The Wreckers

by Bella Bathurst

  As Stevenson himself noted, the islanders of Orkney:

  certainly had their share of wrecked goods, for the eye is presented with these melancholy remains in almost every form. For example, although quarries are to be met with generally in these islands and the stones are very suitable for building dykes, yet instances occur of the land being enclosed . . . with ship timbers. The author has actually seen a park paled round chiefly with cedar-wood and mahogany from the wreck of a Honduras-built ship; and in one island, after the wreck of a ship laden with wine, the inhabitants have been known to take claret with their barley-meal porridge . . . It may further be mentioned that when some of Lord Dundas’s farms are to be let in these islands a competition takes place for the lease, and it is bona fide understood that a much higher rent is paid than the lands would otherwise give were it not for the chance of making considerably by the agency and advantages attending shipwrecks on the shores of the respective farms.

  On South Ronaldsay, Willie Mowatt MBE has held several jobs during his seventy-seven years, though only some of them were legal, and most remained entirely unrecognised by the honours system. He is a strong, thick-set man, as solid as a shire horse. Though age has made him deafer and his eyes are rheumy with age, he shows few other physical signs of decrepitude. At home, the cat sits in the best chair, and Willie pores over his collection of cuttings taken from what he calls the ‘barrel organ’ (the microfiche) in the local library. ‘I’ve worked for everything,’ he says; ‘I’ve been a Pentland Firth sea dog all my time, as well as a blacksmith and all trades, except preaching. And piracy too.’ Officially, Willie Mowatt has been a blacksmith, farrier, crofting assessor, fisherman, lifeboatman, Excise man, and amateur historian. In 2001 Willie was given the MBE; the citation noting his ‘services to the local heritage of South Ronaldsay’. On the wall at home he keeps a photograph of himself and his wife standing stiff-collared in front of Buckingham Palace.

  Unofficially, he was also a wrecker. ‘Oh, I know all about it,’ he says. ‘I’ve been the chief pirate of the Pentland Firth. In my day, in my day. I was at them when I was ten-year-old.’ The knowledge that he was given an award under the honours system for, among other things, plunder, theft and concealment of stolen goods, causes him enough pleasure to silence him (except for a few watery wheezings) for several minutes. ‘We helped with the ships, and we’d get them afloat and everything—we was very helpful in every respect, but when she became a wreck, that was ours.’

  Among those who are old enough to remember, there are several wrecks now sewn tight into local legend. Chief among them is the Pennsylvania. On 27 July 1931, the 6,000-ton Danish freighter struck the west side of Swona. She was a general cargo vessel, loaded to the gunwhales with merchandise for export. Mowatt remembers the Pennsylvania as ‘the best. I think so. She was coming from America—load of cars, general cargo. There was three weeks of thick fog—at that time a hell of a thick fog. And they think that his [the captain’s] course from America was dead reckoning—none of the modern stuff, none of the radar, nothing, just the old-fashioned navigation. And that island of Swona was in its way, that was the trouble, or he’d of been through the Firth no bother. But with the dead reckoning and the fog—I know that the fog signal at the Pentland Skerries blew solid for three weeks non-stop, and that ship was caught in it.’

  When the ship struck, in a calm sea and virtually zero visibility, both the Danish captain and the thirty-one crew refused the assistance of the Longhope lifeboat and remained on board to await the arrival of a tug from Copenhagen. No-one knows exactly why the captain was suspicious of local help, or why he chose to put both his and his crew’s lives in danger by remaining on board, but the delay proved fatal to his ship. The Pennsylvania was in a dangerous position, badly holed, with 23 foot of water in the forehold and trapped in the path of a nine-knot current. By the time the tug had made its way across the North Sea, the current had swung the ship around and broken her back. Eventually, however, both crew and captain were rescued and taken to Wick before making their way back to Copenhagen.

  But what they and the shipowners considered an expensive misfortune, the pirates of Caithness and Orkney considered the best thing to happen to them in years. Within a very short space of time, evidence of unusual activity was observed around the ship’s split spine. The men came silently at first, unnoticed by the official salvors or—for a time—local coastguard. It is a matter of some dispute whether the Stroma men arrived before or after the lifeboats, but there is no question that they got the cream. It is said that they had managed to get two brand new American Cadillacs off the ship, into their own boats and back to the island without the aid of lights and before anyone noticed anything had gone missing. As the Pennsylvania settled back onto the rocks, the disappearances increased. Goods began to slip away, apparently lost underwater. The raiders were also helped by the weather, since the sea remained uncharacteristically smooth for several days after the wreck, making it much easier to offload cargo.

