The extraordinary story of the UK’s most gruelling and spectacularly beautiful islands. Tom Steel’s acclaimed portrait of the St Kildan’s lives is now updated in this reissued edition.Situated at the westernmost point of the United Kingdom, the spectacularly beautiful but utterly bleak island of St Kilda is familiar to virtually nobody. A lonely archipelago off the coast of Scotland, it is hard to believe that for over two thousand years, men and women lived here, cut off from the rest of the world.With a population never exceeding two hundred in its history, the St Kildans were fiercely self-sufficient. Intensely religious people, they climbed cliffs from childhood and caught birds for food. Their sense of community was unparalleled and isolation enveloped their day-to-day existence.With the onset of the First World War, things changed. For the very first time in St Kilda’s history, daily communication was established between the islanders and the mainland. Slowly but surely, this marked the beginning of the end of St Kilda and in August 1930, the island’s remaining 36 inhabitants were evacuated.Updated to include the historic appointment of St Kilda as the United Kingdom’s only UNESCO Dual Heritage site, the ongoing search for information about the island and the threats that it continues to face, this is the moving story of a vanished community and how twentieth century civilization ultimately brought an entire way of life to its knees.
Оглавление
Tom Steel. The Life and Death of St. Kilda: The moving story of a vanished island community
The Life and Death of St Kilda. The Moving Story of a Vanished Island Community. Tom Steel
Dedication
Contents
Map of St Kilda
Prologue
Introduction
1. Exodus from St Kilda
2. A world apart
3. The paternal society
4. Bird people
5. Life on the croft
6. God and the Devil
7. The far-flung dominie
8. A chance to turn a penny
9. A cause of death
10. A need to make contact
11. The beginning of the end
12. The changeless and the changed
13. God will help us
14. Morvern and beyond
15. Military occupation
16. St Kilda in Trust
17. Of mice, men and other life
18. A far better place
Postscript
Tom Steel’s Acknowledgements for the 1988 Edition
Bibliography
Searchable Terms
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Praise for The Life and Death of St Kilda
Copyright
About the Publisher
Отрывок из книги
Updated by Peta Steel
to the memories of the St Kildans. It is also dedicated to
.....
For Nurse Williamina Barclay, 29 August represented a small personal victory. She had been instrumental in getting the St Kildans to agree to the evacuation, and had put in three months’ hard work as the Department of Health’s official on the island. As the ship steamed towards Lochaline, her greatest reward was to feel that at long last the little children of Village Bay would have a future in life. For her work she was to be later awarded the CBE.
The elderly of St Kilda left with the saddest hearts. Many of them had never left the island before and could speak no English. As Commander Pomfret remembers, they were the only ones to show outward signs of emotion as they left behind the one way of life that they were ever to understand. ‘Nothing at all happened until they left Harebell, and then finality was reached – they had to go. Then one or two of them were weeping.’ One of the most tightly-knit communities in Britain found itself split up when the fishery cruiser arrived at Lochaline. The government had been unable to find sufficient accommodation for the thirty-six islanders in Argyll, so some had chosen to make their homes elsewhere in Scotland. At a time when few words were said, Finlay Gillies was heard to mutter to himself in Gaelic, ‘God will help us.’ Finlay MacQueen, then in his late sixties, turned to the young Neil Gillies bound for Glasgow and beyond, and said, ‘May God forgive those that have taken us away from St Kilda.’
