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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A really absorbing article. Thankyou.
I’m glad you enjoyed it
Mr MacKay’s extreme puritanism sounds very similar to the Taliban’s morality code.
Actually it made me think of Ed Milliband!
Actually, there is something awfully po-faced, joyless about the current Labour cabinet: Starmer, Reeves, Milliband, Yvette Cooper (Pixie-Balls) – those strained expressions, furrowed eyebrows, permanently seriou, humorless faces…
I’m much more concerned about what comes out of their brains and their mouths than I am about what they look like [but you also forgot to mention their flat, adenoidal voices, which one would run a mile from at a drinks party…!]. I can recall visiting Inverness in the 1970’s – sports centres closed on Sundays thanks to the church. Luckily, religion is in retreat in Scotland
P.S. Enjoyed the music. Have you heard this splendid Scottish compilation album https://open.spotify.com/track/1AVeoXQjOlTCK23WCcJJjm
Beware of these moral zealots, for them there is no going back.
At least the Puritans knew the difference between a penis and a vagina. They also knew that in the no too distant past many of their white ancestors were slaves.
I doubt the article is half accurate re the ‘joylessness’ of it all.
As opposed to what? Porn, drugs, mindless entertainment, wetting your diapers if your fav footie team loses? Relativity and anti-reality?
Please.
Maybe the article scribbler would have made more sense if he bothered to write about the 3 years of Medical Nazism.
Was the tyranny of Rona not a ‘joy killer’ then?
And Orthodox Judaism.
Very very evocative. And a warning. Thank you.
I’m guessing the St Kilda in Melbourne was named by or after the islanders that went to Australia to sheep farm?
Thanks James. Re St Kilda in Melbourne. The 1854 migrants from St Kilda to Melbourne had a terrible voyage, our of 36 of them, only 14 survived the voyage. Fever struck the ship and it was quarantined on arrival, by the time the quarantine had lifted only 14 St Kildans remained alive, they died in far greater numbers than the other migrants because they lacked the immune systems of those from the mainland.
Although they settled in Melbourne, the St Kilda district is not named after them. in 1844 that area was named after a schooner, The Lady of St Kilda.
I’ve not researched what happened to the St Kildans in Australia, However, Steel indicates that they did not flourish as subsistance farmers.
The St Kildans who emigrated to the mainland did a bit better, one of them ended up as a senior member of the Metropolitan Police in London.
Great – thanks! You never know with people moving around the world in those days. My own lot (mother’s side), left Ireland after Cromwell did his thing there. We don’t know why – could have been another famine or getting on the wrong side in the Lord Protector punch up. Anyway they settled in my home county of Lincolnshire and worked the land until the mid-18 hundreds. Then another agricultural downturn happened to the vast number of farm workers in that county. Might have been the Corn Laws, anyway, three of the Leary family brothers (they dropped the O’ when they moved here) and their families left for New Zealand under NZ government sponsorship. Recruiters were travelling the English countryside signing up prospective workers to fill labour gaps in NZ. Sheep and wool were the source of Lincolnshire’s considerable wealth as can be seen from the huge numbers of large, mostly abandoned churches across the county. Every wool baron had to build a bigger one than his neighbour. NZ, sheep, experienced workers. A match.
We have all their names, the ship they sailed in, and the ship’s log and passenger list. My cousin does this kind of thing professionally.
I’m still writing to a distant cousin there in Waiuku, near Auckland, whom I’ve never met but found me via my company and just a name. He’s 98 and his daughters have confiscated his ladder because he insisted on maintaining his roof himself.
Their voyage was much better it seems but they must have been lucky. There’s a very good museum in Antwerp in the building the Red Star Line operated out of which documents the Europeans journeys to the New World. The Americans had started quarantining refugees this side of the Atlantic after all their problems with cholera & typhus etc.
For more see this:
https://redstarline.be/en
“After Cromwell did his thing there…” which was after the Irish had done their thing to the Protestant settlers.
Yes, including selling the entire Protestant village of Baltimore into slavery, as Scottish historian Neil Oliver recounted in an episode of “Coast”.
Thanks for this; very interesting and yes plenty of echoes of this today
A timely gentle reminder of what we are loosing (or rather, being deprived of ) – our culture. Last week we watched that bravura reminder of who we are, the Last Night of the Proms, and perhaps for the last time we were ‘allowed’ to enjoy, and even participate in, what is one of the last remnants of public celebration of our heritage and identity.
