The raucous night Charles sang a bawdy ballad at a VERY boozy island ceilidh
He dipped sheep, picked potatoes, went out lobster-potting – and stayed on a croft. The enchanting story of the prince’s magical trip to Berneray, by the man who was there to capture it for the nation
IT WAS Halloween 1991. As the Grampian TV crew waited at Ballivanich airfield on Benbecula even our celebrity presenter, Selina Scott, seemed nervous. Would our star interviewee actually turn up? After all, he had just flown back from a tiring visit to Canada.
Would he really honour his promise to Miss Scott that he would fly on to the Outer Hebrides to reprise a visit he had made four years earlier to the island of Berneray – knowing that this time he would be accompanied by a television crew?
As we waited, my mind went back to an earlier film I had made about the Highland Clearances and a fishing township I had visited in Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia. For it was there, among Gaelic-speaking Cape Bretons, that I had first heard about Berneray.
In the minds of the locals it was a kind of Celtic Shangri-La in the Sound of Harris, some 3,000 miles away. Few had ever been there, but it was their spiritual home. Their surnames were MacAskill, Maclean, Macleod and MacKillop, and their fishing boats bore names such as ‘Berneray Isle’ and ‘Berneray Lass’.
Their village was called Englishtown, a clear misnomer since virtually all its inhabitants were descended from people cleared from the Highlands and islands of Scotland.
Fresh in my memory still was the monument to a legendary giant, Angus MacAskill, allegedly Englishtown’s most famous son. Except that he was not. MacAskill is buried in Cape Breton but his birthplace was the island of Berneray.
Standing 7ft 9in with a chest measurement of 80in, Giant MacAskill remains the largest naturally proportioned man who ever lived.
Among his many honours, the Giant had been invited to Windsor to give a demonstration of his enormous strength to Queen Victoria, the four times great-grandmother of the man we were waiting to greet.
My musings ended abruptly with our cameraman shouting ‘here comes the plane’. Minutes later, the Prince of Wales was stepping down from a BAe 146 executive jet of the Queen’s flight to be greeted by Donald Alick ‘Splash’ MacKillop, the Berneray crofter, who had hosted Charles’s previous visit in 1987.
It was actually happening; the return visit to Berneray, long promised by the prince, was really going ahead, and Miss Scott and a Grampian crew would cover the entire trip.
Those islanders in the know had been sworn to secrecy and no other media had been invited. Talk about a scoop!
BEFORE finding fame as a news anchor for ITN and later, the first female presenter of BBC’s Breakfast Time, Miss Scott had worked for me at Grampian TV. We had kept in touch and, with a mutual schoolmaster friend, John Archie Morrison, himself an erudite son of Berneray, we reminded her about Prince Charles’s promise to return to the island where he had learned about the life of a crofter.
Now, four years on, through close links she had forged with Charles and Diana, Miss Scott had managed to persuade the prince to make good on his promise. My role would be as producer of a documentary for ITV about the visit, which we later titled A Prince Among Islands.
Mr Morrison would be our researcher and immediate contact with the islanders.
As four years previously, Charles and his private secretary, Richard Aylard, would lodge with the MacKillops at their Burnside croft.
The rest of us, including Charles’s security detail, would be billeted in the homes of local crofters.
As our convoy of vehicles drove through North Uist en route to the ferry, at that time the only crossing from Otternish on the Uist side to Berneray, I wondered again how we were to keep the visit secret.
Too many, it seemed, were already in the know, judging by the discreet smiles on the faces of the locals we encountered on the journey. But I had reckoned without the persuasive powers of our host, Splash MacKillop.
The most sanitised version of his nickname was that as a boy he liked nothing better than donning his wellies and splashing in the puddles. Other more colourful explanations were also available.
Splash was the undisputed spokesman for the island. The only one ever to challenge this was his wife, Gloria, a native-born Australian who helped run their 90-acre croft and B&B business.
An earlier recce to the island with Mr Morrison had begun with an epic dramming session at Burnside with Splash, his wife, and crofter friends. This introductory session moved to crofthouses all around the island and seemed to go on for days.
I had barely recovered by the time I crawled aboard the homeward ferry, so I was not sure how seriously my pleas for secrecy had been taken. But just as Splash and key locals – such as postie Shawnie Alick Maclean and shopkeepers Angus and Mary MacAskill – had persuaded the 150-strong island population to keep mum about the earlier visit, so it seemed would happen this time.
Berneray is truly one of the jewels of the Western Isles. Measuring only two miles by three, it has some of the most fertile soil and beautifully flowering machair in the Hebrides.
Berneray potatoes, reared on seaweed together with dung from winter grazing animals as natural fertiliser, are particularly delicious, as we discovered. At one time Berneray provided all the tatties for the larger but less fertile neighbouring island of Harris.
Berneray has been inhabited at least since the Bronze Age and Bjorn’s island, as its Gaelic name translates, is scattered with ancient sacred sites, stone circles, and evidence of centuries-long Viking occupation.
For tourists there are endless, empty beaches, including Traigh Iar, the three mile long west-side beach, unsurpassed for its beauty on the whole western seaboard.
And Traigh Iar was where our shoot began the next day. On a brisk November morning the heir to the throne and Miss Scott strode out along a totally deserted beach, with a backdrop of waves rolling in from the Atlantic, to record the keynote interview for the film. We had agreed that the subjects we’d cover were the crofting lifestyle, TV’s role in preserving the Gaelic language and the advantages and disadvantages of bridges and causeways to island living. Selina and the prince had an easy, natural relationship and the interview was like a conversation between friends.
