Before it closed a few years ago, Silverlea Care Home was a residential home in the Edinburgh district of Muirhouse, overlooking Silverknowes Links and the Firth of Forth. On arriving for work one morning, volunteer carer Stuart McKenzie heard a well-worn piano playing hauntingly beautiful music. Upon investigating he found the then 73 year-old Trevor Morrison at the keys so he asked Trevor what he was playing.
Trevor told Stuart that these were tunes he had been taught when he was 10 years old, growing up on the Isle of Bute. An itinerant piano teacher would visit their home periodically and taught Trevor how to play these tunes by ear and Trevor had been playing them ever since. The teacher told Trevor that this was the music of his home, a now abandoned island community called St. Kilda. He had learned them from the old people on the islands and, to his knowledge, the songs he could still play by ear were all that remained of the music and culture of that community. Fortunately, Stuart realised the importance of this. Next shift he turned up with his PC and a newly purchased cheap microphone and he and Trevor sat down and recorded the music.
The archipelago of St. Kilda lies 70 miles west from the Scottish Mainland across the perilous North Atlantic. That distance and remoteness is compounded by the unpredictable and violent weather which even today makes voyaging there a significant challenge. Before the age of steamships the islands were essentially cut off from September to May, the anchorage lacking sufficient shelter from winter storms. Disease, economic stagnation and migration from the islands meant that by 1930 the islanders requested they be evacuated. And thus ended at least 2,000 years of human occupation: a unique indigenous island community on the edge of Europe, its songs, memories and stories scattered throughout the world and dissolved by time. Until Stuart overheard Trevor completely by accident.
After the recording, the story did the rounds, as such serendipitous stories are want to do, until it eventually reached the ear of Fiona Pope, a Decca executive. Fiona, her interest piqued, travelled to Edinburgh in 2010 to meet Trevor.
Trevor sadly passed away in 2012. But in 2016, Pope asked Sir James McMillan, Scotland’s leading conductor, to assemble contemporary Scottish musicians to record the tunes Trevor played – several of which were scored for orchestra. You can find it here.
It’s quite an album and extremely evocative, especially when you think of how these tunes, some of which will be literally thousands of years old, were nearly lost to us for ever. It’s also tragic to think that the words are now long forgotten. They would have been about love, heroes and life in such a place, as these songs are always about.
It’s been 96 years since HMS Harebell evacuated the 36 remaining St. Kildan natives from Hirta, the main island, and ended permanent human settlement. In 2016 our last remaining physical link to those people ended with the death of Rachel Johnson, who had been an eight year-old girl on that August morning as the navy’s jacks helped her and her family into the launches to take them to their new lives among the mainlanders. The story of the St. Kildans and the evacuation of the islands is fascinating and much written about and debated. How did the islanders survive in such a place? How did the islands end up being abandoned? Like everything in our history, the causes are numerous and nuanced. However, as some historians like the late Tom Steel have hinted, the arrival and impact of an extremely strict form of Presbyterianism in the 19th century caused a cultural shift which created imbalance in the economic equation necessary for feasible occupation.
The remoteness of the islands attracted clergymen who were keen to advance the physical and spiritual lives of the islanders but also demagogues and extremists who one suspects were dumped their by the authorities in Edinburgh so that they were out of the way. Both created issues. The former made the islanders increasingly reliant on outside support, the latter introduced a regime of worship that emphasised control of others over the teachings of Christ. In this there is a lesson worth exploring – that the culture of a society is intrinsically linked into everything that society does: its economic activity, its view of the world, its ethics and values, its politics. If you change that culture, you will significantly change everything else in that society and in some cases, like St. Kilda, its entire existence.
You see, by the time St. Kilda was evacuated in 1930, the population was no longer sustainable, but we need to ask why. What had changed to make the population no longer sustainable? The economy was based on a hard life of sea bird collecting, egg collecting, sheep farming and wool. The St. Kildans were the most renowned cragsmen, necessity demanding that a boy became a man when he could scale the most challenging of the archipelago’s cliffs and stacks. Equipped with huge hemp ropes, flat caps, tweed jackets and hobnailed boots or bare feet, they would scale the largest sea cliffs in the British Isles to recover eggs and young fulmar. The meat fed the islanders; the oil in their stomachs lit their homes and was exported as a valuable commodity; the feathers stuffed their mattresses. Every May, the men would row the six miles to Boray to collect gannet eggs: the stacks there are home to a third of the word’s total gannet population. The men would sheer the wild sheep which grazed on the 40 degree grassy western slopes. They would be there for two weeks and would communicate with Hirta, the main island, by turning over parts of the turf on the grassy side of the island. Depending on where the black soil was exposed would constitute the message. All too often it told home that a man had been killed, risking his life on the cliffs.