The irony of the entire Albert Hall audience repeatedly belting out ‘Land of Hope and Glory’, led by Finnish conductor, Sakari Oramo, sadly emphasized just how far down the road to mediocracy our country has stumbled, and now races headlong towards total anonymity. Unless we can recapture that ‘Proms’ spirit in all our lives, and not just one evening a year, we should in all consciousness stop calling ourselves ‘British’.
Like the St. Kildans, we who were ‘born of Thee’ are now approaching extinction. We here face a present that cannot survive, a future that will only continue our tradition if we reinvent ourselves with full understanding of our homeland and its enormous, but politically inconvenient potential.
Our planet has survived because life itself has become an essential part of it, self-regulating its dynamics regardless of what one temporarily dominant species – us – can do to wreck it. Like the St. Kildans, our society now faces imminent extinction, as the maniacal proponents of the emergent suicidal death cult of Net Zero move in and attempt to overthrow our real world culture with their evil lunacy. These new arrivals are entirely the modern day equivalent of those bearers of the obsessional imposition of their own religious intolerance who wrecked the stable human community of St. Kilda.
Are the present attempts by our Chief Witchfinder Starmtrooper General to re-link us with the Continent aimed at opening the door for we indigenous people to move out to a ‘mainland’ where we too can migrate in the hope of finding a better life (or, indeed, one at all, given that winter is coming on) safely out from under his supposedly enlightened feet?
Sadly, I find little hope in our land these days. And as for glory, I imagine it will shortly become a banned word if wokism prevails, which heaven knows, I hope it will not, though it seems our schools are hell bent on ensuring that it is.
OFF – T I just heard BBC4 banging on about the measles vaccine and the decline in the uptake is not about trust, but about ‘access’…Aye, whatever you say!
They mentioned how Wakefield was ‘debunked’….From what I remember reading was how the GMC did a Great Barrington on their ass. Or how the climate propaganda keeps criticism at bay. This was according to the UKHMRA. But notice how they didn’t bother interview a Dr or anyone that DOES NOT want the measles jab. OFcom anyone!
Received today,
Dear hux,
A free flu vaccine is available for you at the practice. Please follow the link to book your appointment
If you don’t want one, or have already received it elsewhere please let us know.
The Sometimes Surgery.
This is the second invite in a week. I just ignore them. I am not wasting my time by responding. If they are that bothered they can phone me but the answer will still be negative.
And we have an ideal place the wokesters can be shipped to..
In the interest of protection of the sea birds, I must protest that. If cats aren’t allowed to roam this island, hunting sea birds to sustain themselves, Eds and Keirs and Eluneds certainly shouldn’t, either.
Banging on about the African slave trade is nothing but a way of the former US pro-slavery party (yes, that’s the Democrats) trying to absolve itself of its own past by blaming others for it. The Atlantic slave trade ended about 200 years ago and it was Britain which first abolished it formally and then shut it down by military force. Until then, slavery had been an institution which had existed at all times in all cultures and which is probably as old as mankind itself. All of this is past history and the past cannot be fixed or atoned for by lining the pockets of current-day preachers of their own enlightenend self-interest, ie, politician-beggars with a megaphone and more than their share of an attitude. They’ll keep coming for as long as they’re getting paid for that.
Putting this in two simple sentences:
The notion of inherited guilt is nothing but the Christian original sin these people misappropriated, putting themselves in place of God: God decreed man was forever guilty which he could do because he was God. The people behind this also decreed that man is forever guilty because in their opinion, they’re just as good as God. But outside of their megalomanic fantasies, they aren’t.
One reason that other Scottish islands were abandoned in the 20th century, though closer to the mainland than St Kilda, was modern transport. It was easier to live a life on the mainland than on the islands.
In past centuries these islands would have been part of a sea highway that stretched from Scandinavia to Ireland. It was easier at that time to travel by boat than overland. They were not remote by the standards of the day.
If the argument is to be made concerning the effects of authoritarians revolutionising culture it is necessary to understand how these religious preachers, as officers of the Church, gained their authority. It has a connection with the attempt at world rule today. Otherwise, it might have been thought that the St Kildans could have freed themselves from Sabbatarian restrictions by referring to the Gospel passage where Jesus criticised the religious leaders of His day for pressing similar counter-productive restrictions on the people.
Originally in the earliest churches the officers were simply responsible for certain administrative duties. The Apostle Paul emphasises that Christians are not rated according to class or office but by spiritual power. As these spiritual gifts had one source and were manifestations of the same Divine Spirit, all the members of the church were included in their operation, regardless of who practised them. In other words, all the members of the church were equals.
