Cancelled and forgotten: the fight to restore hero's reputation

Efforts are underway to restore Hall of Clestrain (Image: Graeme Paterson)

As time took its toll, the once fabulous ground floor rooms of Hall of Clestrain were given over to house pig pens. Its roof was torn off in a vicious storm and its decorative pediment crumbled.

Yet its significance and the story it tells of Orkney and of one of its pioneering sons was not entirely forgotten: among those to champion it and Arctic explorer Dr John Rae are former Monty Python star Michael Palin and adventurer Ray Mears.

Now the group which they are both patrons of has received a major boost to revive the building and place it at the heart of an often-overlooked chapter of island history.

The Category A listed mid-Georgian villa, built in the 1760s and currently on the national Buildings at Risk Register, will be first made secure, then restored to reflect its once magnificent status as Orkney’s grandest home of its age.

Michael Palin is patron of the John Rae Society

It will then become the focal point for telling the remarkable 19th century Boys’ Own style adventures of Dr Rae, whose bravery in the face of harsh Arctic conditions and – unusual for his era – deep respect for the Inuit people he encountered, is said to exemplify the Orcadian spirit.

Along with telling of his extraordinary achievements, including pioneering surveys of the Northwest Passage which helped open up its final route, the project aims to repair his once-tarnished reputation.

Dr Rae was wrongly vilified by shocked Victorians who refused to believe his reports from one Arctic mission, in which told how Inuits helped him unravel the mystery of a long-lost vessel with the horrifying discovery that its crewmen had resorted to cannibalism.

Arctic explorer Dr John Rae (Image: BBC)

Originally intended to be for Admiralty eyes only, the frenzy of interest surrounding what had happened Sir John Franklin’s missing Arctic expedition saw Dr Rae’s report released to the public by accident, sparking outrage.

The suggestion that British sailors might indulge in such atrocities led to the Orcadian being ‘cancelled’ by the British establishment of the time; his reputation as one of the nation’s great Arctic adventurers was left in tatters.

Even leading figures such as Charles Darwin joined the backlash.

A statue of Dr John Rae overlooks Stromness Harbour (Image: Barbara Winters)

He claimed Dr Rae’s strong connections with the Canadian Arctic people – extraordinary in an age of ignorance, when indigenous people were wrongly regarded as uneducated primitives - meant he had been duped into believing lies. He argued, instead, that the crew had been murdered.

Despite having played a major role in mapping huge areas of the Arctic and finding the crucial last gap in the line from Bering Strait to Hudson Bay, Dr Rae was himself frozen out.

Unlike other explorers of his era whose achievements were met with national celebration and knighthoods, he was overlooked.

Hall of Clestrain was once one of Orkney's finest homes (Image: John Rae Society)

It would take years before historians revisited his reports and concluded he and the Inuit people he had met were telling the truth.

As well as highlighting Dr Rae’s story, the £5 million plus revived Hall of Clestrain will shine a light on events in Orkney at the time it was built, when the kelp industry dominated the landscape.

While its original occupants made their fortune from it which was used to fund the grand mansion’s construction, others suffered from pollution linked to the processes of turning it into soap and iodine.

The industrial scale of kelp processing turned parts of the Orkney mainland into a volcanic scene of flames and ash, which poisoned the air and water and left people and livestock sick.

Inside Hall of Clestrain, now earmarked for restoration (Image: Graeme Paterson)

It also led to the re-distribution of land as wealthy islanders who made fortunes from kelp snatched large swathes from poorer families.

The mansion’s redevelopment will spotlight the later impact of the Hudson Bay Company on Orkney and its people.

Derelict for decades, inside Hall of Clestrain, childhood home of Dr John Rae (Image: Graeme Paterson)

As well as providing work for Dr John Rae, his father and brothers, the Hudson Bay Company provided a route the New World for huge numbers of Orcadians, many of whom made new lives in Canada.

A final phase of the project will focus on establishing an outdoor facility for young people, who can take inspiration from the Arctic explorer’s achievements to challenge themselves in the outdoors.

According to Cheryl Chapman of the John Rae Society, which has just received £248,000 of National Lottery Heritage funding for the project, Dr Rae was one of Scotland’s greatest adventurers but his achievements were swamped by the backlash that came from Victorian critics.

“We think of Dr John Rae as one of the last great Scots and our work is to build on that and celebrate his achievements,” she says.

“He is part of world history; he discovered the last link of Northwest Passage and he was a man who befriended the Arctic people.

Once a grand villa, Hall of Clestrain is now to be restored (Image: Graeme Paterson)

“He survived in the Arctic because he listened to local people and adopted their ways. He was ahead of his time.

“He was an entrepreneur, he was brave, hardy and an egalitarian: he was a true Orcadian and we want to celebrate that.”

Dr Rae was born in Hall of Clestrain in 1813, by which time it had already been standing for nearly 45 years as one of Orkney’s finest buildings.

Built to a lavish Palladian-design in 1769, it featured a grand pediment and adjoining pavilions, which gave it a reputation as one of the most impressive buildings in the north of Scotland.

It had been commissioned by Patrick Honeyman, a farmer who had inherited his father’s Graemsay estate south of Kirkwall, who went on to make his fortune from the island’s booming kelp industry.

In its prime, its harled exterior was painted dazzling white, while inside it boasted opulently furnished rooms of silk carpets with grand views overlooking Scapa Flow to one side and Neolithic sites to the other.

When the Honeyman family to become one of Edinburgh’s influential legal dynasties, the Rae family moved in as tenanted farmers.

By the 1950s, however, it had deteriorated, with pigs roaming through its once grand rooms.

According to Genna Adkins, the villa was at the height of fashion in its day, a unique example of Palladian style and  built in a particular way which showed the impressive wealth of its owner.

“It was a very modern building at the forefront of Georgian Palladian design but was built in an old-fashioned way, with construction done like a castle rather than a domestic house,” she says.

“And although it’s now derelict you can still see the original Georgian paint and wood panelling on the hall walls, where the room divisions were and what the individual colour schemes were in the house.”

Hall of Clestrain, home of Arctic explorer Dr John Rae (Image: John Rae Society)

John Rae’s father became an agent for the Hudson Bay Company, and paved the way for his son, a surgeon who had studied at Edinburgh University, to make his way to the Canadian Arctic.

At first John Rae was based at the fur-trading post of Moose Factory in Ontario, spending his free time hunting and learning travel and survival skills from the First Nation and Metis people, including how to use sleds and snow-shoes.

It led to him being chosen by the Hudson Bay Company to finish mapping the Arctic coast, a challenge that led to him making a series of crucial discoveries.

In 1848, he joined the search for the missing Franklin Expedition, which had set out three years earlier to traverse the last unnavigated sections of the Northwest Passage in the Canadian Arctic.

He was on another expedition three years later when he found a piece of wood and part of a flagstaff containing remnants of cloth linked to the lost ship. When he discussed his findings with Inuit families, they told him how they had found corpses and signs of cannibalism.

Genna says it’s just one thread that links the Canadian Arctic with Orkney and the house.

A memorial to Dr John Rae in St Magnus Cathedral, Kirkwall (Image: Barbara Winters)

“By end of the 18th century, 80% of Hudson Bay employees were Orcadians.

“We know a large amount were employed by the Hudson Bay Company, some stayed in Canada and some came home.

“Some had families with native people sent their children back to Orkney to be educated, some stayed and some went back.

“There is a rich patchwork between Orkney and Canada which we want to start teasing out.”