Scotland never left her
Ella Wooley March 2, 1917, to October 2, 2017
Ella Wooley, nee Small, died earlier this month at the age of 100 years and seven months in a nursing home in Tasmania. Here we look back at her strong Arran roots.
Elliza Wilson Small was born on March 2, 1917, in Paisley. The family moved to Arran in 1935 when her father, David A Small, took up the position of engineer/ manager of the Isle of Arran Electric Light and Power Company Ltd at Brodick pier. Ella assisted her father in the office until she joined the ATS.
As a corporal, armed with only a bucket of water and a foot-pump, she was stationed at night on the roof tops of Edinburgh. Her orders were to extinguish the Luftwaffe’s incendiary bombs. It was a futile action although one night she did put out a small fire on the roof of the Carlton Hotel and used to joke that ‘she had saved the Carlton’. She left the ATS on her marriage to Charles MacGregor Wooley. They set up house in Corriegills where they remained until the early 1950s when, together with son Charles, they set sail for Australia.
According to son Charles, they were not just part of the Scottish diaspora, but of the generation who built modern, post-war Australia. As part of that mass migration of millions of people from the other side of the world, Charlie and a legion of capable Scots engineers came to work on hydro-electric dams and power stations high on Tasmania’s wild and remote central plateau. Ella and Charlie did manage a visit home to Brodick in 1986.
Ella’s final years were spent happily in the coastal village of Cygnet in southern Tasmania. Recently she said: ‘All I really want now is home rule for Scotland, but I am running out of time, so they better get on with it.’
Ella left Scotland a lifetime ago but Scotland never left her.