Paul tailored his preaching to his audience. What he says to one group cannot be applied to others, at least not with the same purpose. Though Paul laid down strict modes of behaviour for his Greek converts in Corinth, this is only because they were from this city that was notorious for moral corruption.
It’s hardly likely that the small community on St Kilda were so dissolute as the people of a city in the ancient Greek world that they needed strict rules unnecessary previously. Nor is it likely that these cragsmen would have needed warning, as Paul does to his fellow Jews in his letter to ‘the Romans’, about the allure of the same-sex relations – merely matters of personal taste – that prevailed among the Latins.
After the destruction of Roman authority in Western Europe, the Church was the only institution that survived intact. A city may be governed by a barbarian king, but it was still the seat of the bishop’s see. Dressed in the robes of a Roman magistrate and speaking the imperial tongue, the authority of the officers of the Church were magnified. For the ‘pagani’, the countryfolk of Gaul or Spain, or to the Germans who came to fight over the British Isles, the clergy would only have been known as those having a special position and special powers. Among the St Kildans one might suspect the same.
As a small community already close-knit, and one in the 19th century increasingly remote, the St Kildans would have been particularly susceptible to a charismatic preacher. More Jonestown, Guiana, than Western Isles.
The Apostles had no discernible objective in creating a Christian civilisation. Even before the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple around which the early churches circulated, the churches had become associated with the Roman Empire merely as part of Roman civic society, organised as they were as all the other free associations that honeycombed the Roman world.
And after the destruction of the Temple and the adoption of Christianity as a state religion, the officers of the church were propelled into the highest ranks of imperial rule. It was only at this point did Roman law dictate that heresy was a crime not just against the Church but also against the State. To the Romans, the Empire was ‘the empire of the whole earth’ and being associated with it the Church became identified with world rule and its officers world rulers.
If a warning is to be issued against the culture revolutionaries, one should be issued against its champions. For patriotic social conservatives the worst champion they could have chosen is Trump. Even if he is right about mass migration, he isn’t the right person to say it, damaging the argument with absurdities. Churchill was belligerent but being well-read and articulate he didn’t resort to the crude insults that Trump does.
Churchill could be advised out of his daft ideas without having to appeal to a sense his self-advantage, as Trump’s advisors had to do. Churchill could speak to his audience’s emotions but not at the same time dislocate their reason. Churchill accepted the humiliating result of the 1945 general election when he could have claimed the right to rule as saviour of Britain.
you have to understand that the first significant engagement with Christianity the St Kildans experienced was pre Reformation Irish monks, the same monks that settled North Rona and other remote islands, undoubtably visited St Kilda although there is no archaeological evidence avaliable yet and until the 19th C history was the oral tradition.
This would have been around the time of the Colomban mission to Scotland so we are talking 6th C. These monks belonged to the Celtic Church which was not brought into communion with Rome until the Synod of Whitby in the 7th C.
We don’t know what happened to early Christian Settlement on the remoter islands pre reformation but we do know that periodically catastrophes tipped the islands’ finely balanced economies into freefall resulting in famine. North Rona, which lies 50 miles north of Lewis was uninhabited when the entire population of 30 starved to death in 1685 probably after an infestation of black rats from an earlier ship wreck ate the barley food reserves.
We know that in the early 1700s an outbreak of smallpox killed 90% of the population of St Kilda. By the time presbyterian missionaries arrived on the islands in the early 1800s, the islands followed a faith that was very different from any form of mainland Christianity. The form of Christianity that took hold in the 19th C did so among a people that had no knowledge of St Paul, the early church fathers or alternative forms of Christianity, there are no records of any active church engagement prior to the 18th C only that there was obviously some because the religion of the islanders involved a mix of Christianity, no doubt recalled from the dar age monks.
St Kilda is so remote it doesn’t feature in the argument around transport being a cause of depopulation, it’s remoteness was due to distance but also the sea and weather conditions which made landing their perilous 9 months out of 12. There was no economic benefit to owning the islands, until fulmar oil was discovered as a refined enough lubricant for watches and precision instruments, even that was soon uneconomical thanks to industrial whaling and then with the discovery of oil distillation, there was no requirement for either as sources of oil.
