'Communistic' Scottish community was turned into 'an isle of the dead'

Living on St Kilda’s main island of Hirta they were, of course, geographically cut off from the mainland as they eked a precarious living from their rocky home turf. But when the world came calling, as it increasingly did between the 18th and early 20th centuries, it seems to have forgotten its manners.

Indeed, when boatloads of Victorian tourists steamed into Village Bay, some brazenly peered through cottage windows or entered people’s homes uninvited and newspapers gleefully described the interiors of their “miserable dens”. One critic observed a meal of oatmeal and boiled seabirds being supped, spoonless, from a communal bowl that was later given to the dog to lick clean. “The bedclothes are scant and the bedding not above prison mark,” opined another.

(Image: Birlinn)

By contrast, Romantic-era artists and poets adopted those “primitive” people as a collective muse in the “noble savage” vein – though opinions differed as to whether they inhabited a pastoral utopia, or amounted to a bunch of ‘lazy and ungrateful … cigarette cadgers”.

Even at the bitter end, as St Kilda’s last remaining inhabitants prepared to leave their homes in 1930, reporters flouted the press ban designed to afford them some privacy. You can still find film footage on the internet of women hiding their faces from cameras while packing up their belongings.

Hundreds of books have been written about this poignant chapter of Scotland’s history and Fleming himself published St Kilda and the Wider World in 2005. Now, in The Gravity of Feathers, he makes use of recently digitised newspaper archives to fill in blanks, correct myths and, in the words of historian EP Thomson, rescue St Kilda’s people from “the enormous condescension of posterity”.

Although ravaged by storms, maritime disasters and ferociously high infant mortality, they had endured for hundreds and perhaps thousands of years as a fragile but self-sufficient culture that was superbly adapted to the local topography. “They worked their world intensively,” writes Fleming, “exploiting islands and rock stacks, scaling cliffs, taking harvests wherever they may be found, understanding the ways of the sea.”

Their famously communitarian ethos saw them dividing harvests according to need and allocating the day’s tasks at the morning “mod”. And in the evenings, they crafted climbing ropes, weaving together dried grass, sheep’s wool and human hair combed from their families’ heads to create the cords on which their lives would depend as they gathered seabird eggs, hundreds of feet above the rocky shore. Those ropes, Fleming suggests, symbolise the unique bonds that tied the community to their home, and to each other.

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And despite the “edge of the world” trope, the “Hirteach” had never been completely remote from the outside world. When the fashion for tweed exploded in the mid 19th-century, they swapped seabird feathers for woven cloth as their main export, with “the famous St Kilda tweed” fetching higher prices in London and Paris than the produce of Harris or Connemara.

But if the Edwardian era was a golden age for the island’s economy, the First World War severely dented the tweed market. And by the 1920s, a combination of illness, ruined harvests, rent arrears, coal shortages and dwindling numbers of young people had left the population teetering on the brink of demographic oblivion.

By the time the possibility of evacuation was being mooted, St Kilda was a “cause celebre” whose plight was debated on street corners, in Parliament and in newspapers. (“The desire to end their communistic ways is … understandable,” noted the Glasgow Herald’s leader.)  

In the end, the islanders signed a petition requesting evacuation, but questions remain about the autonomy of their decision. Some families were reluctant to go and Fleming is convinced “clandestine conversations” orchestrated by the island nurse, Williamina Barclay, played a crucial role in persuading them.

Barclay had battled to obtain medical treatment for two desperately ill patients and, shortly before the final exodus, had told a passing trawler’s crew that the locals were “worse off than natives of West Africa”. Days later, a newspaper would declare that the “hermits” of St Kilda had been “reduced to a race of beggars”.

The islanders left on August 29, 1930 (Image: National Trust for Scotland)

The factors that led the last 36 St Kildans to finally board HMS Harebell on August 29, 1930 are complex. Landowners, church leaders and inter-island schisms all played a part, as did problems obtaining supplies and medical treatment.

So, too, did the islanders’ growing awareness of the opportunities that existed beyond the reach of their small boats, some of which quickly turned sour. Many St Kildans succumbed to illness; others, severely disillusioned by life on the mainland or in the New World, longed to return home.

What, or who, should we blame for this calamity? Fleming sets out the evidence in this comprehensive and thought-provoking history of a vanished community that is full of intriguing facts and stories. At points, the narrative flow falters under the weight of all that research and I sometimes struggled to keep up with who’s who among the island’s many generations of Fergusons, MacQueens and Gillieses.

Still, Fleming is right to put so much emphasis on the people whose story this is and one of the most eloquent voices quoted is that of a former St Kildan who became a frequent newspaper correspondent in the lead-up to the evacuation. She described Hirta as “a happy, carefree, independent and unselfish community” whose “faith in ourselves” was spoiled by “those early tourists”.

“Thousands of Gaels,” she added, would condemn any move “to make Hirta an isle of the dead”.

Sadly, that’s exactly what happened - not just on Hirta, but on myriad other small Hebridean islands. And in the process, as Andrew Fleming writes, “something rather special died”.