A St Kilda Wedding - III

Who were the serious young couple whose marriage was described by Kenneth Campbell, schoolmaster on St Kilda in 1884–85? In the speech he delivered in December 1886 about his year on Hirt, Campbell says that he was present at two marriages while on the island: this tallies with official records. His description of them as ‘the young couple’ rules out the marriage celebrated on 27 April 1885 between the notorious ‘serial emigrant’ Ewen Gillies, then aged 59, and his second wife Rachel MacQueen (aged 31 according to the certificate, although in fact 33), who were shortly to leave the island for Canada.

This leaves us with the other marriage held when Campbell was on the island, which took place on 5 August 1884. The bridegroom on this occasion was none other than Finlay MacQueen (1862–1941), the nephew of Rachel MacQueen. By the time of the evacuation in 1930 MacQueen, by then a widower, was the recognised patriarch and best cragsman of the island. Perhaps rather unexpectedly from the glimpse we have of the solemn young man, MacQueen was also the (admittedly often rather cantankerous) guardian of St Kildan traditions.

Finlay’s bride was the slightly older Mary Gillies (1860–1906), of 12 Hirt. Mary Gillies is well-known in St Kilda lore on account of her middle names. The (perhaps slightly enhanced) story goes that her mother had a difficult childbirth, and was assisted by Jemima, the wife of Captain Henry Charles Otter (1807–76) who was there with a deputation, including the Free Church minister of Portree, in his paddle steamer HMS Porcupine. After a successful delivery, the child was christened Mary Jemima Otter Porcupine Gillies.

The new couple took over the croft of the groom’s grandfather John MacDonald (1807–92) at 2 Hirt, and it was there that Finlay MacQueen lived until the final evacuation of the island in August 1930. After an unhappy stay in Ardnarff in Lochalsh – the isolation was ‘worse than Hirta’ – he eventually moved to Tulliallan by Kincardine in Fife, where he lived with his daughter Mary Ann and her husband Neil Ferguson until his death in 1941. MacQueen, who only ever learnt a few words of English, did return to the island with a handful of other St Kildans between May and August 1938, for a holiday, a spot of recreational fowling, an opportunity to sell postcards and souvenirs to day-trippers, and apparently to help to dye and weave St Kilda tweed for the then owner the Earl of Dumfries.

A fortnight before he returned to his old home Finlay MacQueen, along with his fellow Hirteach Neil Gillies, had been presented to King George VI and Queen Elizabeth in the St Kilda Cottage – where ‘St Kilda Tweed’ was heavily advertised – at the ‘An Clachan’ Highland Village exhibit at the opening of the British Empire Exhibition of 1938 in Bellahouston Park, Glasgow. Despite attracting some controversy, the plaster-cast cottages, castle, and cill of An Clachan, occupied by Gaelic speakers mending nets, making creels, and weaving, proved remarkably popular with Highland Gaels and their Lowland expatriate cousins alike, a fact grudgingly admitted by the exhibition manager Captain Sidney Graham: ‘While I have yet to be convinced of the desirability of displaying to the world at large houses of the type in which no human being should be expected to live in the year 1938, there can be no doubt as to the drawing power of the Clachan.’ Among scores of others on the Exhibition General Committee was Alexander Carmichael’s grandson James Carmichael Watson (1910–42). The Clachan’s Highland castle was decorated by mural panels depicting the story of Deirdre, the tale which Alexander Carmichael had been so influential in publicising to a wider Scottish audience.

It is interesting to think that even today a number of Glaswegians of a certain age will have seen, and perhaps even met (though maybe not talked to) the St Kildan Finlay MacQueen, an old man born in the middle of the nineteenth century who had spent the first seventy or so years of his life on ‘an island on the edge of the world’.

References:
CW MS 395 fos.21–25.
Alastair Borthwick, The Empire Exhibition: Fifty Years On (Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1988), p. 20.
Bob Crampsey, The Empire Exhibition of 1938: The Last Durbar (Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1988), pp. 54, 121.
Empire Exhibition of 1938: Official Catalogue, p. 42.
Empire Exhibition: Official Guide, pp. 121–2.
Bill Lawson, Croft History: Isle of St Kilda (Northton, Harris: Bill Lawson Publications, 1993).
W.R. Mitchell, Finlay MacQueen of St Kilda (Colonsay: House of Lochar, 1999 [1992]).
Michael Robson, St Kilda: Church, Visitors and ‘Natives’ (Port of Ness: Islands Book Trust, 2005), pp. 424–35.

Image: Finlay MacQueen talking to the St Kilda factor John Mackenzie, from Mitchell, Finlay MacQueen.

A St Kilda Wedding - II

Although apparently a native of Gairloch, Kenneth Campbell (1862–1929) was brought up and educated in Oban, before attending the University of Edinburgh as a medical student. Alexander Carmichael thus had plenty of opportunities to get to know him, whether during his own rather unhappy stay in Oban between 1878 and 1880, or else while at his summer house in Taynuilt, or indeed in Edinburgh itself.

Campbell left Skye for St Kilda, where he was to spend a year as a supply teacher, on Tuesday 3 June 1884. He travelled out on the proprietor MacLeod of Dunvegan’s boat the Robert Hadden, ‘a large smack’ (the ornithologist Charles Dixon who was on the same voyage refers to it as a ‘tight little smack of about eighty tons’) ‘with provisions receiving in return all the natives have to give in the way of cloth, oil, feathers, cheese, tallow & dried fish’. Kenneth Campbell’s description of St Kilda is rather unusual compared to most Victorian accounts, given that he spent a considerable amount of time on the island rather than just a few hurried hours, and, unlike most visitors there, he could actually converse with the islanders themselves rather than rely upon a translator. His islanders are much more of a community, more recognisably Gàidhealach, perhaps, than the dour or grasping caricatures sketched out by the tourist day tripper. But they were certainly strongly evangelical: when Campbell asked about religious remains on island, ‘the invariable answer is ‘Papanaich, a ghraidh, droch dhaoine, a ghraidh.’