  And the loot . . . The loot had to be seen to be believed. There were items in the hold of the Pennsylvania to silence even the most avid materialist. There was a piano, typewriters, toys, prams, several slot-machines fitted for Baltic currency, gramophones, 500 boxes of spark plugs, basins, swivel chairs, card tables, sewing machines, apples, watches, flour, women’s clothing (including suspenders), hogsheads of American tobacco, car parts and, of course, the two Cadillacs. Much of the cargo presented no difficulty to the unloaders, but other parts proved more troublesome. At one stage a boat was seen rounding the island, heavily laden and covered with a tarpaulin. According to the local paper, the Orcadian, the boat was accosted by two coastguards. Seeing them, the skipper kept the boat a little way offshore but within hailing distance. ‘Good load of peats,’ he shouted, gesturing to the lump under the tarpaulin. Unpersuaded, the coastguards demanded a clearer look. The skipper refused. Realising that insistence would either lead to a fight or to the Stroma men bolting, the coastguards let the boat go, returned to Kirkwall and reported the incident to the local Receiver of Wreck. According to another source entirely: ‘They hove-to for such time as the coastguard got the hell out of it. And they landed anyhow and they had two wardrobes aboard. One of the fellows [in the boat] took a bit of a fright and he made to hurry out right over the boat, and he went right through the mirrors—terrible bad luck. He cleared out for the rest of the evening anyhow—I think he ended up in jail. He turned up later on, I understand, just the same.’

  That same source, Willie Mowatt, remembers that, ‘There was another Stroma man, he had a whole case of rubber boots, and he thought he was dead right with his rubber boots for all his days. Until he found out they were all just for the one feet.’ There were also more unexpected items. ‘Another Stroma man thought he had a great case—well, he thought it was silk, and when he got it ashore and took this stuff home, he found it was a case of shrouds! But no pockets for loot!’

  James Simpson has another story of the Pennsylvania, though it is a tale which Mowatt considers a gross slander against Orcadians. ‘The story I heard was this Orkney man, after the sale, when they’d made a lot of money, this Orkney man had a box under his arm, and they were in the pub on the mainland. Some of the Stroma men says: “What’s that in the box?” “Well, boy,” he says, “there’s enough in that box to last me and the wife for the rest of our life.” So then they got tittle-tattle here—he must have found treasure on that ship, he must have found money. So the man got drunker and drunker, and still this box stayed under his arm, a shoe box. And they says again, “What’s in your box?” And he says, “Well,” he says, “there’s enough in that box to last me and the wife and our two sons for the rest of our lives.” Oh my goodness me, they were thinking, this must be a treasure. They was trying to find a way of tackling him, take the box from him. Anyway, the Orkney man got drunker and drunker, till the box fell with a clash on the floor, and burst open. And you know what was in the box?’. He looks at me. ‘Co
ndoms.’ Willie Mowatt is unamused. ‘It didn’t reduce the population in Orkney just the same. As far as I knew the kids had them for balloons.’

  When the local authorities found out what was happening in the Pennsylvania’s wrecked hold, they did their best to put a stop to the looting and to protect what remained of the vessel. Their efforts, however, proved too little, too late. In a subsequent report, the local Receiver of Wreck recorded his visits to over forty people on Stroma and South Ronaldsay and his attempts to recover some of the cargo before it was sold off. His account sounded a note of high indignation: ‘The goods,’ he wrote,

  have been concealed. I visited the men yesterday and while [one man] admitted that he had been at the wreck, the others refused to make a statement. They would not even admit that they had been to the wreck . . . In every case, the parties who brought the goods ashore from the wreck had no intention of either reporting or handing them over to me. They all plead ignorance, however, and state that they were under the impression that the steamer being a wreck, they could take as much goods as they wished.

  Informed that they would be prosecuted under the Merchant Shipping Act for concealing stolen property, most either paid the nominal sums required, or produced a few token goods. ‘Plunder was produced from the hearts of haystacks, from amid growing oats, from the beds of lochs and the dark recesses of the seashore,’ reported the Orcadian: ‘Several days were occupied in visiting the raiders’ homes and in selling to them the goods they had already stolen.’ The paper struggled for a while to maintain a tone of high-minded censoriousness, and then gave up. ‘True Orcadians,’ it concluded, ‘will have a sort of sneaking regard for any who risk their lives in acquiring loot, worthless though it may really be.’ In a later edition, subheaded ‘Humours of an Orkney comedy,’ the paper considered that, ‘The wreck has revealed the extraordinary outlook which the average Northerner has on such plundering. Whether they live in town or country, in the isles or on the mainland, the majority consider a wreck legitimate prey.’