Life was hard but it was lived. Martin Martin, a Scottish Clergyman who travelled extensively around the Highlands and Islands recorded in 1697:
The inhabitants of St. Kilda, are much happier than the generality of mankind, as being almost the only people in the world who feel the sweetness of true liberty.
Tragically, such an isolated community, cut off from the Outer Hebrides, the nearest land 70 sea miles to the east, was nearly utterly destroyed by smallpox in the 1720s. As happened to other communities exposed to the ravages of that disease, the population had no immunity and only 30 islanders of nearly 180 survived. With the assistance of the Kirk and their laird, Macleod of Harris, the island population slowly grew again and the memories and crag skills that were nearly lost for ever, and which were essential to the survival on the islands, were taught to the next generation.
However, 19th century Scotland saw a schism in the Kirk (Church of Scotland) that shook Scottish communities to their core and set the islands on an irrecoverable road to dereliction. Without getting into the boggy details, the Kirk split and the two main entities that emerged were the Church of Scotland and the Free Church of Scotland. The latter being more popular in the north west and islands. It took years for this split to happen and during that time the Church on St. Kilda was closed and remained so for about 10 years. The church had been the centre of the community and the minister was also the teacher of the children. This was intolerable for some islanders and it resulted in a heavy blow when nearly 40 of them emigrated to Australia and settled as sheep farmers.
But what followed was the real blow. Christianity came late to St. Kilda, its remoteness and the difficulty of accessing the islands meant that it slipped through the Columbine mission and was pretty much ignored by the pre-Reformation Church, with a single missionary mentioning it in the 12th Century. It wasn’t until after the Reformation and well into the 1600s that Christianity became properly established. Prior to this the islanders followed a hybrid of what the old Catholic missionaries left behind and a far older indigenous faith of stones, sea and sky.
Perhaps as a result of the hardship they experienced and the constant presence of death (remarkably few St. Kildan men died in their beds – such is the life of a cragsman) they took to Christianity like a duck to water and became enthusiastic members of the Kirk. The pre-Schism, post-1600s theocracy of the 18th century Kirk was a gentle hand on the tiller and the things that make a hard life worth living – song, dancing, laughter and the odd dram – were permitted. Reverend Neil MacKenzie, who arrived on the island in 1830 and left in 1844 just as the schism bit, was clearly a man of great humanity. He introduced basic healthcare and modern crofting practices that increased productivity and yield. He was greatly missed when he retired to the mainland and the church was boarded up. MacKenzie’s departure was a serious blow for the islands, the islanders having come to rely on his leadership, wisdom and education. Without him it became apparent just how dependent on the outside they had become.
Unfortunately, by 1844 the Schism was well underway and the Church of Scotland had more pressing issues to worry about than the state of the community on Hirta, so the church remained boarded up and the school closed for over a decade. There were a few visiting ministers and schoolmasters but it wasn’t until 1865 that the island received its next permanent minister in the form of Reverend John Mackay.
MacKay was a minister in the new Free Church of Scotland and if the islanders thought they had another Mackenzie who would restore prosperity to the islands, they could not have been more wrong. Mackay was an intolerant, bigoted, bullying zealot who had the audacity to represent his joyless, choking and restrictive regime as the teachings of Christ.
Banned were dancing, singing (including the songs Trevor was taught), musical instruments, mirrors, laughter and alcohol; even tobacco was frowned upon. He introduced three services on Sunday, each often running to four hours. Children were to be seen and not heard. The Sabbath was to be so sacred that no work was permitted. All water had to be pumped on a Saturday, all food prepared then, you went to church, you went home, you sat inside the house, you didn’t even do the washing up until Monday. Children were not allowed to play, silence was observed. If a dog or a lamb went lame it had to be left until Monday, if a storm threatened the boats on the foreshore, the lifeline of the community, they had to be left to God’s will until Monday.
Worse, MacKay extended this prohibition to Saturdays. From Friday evening, no work was to take place because Friday night and Saturday were to be used in prayer preparing for the Sabbath. So strict was his rule that when an emergency supply vessel arrived on Saturday in the winter, with food and fuel and urgent medical supplies, following a storm which had wrecked much of the winter stores and had caused a famine, MacKay refused the islanders permission to unload the ship or the crew permission to unload supplies despite the perilous anchorage for the ship and the fickle and severe weather expected. It demonstrates just how much of a hold some of these ministers had over not only their congregations but the captain of the relief ship that he would rather risk his vessel and crew than upset a minister.
