Community spirit lost along with the shops that once opened all hours

John MacLeod

Forty years after the concern’s demise and 15 since its demolition, I still wistfully recall the shop in my mother’s native village because – as of most Hebridean stores of its type – it was less a business than an institution.

Angus Gillies was a jolly man of thick grey curls and gurglesome voice, presiding from behind an enormous counter and vaguely supervised by a gaggle of little old men in bonnets, who spent most of their day sitting on a bench and discussing events, and for whom his establishment was a warm and free social amenity.

He, or a member of his family, served you over the counter in turn as you joined an amiable queue. It was an old stone building with felt tiles and tiny windows; the interior a warm fug of kippers, Golden Virginia and the aromatic peat fire.

rope he sold by the yard, tugging a length joyously down from a vast cotton reel in the rafters; paraffin he dispensed by the jug. Bacon did not come in slimy plastic packets but was sliced in front of you. In the gable-end window, for the delectation of small boys, an assortment of penknives was displayed on big yellow card. outside, an enamelled orange sign promoted Brooke Bond tea.

Fortune

the shop never made his fortune and did not long survive Mr Gillies’s death late in 1976. His family would not thole the long hours or daily reprovisioning runs to Stornoway – though for many years after, young folk gathered outside the derelict premises at night for banter, as had been the wont of village teenagers for as long as anyone could remember.

there had been such dignity in it, a sense both of achievement and public service, and I vividly recall the understated and classy calendar that hung in my grandmother’s kitchen and most others in the township, the seasonal gift of ‘Angus Gillies, General Merchant, the Gate, Shawbost, Isle of Lewis’. Mr Selfridge could not have taken more quiet pride.

Four decades on and the pain jabs again with the imminent closure of Stornoway’s only department store, Murdo MacLean & Sons Ltd, run continuously and by the same family since it first flung open its doors in 1922.

It’s an establishment of delicious eccentricity – a warren of squeaky floors, noisy hard stairs, frayed carpet, loose floor tiles and unexpected exits. It specialises in kitchenware. And gifts. And haberdashery. And shoes, menswear, and ladieswear – and has been long peopled by staff at once cheerful and daunting.

But efforts these two years past to sell it as a going concern seem to have failed and the closing down sale began a few days ago.

Someone launched a petition on social media for a takeover by Marks & Spencer, which in itself reminds you bitterly that, our late and lamented Woolworths apart, Stornoway was once quite innocent of national chains. Now we have a Boots, an Argos and an M&Co, but fewer each year of the characterful local businesses that serve and define a community.

Great tracts of rural Lewis have no shops at all and the last of the true old village stores, of the sort over which Angus Gillies proudly presided – at Lionel, by the Butt of Lewis – wilted into history in 2002. ‘I always keep this behind the counter,’ murmured its stately proprietor, Norman Smith – elder of the Free Church, conscientious tradition bearer and a veteran of Anzio – as he whipped forth a thick volume of lugubrious cover. ‘It settles so many arguments.’

Published by the local history society, Ness Cemetery records notes every burial in the district since 1916, interspersed with portions of truth as, ‘For I know that thou will bring me to death and to the house appointed for all living’.

Dereliction

More shops closed last year in Scotland than in any other region of Britain – an average of three a day. Banks, fashion outlets and charity shops suffered most. Leith was hardest hit, with a cool tenth of its retail outlets folding.

the trend has been evident for many years but that is of scant consolation to folk in, say, Dunfermline or Kirkcaldy, who see the increasing dereliction of their high streets, or the villages in rural Scotland where you must now hop in the car and go no mean distance for as much as a can of beans.

there are commercial factors. Supermarkets have been around since the 1960s but were initially an urban development – it was 1983 before one opened in Stornoway – and for many years focused on food packaged, canned or frozen.

It was only in the past three decades, really, that they moved boldly and on a large scale into fresh produce. But, as a consequence since, butchers, fishmongers and fruiterers have folded by the hundred.

that’s been accelerated by several mass changes in our shopping habits.

My grandmother donned hat, gloves and sensible shoes and went to the shops every day, making no decisions as to the evening meal until she had seen what was available and on the best terms, buying items fresh and raw and cooking that night’s tea from scratch.

I still try to live like this but, in our busy modern day, it is unusual. Most of us now have a weekly ‘big shop’, heading out on a Saturday morning or thursday evening to the local tesco for our gentler reenactment of the Sack of troy. I am no tesco basher. It’s a fine company which is very good to its staff and whose advent in Stornoway, less than a decade ago, not only brought dainties hitherto unavailable this side of Dingwall but at low, mainland prices. But it is part of a long-term national shift that has seen thousands of smaller concerns go under.

Accelerated, of course, by home delivery, loyalty cards and Amazon – and, perhaps, an unwillingness to put in the long hours and hard work running your own shop entails.

It is no coincidence that most corner shops nowadays are run by Asians: they have the work ethic and extended family our broader culture has largely lost.

Income

People are no longer content with a ‘living’. they want foreign holidays, a second home, two cars, universityeducated children and early retirement – rarely attained by setting up as a newsagent.

the world of Angus Gillies was one of a most egalitarian community where most had their own hens and a cow, supplemented their croft income with a job at the local tweed mill, rarely left Shawbost and almost never left Lewis.

My late great-grandmother only once in her life left her native parish, spending an afternoon in Stornoway about 1955 and in old age to be tested for glasses… and all she could talk about when they brought her home was the marvel of her daughter-inlaw’s sink.

that world was gracious, gentler – and is over. I do appreciate tesco. But how I wish we had kept one of those calendars.