The tragedy of St Kilda and the extinction of the Hiortaich people
A Bible left in every cottage. Livestock shipped but the dogs drowned. How an entire island population was evacuated – and myths about their extraordinary lives finally destroyed
IN March 2012, Norman John Gillies, still alert and spry, could look back on long and happy decades in Suffolk. He had survived Royal Navy service in the Second World War. For nearly 63 years he had been blissfully married. He and his lady had three kindly children and troops of grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
He had enjoyed his long career in charge of a builder’s merchant business, was a pillar of the Methodist Church and took pride in always being neatly dressed. Yes, he said, it had been a ‘tremendous life’ – but he still made occasional visits back to the remote Atlantic archipelago of his birth, and never forgot the day when, aged five, he and his entire community were borne away from it.
It was August 29, 1930 and little Norman John was with other children aboard HMS Harebell, romping on her decks but dimly aware of high emotion among their elders.
‘My saddest recollection,’ he mused more than six decades later, ‘is seeing half a dozen of the women standing at the rear of the boat, their shawls round their heads, waving goodbye to the island until it was out of sight.’
He remembered, too, the faces waiting at Lochaline, Morvern: ‘There was a crowd on the pier – I suppose they had come to see these strange people.’ And the shock of a strange shaggy thing, something Norman John had never before seen – a tree.
St Kilda endures today as a UN-designated World Heritage site and is one of Britain’s geographical marvels, impossible fully to grasp if you have not actually seen it.
Sitting some 40 miles off North Uist, it boasts – at Conachair – the highest, most vertiginous cliffs in the British Isles, fully 1,400ft, and in Stac an Armuinn and Stac Li, the country’s highest sea-stacks.
It is the most important seabird colony in Europe and has the world’s largest colony of gannets. It has unique species of mice and wrens and two breeds of native sheep, prized even today for their soft wool but with two peculiarities – they have no flocking instinct, which puts their management on a par with herding cats, and that wool has to be plucked and not sheared.
WITH fast, comfortable launches now sailing daily through summer from Harris, St Kilda has never been so easy to reach and, with its clear water and many interesting submerged caves, tunnels and arches, it is a wonderful playground for divers. Yet its long-gone Hebridean community is inevitably seen through that prism of 1930 evacuation and, accordingly, failure.
And it is difficult to think of anywhere else in Scotland that has been so heaped in myth, error and nonsense: that St Kildans had specially evolved feet with peculiar, prehensile toes. That they communicated with the world by floating message boxes – the ‘St Kilda mailboats’. That they organised their affairs in a daily parliament and that their community was undone by fanatical Calvinism.
None of that is true and, if anything finally did for this little society, it was not austere religion but exploitative tourism.
Even the name is a misnomer. There never actually was a Saint Kilda – and Hebrideans always speak of ‘Hiorta’ – the largest of its islands – and its late people as the ‘Hiortaich’.
And, resourceful as they were, they were also – we still whisper on Lewis and Harris – rather strange people. Their community, to the last, could be cut off from the outside world for months on end and their contact with other islands, never mind the wider nation, was minimal till the age of steam.
It must be ‘the most over-writtenabout island in the Hebrides’, lamented scholar Bill Lawson in his authoritative description in 1993. ‘When it came on to the Victorian tourist route and the cruise ships started to call, many books and articles were written by those who landed on the island – and many more by those who stayed aboard the ship.’
Yet few of those accounts are of any use to the historian, he sighs. Most of their authors had no experience of communities anywhere else in the Hebrides – and thus distinctly bigged up the ‘uniqueness’ of the Hiortaich way of life. Most were cocky, gigglesome memoirs with little objective description of the people and their culture.
Yet the sad exodus of 1930, ending almost 2,000 years of continuous island living, came at the request of the demoralised Hiortaich who faced two confounding challenges.
The first was their extraordinary human economy. The people of St Kilda were never seafarers. The great billows about them, the frequent and terrible storms and the lack of anything one could dignify as a harbour made a maritime lifestyle impracticable.
For most of their history they kept just one small boat, by which in some emergency or other, word could be brought to their distant Chief, The MacLeod himself, latterly at Dunvegan on Skye. The Hiortaich could not, accordingly, fish; and their archipelago – the principal islands being Hiorta, Boreray and Soay – did not lend themselves to gainful agriculture.
They kept hundreds of sheep and a few cattle and could grow some grain and potatoes, but seabirds were their staple. They lived on gannets and fulmars, munched on the odd puffin much as you might snaffle a packet of crisps, and built dozens of special little drystone structures or ‘cleits’ where eviscerated seafowl was dried as a store for the very long winter.
The oil and feathers harvested from these birds – and a goodly cut of anything else the poor people could produce – was their rent to MacLeod, and by Victorian times could also be sold to buy things on which the Hiortaich were growing dangerously dependent: sugar, tea, tobacco and other tastes their terrain could not furnish.