MacKay’s ‘reforms’ brought economic catastrophe to the islands: they simply couldn’t afford to lose a whole day out of the six working ones. The economy was too finely balanced, the calorific equation too tight. The men were under increasing pressure to provide for their families in five days, and also feed MacKay and meet the stipendiary demands of the church. MacLeod of Harris, who owned the islands, had waived his rents for most of the last 100 years, understanding the challenge, and frequently reached into his own thin pockets to help the islanders stave off starvation. But MacKay always made sure the Free Kirk got its due.
Along with MacKay’s reforms came tourists from the mainland. Steamships made the crossing considerably safer and more reliable. The tourists, frequently members of other Free Kirk congregations, landed with their Psalters and Bibles clutched in their hands. The islanders traded their tweed and folk art and their dignity for a few coins as the Victorian mainlanders gawped at them. The tourists left with their tweed shawls and left behind them influenza and, worst, neonatal tetanus, which resulted in an infant mortality rate of 80%.
No community could survive this and even during MacKay’s tenure in the 1870s there were discussions in Edinburgh and London about evacuating the islands, with increasingly desperate requests for help from MacLeod of Harris.
The St. Kildans suffered under MacKay for 24 long, miserable years. One visitor recorded a Sabbath on the islands in 1875:
The Sabbath was a day of intolerable gloom. At the clink of the bell the whole flock hurry to church with sorrowful looks and eyes bent upon the ground. It is considered sinful to look to the right or to the left.
By the time MacKay left, the islands were no longer economically viable. Entirely reliant on external help, the economic activities on which they had relied were destroyed by a man so dedicated to the pursuit of his own virtue that he couldn’t care less about the consequences, despite being challenged by others including Macleod at the time.
On that August morning in 1930, the remaining 36 islanders boarded HMS Harebell, the elderly being assisted onboard by kindly tars with the strange accents of Portsmouth, Liverpool, London and Glasgow. The sailors were instinctively aware and sensitive of the significance of this event and small acts of kindness were extended without orders. Apparently the seas on that day were calm and glassy with that ethereal light that anyone who knows the Scottish Isles will instantly recall.
The islanders’ sheep and livestock had been evacuated a few days earlier; their working dogs, who couldn’t travel to the mainland, were drowned in the bay. The cats were left behind; most starved in the first winter and the survivors were shot the next year to protect the sea birds.
The memories and songs of St. Kilda were no longer made from that day. The St. Kildans and their descendants went on to build lives across the Empire and in the United States. New ancestry tools allow them to find each other again and share the memories of their families. Few photographs of the time remain – cameras were not owned by islanders, MacKay taught they were sinful. Apart from a superb documentary recorded by the BBC in the 1970s, including interviews with the surviving islanders, little remains. Trevor’s songs of St. Kilda recall life on the island, even if only in tune. They also remind us that culture is worth fighting for and that ideological zealots who demand and force change on that culture will inevitably change it irreparably and may even destroy society entirely.
We are constantly being told how our culture doesn’t matter. Some more radical voices, several of whom are sadly occupying some of our most important academic seats across the West, go so far as to tell us that we have no culture at all and what we have was stolen from others. This cultural vandalism is now mainstream to the point that radically revisionist views of our history are being taught in our primary schools and fed to tourists at National Trusts sites. The utterly absurd recent instructions to Welsh Librarians to avoid booking venues which may have the remotest possible link to the African Slave trade is a good example of this flagellant nonsense.
It’s easy to laugh at this stuff but if you challenge it, expect to be slandered and attacked. It’s also extremely serious because a nation without a history is not a nation, for it is the history, culture, traditions and customs of a nation that provide the foundations of the nation state. Without it the nation becomes a place where people happen to live. Professor Frank Furedi explores this in his latest book The War Against the Past, why the West Must Fight for its History.
As the full tyranny of the woke religion proves itself to be every bit as intolerant, oppressive and miserable as the worst excesses of the Kirk or the Roman Church, St. Kilda is a warning about what can happen to a society if we allow the bullies to win.
C.J. Strachan is the pseudonym of a concerned Scot who worked for 30 years as a Human Resources executive in some of the U.K.’s leading organisations. Subscribe to his Substack page.
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