So the Christianity the St Kildans experienced in the 19th C was that of the Kirk and then the Free Kirk. I must stress that not all of this was bad, after McKay retired, the islands were allocated a trainee minister, who was not ordained who would serve for 2 years with his family and there were some extremely competent men and especially their wives who held this role for the last 3o years or so of occupation, we are grateful to their memoirs in understanding the condition of the islands. The faith was still the Free Kirk, but nowhere near as restrictive and intrusive as it had been under Mackay. Indeed, it was the elders on the island, not the Kirk men who latterly were the ones demanding the faith of their youths, that of MacKay.
As I mentioned in the article, the reasons for the evacuation were numerous and complex, the lack of a safe anchorage meant that unlike Fair Isle or the Faroes, fishing, whaling or sealing weren’t viable activities. But the two events that seem to have finally finished the islands were firstly the consequences of the schism and the closing of the Church after MacKenzie left in 1844, and the subsequent depopulation by the 36 who left for Australia (likely the most active and ambitious of the islanders – sadly fever took on the ship and by the time they landed in Melbourne, only 14 remained alive). The second event was the arrival of Mackay and his ridiculous sabbatarianism. Had a more enlightened minister been appointed, like another MacKenzie then it is quite possible the islands would have survived. Unfortunately, the cultural malaise, the oppression, the self loathing and the suspicion of anything that wasn’t downright miserable, fatally undermined any chance the islands had of getting back on their feet.
They relied increasingly on charity until the eventual evacuation.
Very interesting article and thanks for the additional information.
Pre-war (WWI) English contemporaries of Churchill have described him (polemically, obviously) as someone whose intellect was equivalent in value to that of a piggy bank with a single penny rattling in it whenever it was shaken. He was also the spiritus rector behind the military fiasco at the Dardanelles 1915. Later, he was instrumental in saving France from the blunder of declaring war on Germany because of the joint German – Russian invasion of Poland but only at the expense of abandoning almost all of Europe eastwards of the Elbe to about 50 years of Bolshevist reign of terror. Lastly, he was also the politician responsible for ‘morale’ firebombing, ie, the attempt to burn every historical building ever erected in Germany to the ground and kill all people living there. He should count himself lucky that he had no English propagandists working against him, as they might as well have depicted him with the head of his umbrella proudly driven into the charred corpse of a toddler in front of a burning town. Maybe with the neat text like “For freedom, democracy and human rights!”
He certainly didn’t save Britain from anything as there was no way the Germans could have staged a successful invasion of the British Isles at any time in the 1940s and the Germans wouldn’t – in all likeliness – have gone to war against it hadn’t the anglo-french desire to hand all of Poland over to the Russians instead of only half of it been so overwhelmingly strong.
Rw one of the stupid ignorant and spiteful posts we have seen here.
It’s – to the best of my knowledge – historically accurate. Eg, the source for the piggy bank remark, which originally uses a few nickels instead of a single penny, is here (in German, indirectly quoted but unfortunately, without source itself)
https://digi.landesbibliothek.at/viewer/image/AC04184756/48/#topDocAnchor
This is a from a book title The Secret Prehistory Of The World War (Die geheime Vorgeschichte des Weltkrieges) written by Dr Hans F Helmholt in 1914.
Just in case someone except me cares about this kind of stuff:
It’s claimed that the quote is from a letter written by an ambassdor during the an ambassador conference in London in winter 1912/13 and it’s really about Sir Edward Grey. The relevant part is
Recently, when a temperamental foreign diplomat expressed admiration for Grey’s calm nature which always hid his real inner mood, a cheeky secretary opined “If a piggy bank made of clay is completely filled with gold coins, it obviously won’t rattle when shaken. But neither will it if there’s not a single penny inside. In the case of Winston Churchill, a few nickels keep rattling so loud that this gets onto everybody’s nerves. And with Grey, there’s just silence. Only someone holding the piggy bank in his hands can tell if it’s full or empty!”
No, it is NOT historically accurate.
One very curious historical snippet about the Firebombing of Dresden, ordered by Clement Attlee in collusion with Stalin (on one of the Illuminati Ritual Human Sacrifice nights, Feb 13-14), is that, amongst all the huge numbers of refugees killed there, none were Jewish, because the Jews had been forewarned by their own vast information network, and quietly escaped from the city in time.
FALSE!
It was the Evil Closet Communist Clement Attlee, eaten up with envy of Churchill, who colluded with Stalin to order the Firebombing of Dresden BEHIND CHURCHILL’S BACK. When Churchill was on his way to Yalta, the Traitor Clement Attlee was in temporary charge of Britain in Churchill’s absence, and ordered the Firebombing of Dresden at Stalin’s secret urging.
Churchill only found out about it at Yalta, when Stalin gloatingly mentioned it.
