The Life and Death of St. Kilda: The moving story of a vanished island community

The mailbags taken aboard the Dunara Castle that day were not the only mail sent from St Kilda. Three days earlier. Alasdair Alpin MacGregor and Neil Ferguson had despatched the last traditional St Kildan mailboat. Within its wooden hold was placed a solitary postcard addressed to the island’s owner at Dunvegan, in the Isle of Skye. The wooden vessel, attached to an inflated stomach of a sheep, had been cast into the sea. ‘This’, read the postcard, ‘is the last mail from St Kilda.’

Meanwhile, the Master of Reay was being persuaded at great length by Alasdair Alpin MacGregor not to try to remain on the island. The Master, heir to the Chief of Clan Mackay, had come ashore from the Dunara Castle with the intention of remaining on St Kilda for a few weeks to do some exploring. He had even gone as far as to bring a load of provisions with him to last him throughout his period of isolation. The Dunara Castle’s sister ship Hebrides, he thought, was to make yet another trip that summer and he was relying on that to take him off before the winter. But Dr Shearer, sent by the Department of Health to carry out the evacuation, put an end to the young Robinson Crusoe’s plans by saying no.

The Scottish Office and the proprietor of the island had already turned down hundreds of requests from people wanting to live on St Kilda. The government received more than four hundred enquiries and pleadings from those eager to accept that which the St Kildans were abandoning.

Sir Reginald MacLeod of MacLeod, the proprietor of the island, had told the Glasgow Herald in an interview, ‘I am sorry to lose a population that has down its generations been tenants of my family for a thousand years. But they themselves have elected to go, and I cannot blame them. The life is one of hardship and inconvenience.’ Sir Reginald played a minor role in the decisions that had to be made at the evacuation but was determined, as was the government, that no one should live on St Kilda after 29 August 1930. ‘At all events,’ he told the Herald’s correspondent, ‘I am strongly opposed to the idea of new settlers. The present population have signed and sent a petition for removal which, at great trouble and expense, is now being carried out. In these circumstances it would be folly to remove one lot of people who know the island, and replace them with a group of strangers.’

The last thirty-six St Kildans on the island were sad but not sorry they were leaving. They had been convinced by the nurse and the missionary that they were leaving for a better land. The experience of living on St Kilda in the last few years had shown them they could not be leaving for a more inhospitable world.

The Dunara Castle had brought not only tourists and journalists, but also various officials who had work to do on St Kilda. The Examiner of Registration Records came ashore to check the island’s entries of births, deaths and marriages with the missionary, Dugald Munro, who had been responsible for keeping them. Nurse Williamina Barclay told the Examiner that she had not had to assist with the birth of a single child since she came to St Kilda over two years before. No one had been born on St Kilda since 1927, when the youngest of the Mackinnons, Neil, was born. The books duly checked and signed by the Examiner were transferred to the vaults of Register House in Edinburgh. No further entries would be made.

At noon the Dunara Castle sailed for Oban. The journey would take seventeen hours and the skipper was anxious to be safely through the dangerous Sound of Harris in daylight. Together with the beasts and belongings went the last outsiders – the journalists, photographers, and visitors. No one but a few government officials was to be allowed to remain on the island until the end. Alasdair Alpin MacGregor had gone as far as to petition the Prime Minister to allow him to stay and witness the evacuation, but the reply from the Scottish Office had been definite: ‘The Admiralty are naturally hostile to the idea of publicity and Mr Johnston himself is strongly of the opinion that the utmost effort should be made to avoid the miseries of the poor people being turned into a show…The Scottish Office are endeavouring to carry out the evacuation with as little publicity as possible out of consideration for the feelings of the St Kildans themselves.’ Tom Johnston, then Under-Secretary of State for Scotland, had decided there would be no cinema newsreel cameras present, no press photographers to capture for publication the first tears of sadness, no witness of any description to the emotions that were felt by the St Kildans between noon on 28 August and eight o’clock on the morning of the 29th. The officials even rejected a request from a former islander, Donald MacQueen, who wished to see for himself the removal, as he put it, ‘of the last remnants of my race’. He had asked if the Department could help him get to St Kilda because, he wrote, ‘owing to having to exist on seventeen shillings a week, I could not manage home to my people’.

