Donald Joseph Peteranna

Businessman and crofter Born: March 4 1937

Died: August 3 2018 DONALD Joseph Peteranna, who has died aged 81, developed a range of businesses on Uist, while continuing to run the family croft.

Known to all as DJ, he was born in Garryhallie, South Uist, the second oldest with five brothers and his sister Kathy, to Mary Kate Steele, a housekeeper and John, crofter and builder.

During the war years everything was scarce, with rationing for luxuries, but on Uist people were better off than many others. His father would manage to buy half a bullock at the sales and split the carcass, always sharing it out among the neighbours. There was no running water and no electricity so the meat would be salted in barrels to preserve it.

School was not important to him and he preferred to be working with his father with the sheep, cattle and horses. But on his first day in Daliburgh School in 1942, he was given a desk to share with Ronnie Morrison, they got on well and went through all their school years together.

On one occasion, watching bricklayers at work, they decided that that was what they wanted to do. This changed a couple of months after that, the weather turned cold and – seeing plumbers working at the school with blowlamps which gave out quite a heat – they thought instead that this was the career for them.

DJ’S headmaster encouraged this, feeling that, as most of the island didn’t have mains water, there was a good future for a plumber there.

DJ left school at the age of 15 and took up an apprenticeship in welding, fitting, shipwrighting and plumbing. He started working with a company called John Crawford in the new Glasgow housing schemes of Ruchazie, Barlanark and Easterhouse. Wages were under £3 a week, out of which they paid digs of £2 a week and had to buy and launder their own boiler suits, which did not leave much for anything else.

In 1954, at a dance in the old Balivanich gym, Benbecula, DJ met Patricia Brogan who was on holiday with friends. They were engaged for about a year-and-a-half before getting married at St Margaret’s, Kinning Park, Glasgow on November 26 1957.

He had been called up on national service before this and spent threeand-a-half years in the Scots Guards. After passing out he was stationed at Wellington Barracks in London and carried out duties at Buckingham Palace, St James Palace and Windsor Castle. Later he was stationed near Dusseldorf in Germany before he was demobbed at the end of 1959.

He started with the gas board in Glasgow, as an area fitter, before moving back to Uist and settling in Daliburgh. In the later 60s his father split the croft and he built the house that has been the family home for over 50 years.

He worked with Mitchells building the Hebrides rocket range before going on his own. Later he was joined by his brothers James, Donald Roderick, John Ewan and Angus. This was the start of Uist Builders (Construction) Ltd (UBC), which he founded, and which grew steadily and expand on to the mainland. At UBC’S peak they employed around 400 men, including 50 apprentices.

Daliburgh crossroads was a popular meeting place in his younger days and when the doctor’s house and surgery came up for sale he bought them and began work on the Borrodale Hotel, which opened 40 years ago and was run for many years by his late brother Charlie. The Dark Island Hotel in Benbecula followed a few years later and the Creagorry Hotel joined the Isles Hotel Group after that.

DJ never said no when someone approached him looking for work or needing a break and that respect worked both ways with many island workers helping to take the businesses forward, often taking on ventures that had never been done before in the islands.

He was awarded the Honorary Testimonial of the Royal Humane Society after an incident in 1968. After mass on a Sunday afternoon in February, he was with friends, shooting ducks from a small boat off Lochboisdale pier when young Norman Campbell fell in the water. His uncle, Neil Campbell immediately dived in after him but seeing the two of them were in trouble DJ tied a rope to his waist and went in. He managed to get Norman back into the boat safely, but Neil tragically lost his life.

DJ was 40 before he had his first real holiday touring America with Patricia. Their trip took in the Rotunda at Capital Hill, Washington DC. On display there, is a replica of the Magna Carta, which sits on a slab of pegmatite presented to the United States by Britain to celebrate their bicentennial in 1976.

DJ himself, with others, had removed this rock from Ardivachair, Uist, which was the nearest accessible point to the States and at 300,000 million years old, represents the time that the two continents were joined together.

DJ was lucky enough to have a long busy active working life and enjoyed good health for nearly all of it. He continued the traditions of sheep, cattle, potatoes and peats.

He is blessed with six children: Iain, Stephen, Patricia, Donald, Sheila and Colin, 26 grandchildren and 12 great-grandchildren for whom he did everything he could to give them a good start in life.

He was very, very proud of the tradesmen that he trained and the work they produced across Scotland.