The champion of Canna: Mag
Tributes have been paid to retired Canna House archivist Magda Sagarzazu who died aged 70.
Mrs Sagarazazu passed away on June 2 in San Sebastian with her husband and family by her side but there are plans to celebrate her life and work with a memorial back in Scotland when lockdown restrictions ease.
The former archivist, who was just 12 when she was first charmed by the Isle of Canna on a family holiday, became a personal friend of well known folklorist John Lorne Campbell and his Pittsburgh born wife Margaret Fay Shaw as well as keeper of their enormous literary collection featuring many thousands of individual items including personal diaries, photographs, transcribed music, original letters and manuscripts as well as a sound archive of Gaelic song and stories.
Canna House and its contents was gifted to the National Trust of Scotland
Magda on the pier on Canna.
(NTS) in 1981. Clea Warner, NTS General Manager for the Highlands and Islands said: ‘We are deeply saddened to hear of Magda’s death. The Trust is hugely grateful for her unique contribution to Canna, to conserving its important collections and to our conservation charity. Our thoughts are with her family and friends at this time.’
Mrs Sagarzazu wrote this about her first visit to Canna in 1962 as a child from the Basque country: ‘My idea of an island as a child was a piece of land with palm trees! But I arrived to a beautiful real island. Canna House, the garden, the cats, the Steinway grand piano, books in every room on all topics – it had a great charm for me immediately.’
That first visit lasted almost six months and was to become an annual trip for the family who stayed in TighArd House, up above Canna House.
The young Magda and her sister spent summers exploring every nook and cranny of the island’s beaches and moors, fishing for lobsters and swimming on the Traigh Bhàin on the neighbouring island of Sanday. She described her time on Canna as an ‘education itself’.
The library and the sound recordings of Canna House became part of her daily life when living on Canna and came to have such meaning for her that after training in administration and commerce in Spain, she decided to retrain as a teacher so the long summer holidays could be spent on Canna, helping John Lorne Campbell with his literary work and cataloguing of the extensive collections.
When he died in 1996 in Italy, it was Magda and her sister who accompanied
Margaret Fay Shaw back to Canna to help with the legalities of John’s estate and sort out his considerable paper archives. When Margaret decided to stay on Canna, Magda took the decision to give up her teaching job and move to the island full time to continue John’s work and be companion to Margaret, writes NTS’s Canna House archivist Fiona Mackenzie.
Her work grew into that of archivist and she was appointed that role by the NTS, to whom John had gifted the island in 1981. She lived on in Canna House with Margaret, who died in 2004, and she then took up residence in the little white, iconically Hebridean cottage, Doirlinn, with the green gate looking out onto Canna Bay.
‘Over the years, that house became the focus of many soirees where the Gaelic, Basque, Spanish, Italian and English tongues could be heard in equal measure accompanying songs, darts matches, dancing