One of the first tasks that had to be carried out once the sheep had been taken off was to deal with the island’s numerous dogs. They were no longer of use to the St Kildans, and despite the pleadings of the National Canine Defence League and numerous offers from people on the mainland to adopt them, the dogs were put to death. Dr Shearer, assisted by Commander Pomfret of the Harebell, was able to destroy only two dogs with hydrocyanic acid in a room in one of the empty houses. The St Kildans stubbornly demanded that they drown the rest. A stone was tied round the neck of each dog and they were thrown off the end of the jetty. Weeks later, when the Hebrides paid a visit to the island, the bay was still full of dead dogs.

It seemed to the St Kildans that everyone had been interested in their island during the past few weeks. But it was their home and they would not be badgered, bribed, or bullied into doing things they did not want to do. Offers of help were made, but few were taken up. The afternoon of the 28th was spent ferrying out the islanders’ belongings to the Harebell, and the work went on well into the night. As the women carried the last few bundles down to the pier, the men of the British Navy looked on. They were prepared to help, but the St Kildans did not want to be assisted in these last hours by representatives of a society that had ignored them for centuries. The sailors could only stand and watch, and the islanders were heard to murmur to one another that they would not be rushed should the entire Navy come out for them.

By seven o’clock next morning, there was little left for the St Kildans to do save board the Harebell. The islanders put on their best clothes. If they did not feel a desire to impress their new neighbours on the mainland upon arrival, they were certainly determined that they would not be the subject of ridicule. The family prayers were said for the last time and, as was the custom among Gaelic people, a Bible was left open in each house, along with a small heap of oats. In one house the exposed text was Exodus.

In each of the eleven inhabited cottages, the fire was built up with fresh coal and turf. When they were burnt out some hours later, it was probably the first time there had not been a fire on St Kilda for a thousand years. Lachlan Macdonald, then a young man just turned twenty-four, recalls: ‘I mind of everyone closing the door of his house and some of them read a chapter of the Bible before they left, and put up a prayer.’

Neil Ferguson, son of the postmaster, and the last male islander to marry and set up a home of his own on St Kilda, remembers those last hours well. ‘You had a bed and chairs and them old-fashioned chests and all that stuff. All that stuff was left on the island when we left. Most of the furniture was left in the houses – dressers, and even pots and pans and stuff like that – all left. And all them pots they used to have in the old days with three legs, they were all left. And all the fishing gear was left, lines and boats. Oh, we never took much away, we were just running away and leaving everything.’

His father took a last walk round the village. In many respects he had been the most important man on the island. Not only had he been sub-postmaster for many years but he had also been the factor’s representative. If the St Kildans had ever allowed one of their number authority over the rest, Neil Ferguson Senior was that man. He was the one who had called the men together when important decisions had had to be made. He had taken the Church services when the missionary was absent from the island. He was the only islander to have planted as much as a plot of potatoes that year, and was leaving the island with a heavy heart.

The corrugated iron shack bearing the crudely lettered notice ‘St Kilda Post Office’ was Ferguson’s first port of call. The target of visitors to the island eager to prove to their friends they had been to St Kilda would no longer sell the famous St Kilda postcards. Inside, papers and postcards lay strewn over the floor. On one wall was pinned a notice headed ‘What the disabled soldier wants to know’ and dated ‘War Office, August 1915’. Ferguson had often wondered why he had been sent the notice. The men of St Kilda had never in recorded history taken up arms against anyone. On 10 September 1930 the Post Office Circular announced: ‘The St Kilda Post Office was closed on 29 August, the date of the evacuation of the island. Official Records should be amended where necessary. Any letters or parcels which may come to hand for St Kilda should circulate as for Oban, where arrangements have been made for their redirection to the addressees.’

In the little schoolroom where Ferguson had received an education forty years before, a piece of linoleum still served as a blackboard. The walls were of unvarnished matchboarding. There were two school pews that could seat fifteen scholars. In each pew were mountings for inkpots. On the wall was a map of Great Britain – a map which included England at the expense of Scotland. It did not even show where St Kilda was. On the same wall was a notice that proclaimed: ‘Any scholars between the ages of three and fifteen will be exempted from payment of school fees, Harris, 14 October 1904.’ The school calendar for the year 1930 had been torn off to September. The ten schoolchildren of Hirta had had their last lessons in this small, damp room. The St Kilda School Log Book’s last entry, filled in by the missionary, was for June, and read: ‘Attendance perfect for last week (Eight). School closed today with a small treat which the children seemed thoroughly to enjoy. Today probably ends the school in St Kilda as all the inhabitants intend leaving the island this summer. I hope to be away soon.’