In June 1884 a yacht party voyaged to St Kilda, among them Alexander Ross, who was helped by Campbell – ‘a very intelligent and obliging young gentleman’ – in gathering geological specimens, and David Whyte, the photographer from Inverness. Whyte took the accompanying photograph of the islanders: Kenneth Campbell is the man in the bowler on the left.

Campbell’s time on the island certainly affected him: his obituary states that he ‘was a delightful raconteur of his reminiscences of that period.’ It is noteworthy that in September 1885, after a catastrophic storm had swept away the islanders’ harvest and one of their boats, young Alexander Ferguson (1872–1960) was moved to write to his old schoolteacher, then working in Uig, Lewis, for help. Rather extraordinarily, the boy’s letter, placed in a wooden ‘St Kilda mail boat’, landed near Àird Uig, reached Campbell, was printed in the Inverness Courier, and, together with two letters of the same tenor from the island minister, caused a public outcry which led to a ‘relief expedition’ sponsored by the Highland and Agricultural Society of Scotland the following month.

It seems rather probable that it was in fact from his friend Kenneth Campbell that Carmichael heard the account of the last great auk which has already been printed in this blog. Campbell’s interest in the bird may have been spurred by his acting as a translator for the ornithologist Charles Dixon during the latter’s visit to St Kilda. In the late 1890s Campbell appears to have given another speech in which he gave the story of the great auk much as Carmichael scribbled it down. The account was reported in the Westminster Gazette in March 1898, then reprinted throughout the world in newspapers as diverse as the New York Times and the Otago Witness. These years were a time of rocketing prices for surviving great auks’ eggs, mainly thanks to the apparent obsession (or was it canny publicity-seeking?) of H. C. Middlebrook, antiquarian and publican, whose Edinboro’ Castle Inn, Camden – like a number of London pubs at the time – had a free museum of curiosities on the side to attract customers. In all Middlebrook purchased four great auk eggs for vastly inflated prices – possibily fuelling the contemporary debate about the need to protect endangered wildlife.

References:

CW MS 395 fos.4–5, 21–25.

Anon., ‘The late Dr Kenneth Campbell, Oban’, An Gàidheal, xxiv, 7 (Giblein, 1929), pp. 105–6.

Charles Dixon, ‘The Ornithology of St Kilda’, Ibis, 5 (1885), pp. 69–97, 358–62.

John A. Love, A Natural History of St Kilda (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2009).

Michael Robson, St Kilda: Church, Visitors and ‘Natives’ (Port of Ness: Islands Book Trust, 2005)

Alexander Ross, ‘A Visit to the Island of St Kilda’, Transactions of the Inverness Scientific Society and Field Club, iii (1883–88), pp. 72–91.

Image: ‘Nurse Ann MacKinlay in a group with some St Kildans and the Schoolmaster of that year – Mr Campbell’: Robson, St Kilda, p. 572.

A St Kilda Wedding I

The lively reel called ‘The St Kilda Wedding’ has had many outings on record and CD over the years. Judging from a written account preserved in the Carmichael Watson papers, by the late nineteenth century a real-life St Kilda wedding may not have been quite so exhilarating. The following report comes from a speech delivered on 16 December 1886 by Ross-shire man Kenneth Campbell (1862–1929). Campbell had been employed as a schoolmaster on the island for a year during 1884–85 by the Edinburgh Ladies Highland Schools Association.

On a certain morning after ringing the school-bell as usual I awaited the arrival of the children. When they did come one of them ventured the information that a marriage was to take place that afternoon. On casting some doubt upon this statement, the boy replied, ‘Oh yes, they are just now polishing their boots in the house.’ …

About 4 in the afternoon I noticed a party of 4 people pass on their way to church. With bent heads & solemn faces they paced slowly & humbly on their way. Eager to see something more of this serious affair I followed to the church where I was soon joined by some others of the people who having been at work in the fields had thrown down their implements & come to church barefoot as usual. Looking round the church I saw the young couple with their 2 attendants seated in a corner, having their heads resting on the bench in front of them and looking the picture of misery. Now comes the minister who starts a long solemn discourse, admonishing, warning, advising. When he had married them to their own & his satisfaction they marched out of church as solemnly as they had entered, looking neither to the right or left. No handshakings! no congratulations! One could not help wondering what a funeral would be like when a marriage could be so miserable an affair.

Later on Campbell was invited to ‘a bit of a spree’ at the manse by the couple, each of whom had a bundle wrapped up in a handkerchief.

Arrived at the manse, we had tea. Nobody spoke. For my part I was afraid to speak, but at last in desperation I hazarded the question where the married party intended to spend their honeymoon.

At last, whether inspired by the tea I know not, but the bridegroom made a remark about the birds. Looking around the table I saw the bridesmaid busy untying her parcel, while the groomsman was quite as busy with his on the other side. After some tugging and a vigorous use of front teeth, the one brought to light three large oatcakes that had been prepared for the occasion, while the other produced a large piece of mutton & some cheese. The groomsman had to do the carving. With pocket knife in hand he succeeded in cutting [&] passing around a rib with its attachments to each of us. After some more edifying talk about the birds, eggs, feathers, and the weather we went home & heard no more of the marriage.

References:

CW MS 395 fos. 21–25
Michael Robson, St Kilda: Church, Visitors and ‘Natives’ (Port of Ness: Islands Book Trust, 2005), pp. 572–74.
Image:  St Kilda.