanders by carrying their mails to and from the mainland and performing other friendly services.’ In the early decades of the twentieth century trawlermen from Fleetwood had a working relationship with the people of St Kilda. The Fleetwood trawler fleet was then the largest on the west coast of the United Kingdom. Since the 1890s its steam-powered boats (which were first introduced to the port by the Marr family of Dundee) had been sailing to the plentiful hake and dogfish grounds off the west of Ireland, off the Faroes, off Iceland, to Bear Island south of Spitzbergen and to the relatively homely north-west of Scotland, particularly the waters around Rockall and St Kilda. The steam trawlermen spent weeks and often months at sea in brutal conditions. St Kilda was the most isolated human settlement in the British Isles. The islands lay 40 miles from the most westerly point of the Outer Hebrides and 100 miles from the Scottish mainland. On most days they were as invisible from any other part of Europe as a ship in mid-ocean. Their inhabitants led a subsistence lifestyle supported by an irregular commercial steamer service. Fishing boats were frequently the only vessels to approach St Kilda for months on end. A symbiotic connection developed. It started with trawlermen anchoring in Village Bay and putting ashore to pick up fresh water, enjoy tea and company and leave behind tobacco and other small luxuries. It grew into friendship and a form of inter-dependency. As they came to know the islanders and understand their needs, Fleetwood steam trawlers made a point of carrying sacks of meal and bottles of whisky as well as tobacco on their voyages north, and carrying news of the islanders’ circumstances back to the British mainland. In return they were guaranteed a safe haven and a cheerful welcome in the hostile North Atlantic Ocean. In 1906 this arrangement was officially recognised and formalised when the Fleetwood post office was given responsibility for delivering the mail to St Kilda in its local trawler fleet – a function which had previously lain with the post office at Aberdeen on the far eastern coast of Scotland. In the summer of 1924 another steam trawler from Fleetwood in Lancashire answered a radio signal for assistance from St Kilda. The ST Philip Godby put into Village Bay and picked up an elderly crofter and weaver named Finlay MacQueen who required medical treatment for a growth on his shoulder. When the trawler returned to Fleetwood it carried Finlay MacQueen in steerage. The 62-year-old widower spoke very little English, but a doctor with a smattering of Scottish Gaelic was found in Lancashire and an operation was carried out successfully. The morning after the operation Finlay MacQueen left Fleetwood on another trawler to return to St Kilda. He would, he told his interpreter, ‘never leave St Kilda again’. Four years after Finlay MacQueen’s expedition for medical treatment from St Kilda to Fleetwood, three other islanders followed him on the same route. In April 1928 the fishing steamer Loughrigg carried to Lancashire a fifty-seven year-old unmarried St Kildan man called John MacDonald, a seventeen year-old girl named Rachel Ann Gillies, who had never previously left the island, and – at least in part as chaperone to Miss Gillies – Mrs MacLeod, the wife of the St Kilda missionary John MacLeod. None of the three had Finlay MacQueen’s linguistic difficulties. Both John MacDonald and Rachel Gillies spoke English as well as Gaelic, and Mrs MacLeod was a native of Gloucestershire. (The English west country accent of the minister’s wife must have contributed to the ‘consternation’ caused when she bustled into Fleetwood post office to pick up the St Kilda mail. ‘They thought I was someone escaped,’ laughed Mrs MacLeod, ‘but I assured them I was quite tame.’) The arrival on the north-west coast of England of a teenaged girl from those fabled rocks caused even more of a stir. The captain of the Loughrigg, Reginald Carter, accommodated the three St Kildans at his Fleetwood home. They travelled from Carter’s trawler to his house by taxi-cab, ‘and the ride amazed Miss Gillies. Her drive through Fleetwood filled her with wonderment, though she was too excited to express herself ’. This was, the newspapers pointed out, a girl who had never seen a horse, a cinema picture, a motor-car or a train. John MacDonald, who was in ill health and like Finlay MacQueen before him would require medical attention in Fleetwood, was less constrained. He told a reporter that most of the forty remaining St Kildans ‘would leave the island if they had the opportunity of homes and work on the mainland’. Within three months John MacDonald had returned to St Kilda. Rachel Gillies held out for slightly longer. She found a job in the town and appeared to settle in Lancashire. At the end of April an enterprising journalist took her to the cinema. The feature was an American silent movie starring Joan Crawford and titled The Understanding Heart. (‘Monica Dale is a fire lookout in love with Forest Ranger Tony Garland’, according to an online cinema datebase. ‘Escaped killer Bob Mason hides out in Monica’s observatory and falls in love with her. A fire encircles them and is put out by rain. Bob finally gives her up to Tony and is cleared of his earlier crime.’) When the film began to roll, reported the journalist, Rachel Gillies ‘sat transfixed. Her facial expression was a study of wonder and fear. Gradually she settled down and rarely took her eyes off the screen … The film puzzled her as representing something different from what she imagined civilisation to be.’ Rachel was obligingly grateful for the experience. ‘We have heard about kinema pictures at St Kilda,’ she said, ‘but we never thought they were so wonderful. It is very wonderful. I never knew there were such things.’ In July Rachel Ann Gillies gave up her job and went back to St Kilda. ‘She soon learned to dislike the hurried life of England, and after the first few weeks of excitement the novelty of things wore off and she longed for the solitary life at St Kilda, where the people during the winter are cut off from the outer world, save for the occasional visits of Fleetwood steam trawlers. She kept wanting to know how [her widowed] mother would be going to gather the peat for the winter’. ‘When she left she discarded modern dress and went off in homely tweed, woven by her fellow-islanders. She returned to St Kilda with a feeling of pleasure at having finished with the hectic conditions of life on the mainland, and resolved never again to forsake the quiet of her home.’ She was too polite to remark to the reporters that while until four months ago she may not have seen a moving picture, a motor-car or a train, they had never seen the sun set behind Mullach Mor, its last rays light up the black rocks of Dun and the evening draw down like a veil across Village Bay. Two years later, in August 1930, Finlay MacQueen, Rachel Ann Gillies and John MacDonald would be among the last three dozen St Kildans who were evacuated from their island and offered new homes and jobs on the Scottish mainland. They sailed out of Village Bay on the Admiralty cruiser HMS Harebell with Rachel’s forty-one year-old mother Ann, her eleven year-old younger sister Flora and another thirty of their relatives and neighbours. It was not quite the first time in 4,000 years that the islands had been left uninhabited by humans. But it was the first time in 4,000 years that the islands had been considered uninhabitable. ‘It was really quite sad,’ Flora Gillies would recall, ‘to see the chimneys and knowing we would never be back again.’ Four hundred miles away there was sympathy with Finlay MacQueen’s reluctance to leave. It was reported...