The other sore trial was their isolation. The word ‘remote’ is often and flippantly bandied about, but by any measure St Kilda was for hundreds of years the most cut-off community in Britain and only the post-war invention of the helicopter has made year-round access feasible.
That did not matter until really quite modern times. The Hiortaich needed only the annual visit of MacLeod’s factor, who took his levy of their produce and delivered meal and other essentials to see them through another year.
And the community was fortunate to survive one nearcatastrophe. Around 1727, paying his annual visit for MacLeod’s dues, the factor and his crew were startled to be hailed by wild cries from Stac an Armuinn, and in short order hauled aboard three unkempt men and eight wildeyed boys. They had been stuck there all winter, they gabbled: whatever had happened on Hiorta? The boat that had landed them on the Stac to do a few days’ fowling had never returned for them.
In fact, the Hiortaich had been almost wiped out by smallpox. Of its 200 people, the only survivors, these fowlers apart, were one very old man and a few children. He, tough old fellow that he was, dismissed all talk of relocation and the factor was invited to send out new settlers.
So assorted new families – with new surnames such as MacQueen, Ferguson, Gillies and MacCrimmon – duly fetched up on Hiorta and, save for the MacDonalds and the Morrisons, all subsequent St Kildans were descended from them.
They might have been odd, shy folk, and by Hebridean standards notoriously superstitious, but the folk of St Kilda were tough. And, given
the daunting environment and the desperately dangerous exploits on cliffs and stacks to garner seafowl and eggs for their subsistence, one has to admire their tenacity.
The 19th century brought two significant developments: the advent of new and robust Evangelical religion, and – in 1860 – construction of what remains the main surviving village, gifted by the then-laird, John MacPherson MacLeod. These were years of sustained Hebridean revival – bequeathing a culture of earnest faith that survives on Lewis and Harris to this day – but in the context of St Kilda was mocked and blamed for the final disintegration of the community.
It is nonsense – Norman John Gillies and others attested what the rich faith meant for their community and how it sustained them – but reflects the ignorance of visitors and their frequent friction with the local Free Church ministers.
Rev John MacKay did not afford the leadership he should have – and it is said to have been quite under the thumb of his large and ferocious housekeeper – but his successor, Rev Angus Fiddes, made determined war against the efforts of journalists and others to exploit his people through fictitious tales.
He also, after tireless campaign, educated the Hiortaich out of anointing the umbilici of newborns with a hideous concoction of dung and fulmar oil, thus ending the tetanus that was killing two out of every three babies. But almost as big a headache was the new steamer tourism which, as historian Frank Thomson rightly deplored, reduced the Hiortaich to ‘a human menagerie’.
‘One cannot be long on the island,’ rued an unusually thoughtful visitor, Robert Connel, ‘without discovering the great moral injury that tourists and sentimentalists and yachtsmen, with pocketsful of money, are working upon a kindly and simple people.’
Someone assessed that – charging to pose for photos and so on – the community exacted five shillings from each of the 200 visitors or so annually, increasing St Kilda’s shift from a subsistence economy to one of cash for imports.
THE ‘St Kilda mailboats’ were a tourist gimmick: the first box was launched not by a local, but by a stranded writer, in 1876. And there was no ‘parliament’, though a pompous photographer lined up some hirsute island men in two rows, to pose in a pretend one.
The end came rather quickly. By 1921 there were only 73 residents. There had been a Navy base on the island during the Great War and its closure was keenly felt. Able-bodied young men were fast leaving – sickened by the frequent dreadful accidents on the cliffs.
Even those new houses proved a nail in the coffin: thin-walled and with roofs at first of corrugated iron and then felt, they were illsuited for the environment.
The last straw was a tragedy. In January 1930, a young woman developed appendicitis. It took a month before a trawler happened to call and another fortnight before a ship was sent to collect the patient. ‘I stood on the pier with my grandmother. I remember my mum with her shawl round her head waving to me,’ Norman John Gillies recalled. ‘That’s the last I saw of my mother.’ What he did not know was that she was heavily pregnant – neither she nor the infant survived.
And when word of the tragedy reached Hiorta, late in May, ‘that really put the tin hat on the evacuation and they all agreed that they would leave the island’.
The Scottish Secretary was duly petitioned; egress was duly organised – for just short of £1,000 – and all the houses, on the fateful day, were left unlocked with a Bible in each. One was open at Exodus.
Steamers bore away the livestock; HMS Harebell the people. The sheepdogs could not be taken. Most men were destined for work in forestry and while the sheep could be sold on, there was no market for second-hand sheepdogs. Stones and ropes were got and all were drowned in Village Bay.
A few Hiortaich made new lives for themselves on Harris. Most were settled in Lochaline, Argyll, or Stromeferry, Ross-shire.
Though Norman Gillies was not quite the last Hiortach – he was survived by Rachel Johnson, who died in a Clydebank care home in 2016 at the age of 93 – he was the last who could talk about it. He died in September 2013, in a pleasant modern house. It was called St Kilda.