A door from the schoolroom opened directly on to the Church, a high-ceilinged room with windows pointed at the top in the Gothic manner. Outside the Church, from a rough wooden scaffold, hung the Church bell, salvaged from the wreck of the Janet Cowan which had come to grief on the rocks round St Kilda on 7 April 1864, while on a voyage to Dundee from Calcutta with a cargo of jute. The interior of the Church was filled by two rows of varnished deal benches with an aisle down the middle. The missionary’s pulpit was the largest to be found in the Western Isles. The previous day, when the visitors had gone, the islanders under Dugald Munro had had their last service. The St Kildans left their Bibles at their places in the pews, and the missionary left on the lectern an English and Gaelic Bible. In the shadow of the pulpit, Norman Mackinnon, the precentor and head of the largest family on the island, had led community worship for the last time.

Like all the male islanders Neil Ferguson Senior had been offered a job with the Forestry Commission. He had never seen a tree growing in his life, there being none on St Kilda; but he had agreed to go to the Tulliallan Estate and was still wondering whereabouts in Scotland that was. Some days earlier he had asked some of his fellow islanders if they knew. Someone had thought it was near Fife. As he looked at the deserted village, he remarked ‘it is like a tomb’. He closed the door of his own home. Like the other St Kildans he could not lock it. In a community in which everyone knew everyone else it had been sufficient just to shut the door against wind and rain.

The crossing to the mainland was a calm one. For as long as St Kilda could be seen on the horizon, the islanders stood silently at the stern of the boat. As the Harebell drew away from Village Bay, they showed the first signs of emotion. ‘It was really quite sad’, says Flora Gillies, then a ten-year-old schoolgirl, ‘to see the chimneys and knowing we would never be back again.’

On board the islanders were fed on salmon, beef, bread, and butter. It cost the Navy £22s 6d to provide them with a meal – a sum which they insisted on recovering as soon as possible from the Scottish Office. While the islanders ate heartily, George Henderson of the Department of Health went below to send a telegram to Tom Johnston, who was spending the weekend at his country home, Monteviot, in Kirkintilloch. ‘Evacuation successfully carried out this morning,’ wrote Henderson. ‘Left St Kilda 8 a.m.’

There was one further matter for Henderson to sort out. At the time it had not been resolved who was going to foot the bill for the evacuation. The head of every family, therefore, was obliged to sign a declaration over a sixpenny stamp, witnessed by Dr Alexander Shearer of the Home and Health Department and a representative of the Inverness County Council. By signing, the St Kildans agreed to repay the Department of Health such sums as ‘may be incurred by them regarding the removal of family, goods and effects (other than sheep), temporary accommodation in the course of removal, the purchase of furniture and furnishings for the new houses and execution of minor repairs required; also sum paid by way of maintenance until wages due to the islanders had been paid’. The sole qualification was that the total sum repayable should not exceed the money owed to the islanders by the Department of Agriculture for Scotland regarding the sheep. The authorities had thus, on the advice of the Treasury, covered themselves should questions be asked regarding the spending of British taxpayers’ money.

The feelings of the little party of civilians on board the Harebell were mixed. Some left the island gladly. Norman Mackinnon, head of a family of nine, was among those eager to leave. The previous winter the Mackinnons had almost starved, and he had told the nurse he would remove his family to the mainland that summer regardless of what other St Kildans wished to do. In so deciding, he had forced the others into petitioning the government to evacuate the whole population. Support for the evacuation had come from the other young men on the island who, like Mackinnon, were weary of the hard life on Hirta.

For Nurse Williamina Barclay, 29 August represented a small personal victory. She had been instrumental in getting the St Kildans to agree to the evacuation, and had put in three months’ hard work as the Department of Health’s official on the island. As the ship steamed towards Lochaline, her greatest reward was to feel that at long last the little children of Village Bay would have a future in life. For her work she was to be later awarded the CBE.

