Not just an old tin hut
A recent planning application to alter and add to a magnificent 100-year-old private ballroom in Lochaber has created not only an interest in its size and design, but awakened a fascination in the material used in its construction.
Corrugated iron buildings were common across the Highlands when the ballroom was built but examples are now becoming so rare they are being listed by Historic Scotland. The quality of the material used in those days was far superior to that bought from industrial suppliers today.
The first corrugated iron was, in fact, wrought iron, which was remarkably weather resistant. It was also a lot thicker and more galvanised than today’s. It truly was, and still is, a wonderful material which now comes in a greater range of shapes and sizes.
Henry Robinson Palmer, who recognised its potential for covering wide span roofs, patented corrugated iron in 1829. The following year, Palmer, who was an engineer and architect with the London Dock Company, built a large shed at the docks roofed entirely of self-supporting corrugated iron sheets and spanning 40 feet. By the 1840s the production of fully prefabricated corrugated-iron buildings was established in Britain. Many of these were exported to Australia and South Africa. Public fascination with this new and exciting material was such that in 1845 an ‘iron palace’ built in Liverpool for export to Africa, was displayed to the public, who paid a small fee to view it.
However, the public love affair with corrugated iron was not unanimous. Contemporary newspaper reports show that although it was considered all right in rural areas it was not generally tolerated in towns and cities where, for example, some bishops were unwilling to consecrate iron churches. Something which The Rt Rev Angus MacDonald, the first Roman Catholic Bishop of Argyll and the Isles, had no qualms about when, in 1886, he blessed Oban’s world famous ProCathedral, better known locally as the Tin Cathedral, which stood on the site of the present St Columba’s Cathedral. (The Tin Cathedral will feature in a later Morvern Lines).
Cheap to build and light enough to be transported great distances on land and water, corrugated iron was to be found everywhere, including some of the most isolated parts of the Highlands and Islands. Fine examples of cottages, boathouses, schools, halls, churches, sheep and cattle sheds, kennels and hen-houses, to name only a few uses to which it was put, are still to be seen from Campbeltown to Cape Wrath and St Kilda to Peterhead. These structures, usually in kit form, were bought in much the same way as we might order a garden shed from Amazon today. They were quick to put up and, as the perfect solution to a number of different needs within the community, soon became a familiar part of our cultural heritage. Many UK companies offered them for sale through illustrated catalogues. Humphreys’ Ltd, Knightsbridge, Hyde Park, London, who were the recipient of several gold medals as builders and suppliers to the military, corporations and town councils, sold church halls, chapels, schools, reading rooms and isolation hospitals and offered to erect them in any part of the United Kingdom and abroad. Unfortunately, however, it was very much a case of ‘price on application’. E T Bellhouse and Co, the Eagle Foundry in Manchester, were more upfront. From their catalogues we know they charged £500 for a two-storey, eight-roomed house and £100 for a cottage with two rooms, both with an incredible guarantee that they would be equal to the most comfortable house of comparable size in England. Bellhouse and Co’s greatest coup was undoubtedly securing a presence on Balmoral Estate.
Prince Albert, the Prince Consort, who initiated the Great Crystal Palace Exhibition opened in Hyde Park, London, on 1 May 1851, was so taken by a corrugated iron building he saw there he gave them a commission to provide a ballroom made from it for Queen Victoria on condition it would be ready for that year’s annual Ghillies Ball on 1 October. It is still there but now serves as a carpenter’s workshop and store.
Interest in corrugated-iron buildings has not gone away. When Strutt & Parker, one of the largest property consultancies in the UK, were asked a few years ago to market a family home in Strathspey built entirely from corrugated iron, house hunters in the Highlands queued to pay £175,000 for a structure which cost the seller’s father, a local farmer, £425 to put up at the turn of the 20th century to move his family into for a couple of months every summer while their farmhouse was rented out to wealthy holi
daymakers. The house, which features a kitchen, sitting room, dining room, two bathrooms and three bedrooms, is thought to have been bought as a ready-to-assemble kit from the catalogue of William Cooper Ltd, Old Kent Road, London. A spokesperson for Strutt & Parker said: ‘When the surveyor came to do the house he was rather worried at its first appearance but he was pleasantly surprised when he looked around it. He said it is probably better built than most houses nowadays.’
The Lochaber ballroom which is attracting so much attention, was built in 1903 by a Derbyshire industrialist. It measures 70ft long, 24ft broad and 29ft high. Inside there is a stage, a small sitooterie and a WC. The original richly-patined pitch-pine walls are covered with stags’ heads, and flags and bunting taken from the 151-ton family yacht, named the Sanda, which, every few years, would steam out to St Kilda to pick up specially-commissioned tweed woven by the islanders for the family and their shepherds and stalkers. Its function was to provide a sufficiently large and comfortable dance hall for family and guests during the stalking season, and employees and friends at Christmas and other times of the year. It and the adjoining shooting lodge, stand in a designed landscape created at a period of great social and economic change in the Highlands by the arrival of southern proprietors and their unimaginable ‘new’ money bringing an end to a quasi-feudal subsistence economy with tenure for service.
That reason alone make buildings such these stand out and worthy of protection.