“…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.”
A point I have been making repeatedly on DS.
The assault on our language, the assault on private schools, the attacks against our Christian churches, the criminalisation of anti Islam discussions, the criminalisation of our flags for God’s sake, the dumbing down of education, theatre productions museums and art galleries, the destruction of our pubs and nightlife, persistent criticism of the greatest nation on earth and unrelenting insistence on rewriting our history and rubbishing our achievements, all insidious and ongoing and let us not forget the great replacement with hordes of third world barbarians. The deliberate aim to destroy all that Great Britain has ever been and could be is unending.
We are at war and that war was formally declared in March 2020. At some point it must get bloody.
A sad evocative and timely tale, thank you C.J.
I just find it so hard to grasp how individuals like that McKay can possibly function.
And as for drowning the working dogs, that is hideous.
Sadly we wiped out all thr truth and beauty in the hope that we had something better to offer. We destroyed them and gave them nothing but a wasteland in every place where the spirit was still strong. Blindly compelled to destroy these places. It has been official Christian doctrine since the council of Constantinople in the ninth century. That there is material and soul but the realm of the spirit is inaccessible to man. One day we will understand the gravity of this false turning.
Brilliant, thank you so much.
A very bigoted article, typical of the modern Scottish hatred of the protestantism that made it a great country. I have read a great deal of 19th century Scottish history, so I know whereof I speak. It was the Scottish Reformation that made it the most literate and objectively honest nation on earth.
And Scottish Calvinism is not at all like the modern “woke” religion, with its positive effects on morality and human dignity, its holding of the existence of objective truth, and unfearing openness to examination of its tenets.
Shabby writing.
Meanwhile ‘God’ laughs at the great joke he plays on believers.
How to tell us all you didn’t read the article without telling us you didn’t read the article.
You saw the headline, skimmed it and thought: this guy is blaming the end of occupation in St Kilda on the Presbyterian Church.
You then think you are qualified to condemn the article as ‘bigoted’ and presumably extend the same to me.
If you HAD read the article you would have noticed that I did not condemn Christianity, Presbyterianism, the Kirk or the Free Kirk..what I did was highlight how some historians including Steel condemned Rev John Mackay’s ludicrous and extreme sabbatarianism as a cause of the islands economic ruin.
Steel was not the only person to condemn MacKay, his contemporaries in the Free Church did.
I also stress that church men like MacKenzie ( pre schism) and the Free Church missionaries who came after Mackay did an excellent job.
You seem to assume that I am somehow an opponent of Reformation Scotland.
I wonder if you have ever lived in that country because the history of religion in Scotland is both nuanced, complex and violent and is not a simple matter of one side vs the other, native Scots understand this because we have lived with the consequences of religious sectarianism in our society.
No matter.
It’s polite to read articles carefully before commenting, I’d recommend you do so in the future before commenting.
BTW I was brought up in the Kirk, I’m also from Argyll and understand the impact of all the churches on the Isles, for good and bad.
I’m now a practicing and somewhat devout Catholic.
Shabby review.
Thank you for telling this story – a moving and tragic example of the impact of ideological thinking. There are contemporary examples of similar dangerous madness in this piece: https://www.hughwillbourn.com/post/54-madness-and-the-evaporation-of-authority
Thanks Hugh, I’ll take a look
What an excellent thought provoking article.
i think Mr Strachsn would have got on well with Edmund Burke.Their messaging is as important today as it was in Pitts time
Thank you for the musical link.
Quite mournful music.
What an absolutely fascinating article. But what a tragedy for the St Kilda archipelago. I shall listen to the music. Thank you very much, Mr Strachan.
That was a really interesting article, in fact I am going to research more, I think one of the clear points, as if we weren’t aware, is how one persons ideaology can destroy a whole society. Thank you
What a fascinating and sad story.
It demonstrates that extremist religious zealots (whether they represent Muslim, Christian, Jewish or Gaia/Net Zero) are basically bullies, control freaks and entirely destructive.
We seem to have an abundance of them in Government.
My great grandfather was the last teacher on St.Kilda. I believe he acted as the last, part time, minister of the Free Church and he moved on to be a minister at Blair Athol where he is buried. My grandfather trained as a doctor and escaped to Wolverhampton!
That’s fascinating. Thanks for sharing. It’s Thanks to men like your great grandfather we know about the lives of the islanders.
Brilliant piece. Thank you.
Thanks Simon
Well done to C.S. Strachan for such an outstanding article.
Thank you