The elderly of St Kilda left with the saddest hearts. Many of them had never left the island before and could speak no English. As Commander Pomfret remembers, they were the only ones to show outward signs of emotion as they left behind the one way of life that they were ever to understand. ‘Nothing at all happened until they left Harebell, and then finality was reached – they had to go. Then one or two of them were weeping.’ One of the most tightly-knit communities in Britain found itself split up when the fishery cruiser arrived at Lochaline. The government had been unable to find sufficient accommodation for the thirty-six islanders in Argyll, so some had chosen to make their homes elsewhere in Scotland. At a time when few words were said, Finlay Gillies was heard to mutter to himself in Gaelic, ‘God will help us.’ Finlay MacQueen, then in his late sixties, turned to the young Neil Gillies bound for Glasgow and beyond, and said, ‘May God forgive those that have taken us away from St Kilda.’

The next day the nation’s newspapers told their version of the day’s events. In bold, black type one newspaper announced ‘EXODUS FROM ST KILDA! ISLANDERS LEAVE THEIR HOMES WITHOUT TEARS’. For many who wrote and read the morning papers on Saturday 30 August, the evacuation of St Kilda represented a victory for their society. The social anomaly in the Atlantic that had been an embarrassment to progress made elsewhere in Scotland had at long last been eradicated.

2

A world apart

Until the evacuation St Kilda was the most remote inhabited part of the United Kingdom. It had been so for at least a thousand years, and as such the place fascinated those on the mainland. ‘It seems almost beyond credence’, wrote an astounded correspondent to The Globe newspaper in the middle of the nineteenth century, ‘that such an interesting little colony, such an exclusive commonwealth exists as part of this busy kingdom. Beyond the whirl of commercial life, untroubled by politics, completely isolated from the rest of the world, the St Kildan lives his simple life. When death comes to him he is quietly buried in the little paddock which does duty for “God’s acre”, among the familiar crags and hills; the wild sea birds sing his requiem and the Atlantic surges toll his funeral knell.’

St Kilda is the name not of one island but of an archipelago which lies in the Atlantic Ocean about 110 miles west of the Scottish mainland. The nearest island is Uist in the Outer Hebrides which is about 45 miles east of St Kilda. The nearest port from which boats are able to sail is Lochmaddy, some 65 miles from the group. Dunvegan on the Isle of Skye is 80 miles away and Castlebay on the island of Barra lies some 90 miles from St Kilda. The origin of the name ‘St Kilda’ is the subject of controversy. A Dutch map of 1666 is the first to refer to the little archipelago west of the Sound of Harris as ‘S. Kilda’. There is no reason to believe a saint called Kilda ever lived, and the islanders rarely referred to their home by that name. To the St Kildans the island of their birth was Hirta, and there is a map, issued in Italy in 1563, that plots an island called ‘Hirtha’ to the west of the Scottish mainland. But even this old Gaelic name is subject to scholarly debate. Many say it is derived from the old Irish word ‘Hiort’, meaning ‘death’ or ‘gloom’, a reminder of the old idea that the land of spirits lay beyond the sea. According to the Reverend Neil Mackenzie who was minister on St Kilda for fourteen years, the name was derived from the Gaelic ‘I’ (island) and ard (high). Perhaps, however, the origin of the name Hirta comes from the old Norse for shepherd – Hirt, a reference to the fact that the island almost rises perpendicular from the sea and overlooks the Western Isles.

The origin of the name St Kilda might also be found in the way in which the islanders pronounced Hirta. The natives pronounced an ‘r’ like an ‘I’, so that Hirta sounds like ‘Hilta’, or almost ‘Kilta’, as the ‘h’ had a somewhat guttural quality.

Hirta is the largest island of the group. The coastline measures some eight and three-quarter miles and the total land area is 1,575 acres. It has two bays: Glen Bay lies to the north-east of the island and Village Bay, where the people of documented history lived, lies to the south-west. The two cut deep into the land and shape it into a rough letter ‘H’.