CHARLES recalled an even earlier visit to Berneray back in 1956 when he, the Queen and Prince Philip, along with other members of the Royal Family, had come ashore from the Royal Yacht Britannia to picnic on the deserted beach and play football.
At one point, checking the closeup of the walking couple through the viewfinder, our director, Bernd Schulze, remarked on the close physical resemblance between
Miss Scott and Princess Diana. It was a throwaway observation. But what none of us realised at the time – and what Charles’s demeanour only occasionally showed during the filming – was that the royal marriage was already in trouble.
The filmed walk took viewers off the beach and through a group of ruined crofthouses, some with furniture left by former occupants.
Charles was amazed no one had stolen the furniture. Miss Scott, a keen collector of antiques, seemed already to be working out what might be saved until, ‘Oh my God, it’s a dead sheep’. ‘Actually, three dead sheep,’ smiled the prince, pointing to the decomposing remains of sheep which had sought shelter in the abandoned crofthouses. Time for royal party and TV crew to beat a hasty retreat!
In Berneray everyone keeps sheep. Later, we would film the prince helping crofters dip their sheep. All lend a hand, as with most crofting tasks. It was this strong sense of community that had so impressed the prince on his previous visit.
And for the cameras this time, he again followed the tractor-drawn digger, stooping with mothers and kids to fill baskets with Berneray’s famous Kerr’s Pink potatoes.
In 1987 he had planted trees as part of a shelter belt. Many had perished in the winds that blow in sideways from the Atlantic, so this time we filmed him planting replacements. ‘Agriculture is more than an industry’ he told Miss Scott. ‘Especially in places like this where you have to learn to live with nature. Crofting has a social and cultural significance, and people who live and work in remote hill and upland areas are the backbone of this country.’
He was equally eloquent on the need to preserve the language and culture of the outlying parts of his future kingdom and praised the initiative to launch a Gaelic language TV channel.
‘I’ve always had a soft spot for Scotland’ he admitted. ‘One of the titles I am most proud of is that of Lord of the Isles. That’s why it’s important that I try to support the lifestyle and language of people who live here.’
But Charles was ambivalent about a proposal to build a causeway linking Berneray to North Uist. Clearly, it might help the island economy and encourage people to return, but there was an equal risk that access by causeway might destroy the very things that made Berneray special.
He recalled that his friend, the writer Laurens van der Post, had made a film about the Kalahari, which attracted so many tourists to the place that it was no longer the special wilderness he had been trying to save.
Charles had clearly enjoyed his few days away from it all and especially the tranquillity.
One afternoon he told his private secretary and security people to make themselves scarce. He wanted to be alone with his sketchboard and watercolours.
He would allow our cameras access for ten minutes. It was one of the few occasions his marital problems appeared to intrude. The gaze he directed out over the surging seas, viewers later commented, seemed more about his inner turmoil than his artistic vision.
Among the highlights of his fourday stay were lobster-potting with Angus MacAskill and his nephew, Roddy Shaw, on their boat, The Berneray Isle; cutting the birthday cake for 79-year-old Bessie Paterson, who had earlier received the BEM for single-handedly running the Berneray telephone exchange for three decades; and revisiting
Annie and Jessie MacKillop, twin cousins of Splash who had knitted the prince ‘wonderful kilt socks’ back in 1987.
Charles, Miss Scott and the security people also boosted the crowded congregation when the Rev Donald Mackay preached the Sunday service in Gaelic.
The prince was later to describe the congregational singing as ‘deeply moving’ and somehow echoing the strains of the pipes.
The prince was equally complimentary about the singing at the farewell ceilidh held at Burnside croft on the eve of his departure. It was a night of delicious Berneray cooking and Splash-sized drams.
The local ladies had prepared a feast fit for a prince – tray-loads of sandwiches, smoked and poached salmon, Stornoway’s famous marag dhubh (black pudding) crowdie cheese, oatcakes, homemade puddings and Berneray cranachan, a delicious concoction of oatmeal, cream, whisky, seaweed and raspberries.
GAELIC songs were the order of the night, including the heartrending Fagail Bhearnaraidh, Farewell to Berneray, which Capercaillie’s Karen Matheson would sing in the edited film.
The prince, looking relaxed in a green sweater, open-necked shirt and khaki chinos, delivered a poem about Cyrano de Bergerac’s remarkable nose. His encore, sung with a large dram in hand and in broad Scots, was a ditty he said he had learned from his grandmother, ‘Auntie Mary had a canary...’ which was speedily brought to a close by his private secretary.
Charles was later to tease him mercilessly when he failed to deliver a party piece of his own.
My contribution was a take on Duncan Macrae’s famous, ‘Sing me a Hebridean song, daddy, one that is 40 verses long, daddy...’
The prince seemed suitably amused; Splash less so!
The security personnel reported that the Press had belatedly got wind of the visit, but with no ferries running none had been successful in hiring a boat from Harris or North Uist.
The news prompted even larger drams and a ceilidh that went on into the wee hours.
Splash and Miss Scott were with us next day at Ballivanich airfield to say their farewells as we filmed the prince’s departure. The jet had just disappeared into the autumn skies when we were approached by a reporter and photographer, newly arrived from the south.
‘So, what time does he actually get here, mate?’ asked the reporter. ‘Any time soon,’ replied Splash.
Charles returned to Berneray in 1999 to open the new causeway linking the island to North Uist.
At a Holyrood reception for MSPs a few years later, I was lucky enough to have a word with him.
How did he really feel about the causeway? ‘Well, at least the causeway fits nicely into the landscape,’ was the prince’s tactful reply.