Hirta can only be thought of as stupendous. In parts only one and a half miles long, and at no point more than one and three quarter miles across, the island has five peaks over nine hundred feet high. Of these, three – Mullach Mor, Mullach Bi, and Conachair – are over a thousand feet above sea level. Conachair rises to 1,397 feet, and its awe-inspiring cliffs are the highest in the British Isles.

Of the three other islands in the group, the island of Dun lies nearest to Hirta, to the western side of Village Bay. It is separated from the main island by a narrow channel, only fifty yards wide. Dun is a long, narrow finger of land which rises to over 570 feet above sea level as it stretches out into the Atlantic. The island is rocky and precipitous on its western side, grassy on its eastern flank, and in winter it was not unknown for the spray from waves to crash over the top of the island into Village Bay below.

Soay, the second largest island of the archipelago, lies to the north-west of Hirta. Abrupt on all sides of its two and a quarter mile coastline, Soay has a land area of 244 acres. Rising to 1,200 feet Soay, like Dun, is separated from Hirta by a narrow passage of ocean. Three needles of rock, Stac Donna (87 feet), Stac Biorach (240 feet), and Soay Stac (200 feet), stand in the sound.

Boreray, the remaining island, lies four miles to the north of Hirta. It has an area of 189 acres and is surrounded by a wall of rock which climbs from 300 to 1,245 feet above sea level. Lush grass grows on the steep south-westerly slope of Boreray facing Hirta.

The archipelago includes other giant rocks, called stacs, that rise out of the Atlantic like the tips of icebergs. Stac Levenish (203 feet) lies outside Village Bay; Mina Stac (208 feet) and Bradastac (221 feet) lie at the foot of the cliffs of Conachair. Stac an Armin, which rises to 627 feet and is the highest stac in the British Isles, and Stac Lee, eighty-three feet shorter, rise from the waters round Boreray. Stac Lee is the more impressive of the two, rising like a great tooth of solid rock out of the ocean. Together with Boreray, from which in ages past they broke free, the two stacs have frequently aroused comments similar to that made by R. A. Smith when he sailed to St Kilda in the yacht Nyanza in 1879. ‘Had it been a land of demons,’ he wrote, ‘it could not have appeared more dreadful, and had we not heard of it before, we should have said that, if inhabited, it must be by monsters.’

Until the coming of steamships in the nineteenth century, the journey to St Kilda even from the Hebridean ports was slow and perilous. In 1697, when the island’s historian Martin Martin visited the people of Village Bay, the voyage took several days and nights. There was only one type of vessel available – an open longboat rowed by stout men of Skye. It took sixteen hours of sailing and rowing before the crew caught their first glimpse of Boreray. ‘This was a joyful Sight,’ wrote Martin Martin, ‘and begot new Vigor in our men, who being refreshed with Victuals, low’ring Mast and Sail, rowed to a Miracle. While they were tugging at the Oars, we plied them with plenty of Aqua Vitae to support them, whose borrowed Spirits did so far waste their own, that upon our arrival at Boreray, there was scarce one of our Crew able to manage Cable or Anchor.’ It was left to the following day to row the few miles to Hirta.

The prevailing winds helped further to cut off the people of Village Bay from would-be visitors. On the northern, uninhabited side of Hirta, Glen Bay is exposed to northerly gales, while on the other side of the island Village Bay is open to winds that blow from the south-east and the south-west. Because of steep rock faces, Glen Bay was rarely used as a landing-place, except by a few stray trawlermen running before a storm. The majority of landings throughout the island’s history were confined to Village Bay.

Wind and tide frequently prevented a landing. A sudden storm could lash the sea into waves forty feet high and make disembarkation impossible. To add to the difficulty, any vessel larger than a longboat could not come close enough to enable people to be put ashore on the slippery rocks that were the only possible landing-place.

Around 1877 a simple jetty was built on Hirta to assist the landing of people and stores. Two winters later it was swept away in a storm. In 1901–2 a small concrete jetty was built by the Congested District Board at a cost of £600. It proved less than adequate. Its size was governed less by the needs of the St Kildans, and more by the money available at the time. Although well constructed it was little improvement on the previous state of affairs. It made for a more graceful landing but did not significantly increase the number of landings possible. Even to this day, only the four months of summer – May, June, July, and August – hold out hope of a landing for visitors. To set foot on Hirta depends to this day upon small boats and calm waters.