  In the end, it was considered that the Stroma men had already taken so much from the wreck that it would be easier for all concerned if they were to buy it. The Danish underwriters gave up all hope of salving the ship or what little remained of her cargo, and sold her for £100 to a syndicate of Stroma men, belatedly making official what had for weeks been going on unofficially. As Simpson remembers: ‘There was Orkney men, and there was Stroma men, and there was men from John o’Groats, and they broke up the framework of the ship—the doors and the parts—and they took it across to the mainland. They had two or three sales, and they made a lot of money with it in that way. The Pennsylvania had everything from needles to anchors—typewriters, adding machines. I remember my father’s adding machine, it was a big clumsy thing, but you’d get the answer same as a modern one. There was ladies’ underclothes, there was corsets—you name it, it was on that ship. Oh, there was strange things on the island after that. They had all these things that they’d never heard of before in this part of the land.’ A wreck sale was held on Huna, attracting a large attendance, and by mid-October the ship had vanished into the Firth, broken up by heavy seas.

  It is a reasonable bet that neither the local Receiver of Wreck nor the rivalrous islanders ever found all the loot. Although Stroma may appear a bald place, as naked now as it must have been when first created, it is in fact the kind of openness which offers plenty of concealment. And the Stroma men were expert at finding places to hide things. Down the cliffs, in caves—small items could be hidden in fields, or dug into the turf, or pushed into corn stooks. In fact, the only place where things would never be hidden was in the crofts themselves. Willie Mowatt recalls many items being hidden from the cargo of the Pennsylvania. ‘They [the Stroma men] had an enormous load of tins of sardines just ready for household use, and great big frying pans too. They was hidden in the loch—in the long grass, clear of the house, of course, not far from the landing spot at the south end of the island. There happened to be a day about that time of year when there was shooters that came from down in England for shooting wildfowl, and they had their man with a dog for picking up the game. So these dogs got on this scent of this fine frying pan—they wouldn’t leave the damn spot, and the shooters didn’t know what on earth was the matter. So they investigated, and there was this pile of loot, with the sardines and the fat in the hying pans that had attracted the dogs.’

  Once the loot was off their property, concealed in a cave or a peat stack or by a loch, no-one could prove who it belonged to. David Stogdon, the RNLI’s Inspector of Lifeboats for Scotland from 1952 to 1960, remembers making several visits to Stroma. The islanders maintained a strict control over who entered and left the island. Those who were not wanted were told that if they tried to land on Stroma without permission, they might find themselves trapped. Police boats could go missing, develop an unexpected leak or spontaneously combust. If that didn’t work, they would be told that attempting to land put them under risk of direct attack. ‘The Stroma men were,’ says Stogdon, ‘a law unto themselves.’

  Customs officers, policemen, coastguards and Receivers of Wreck might all have been repelled, but the lifeboatmen were liked and trusted partly out of respect for their work and partly because they were a voluntary, non-governmental organisation. Stogdon was also accepted by the Stroma men because he had sailed every inch of Scotland and the Firth since childhood, and knew exactly what he was talking about. He remembers being greeted on his arrival by William Bremner, then the appointed head of the Stroma gathering, and given a tour. What he saw would have made a conscientious Excise man weep. After a tour of the makeshift island graveyard, he was shown into the islanders’ crofts. ‘Every house,’ he says, ‘was stuffed with wreck.’ What sort of wreck? ‘Well . . . clocks, telescopes, binnacles . . . I seem to remember enormous dining-room tables in small cottages. And then of course from time to time they’d have cargo parts of lorries or something like that which could be put together to make a lorry and taken ashore on two or three fishing boats in calm weather. They’d land it quietly somewhere, drive it along and sell it.’

  Stogdon was also shown how, and where, the wreck was hidden. ‘Bremner said, “Of course, the trouble is, people come from the mainland to find out what we’ve got, so we have to have a way of hiding it.” And he showed me where stuff had been put below the water. It was put there so if a search took place, they would find nothing. The booty was underwater, down rocky narrow crannies, probably quite deep, on chains, and then coming up on a thread to a little cork. You’d pull up the cork, and then the thread, and you’d get a bigger rope, and then you’d get a bigger rope than that, and then you’d get the end of a chain, and then you’d have to get a hoist rigged to bring up whatever was down there.’ He laughs. ‘But for the coastguard coming to look, they could look all day and never see the tiny corner with the cork. Because they were so remote, these corners which were deep enough and the right size to take booty, that anyone who didn’t know it very very well wouldn’t know where to look.’

  The islanders also had a tried-and-tested method of confusing any officials sent to search the island. One of the wives would take up a bundle of something—a bag of oatmeal, a sack of potatoes, a baby—wrap it well, and run from one end of the island to the other with it. Another wife, in another corner of the island, would do the same. And another, and another, each with their own suspect bundle, and each running in different directions. One of the wives might well have a piece of genuine wreck under her shawl or her cloak, but most of them would be running around with perfectly innocuous items. The coastguard would, of course, have to set a man to hurry after each one of the wives, thereby not only using up all their manpower, but exhausting them in the process. As Bremner added, ‘We’re used to coping with interference in our profession.’ Perhaps unsurprisingly, the customs officer and coastguard never did find much.

  But how on earth had they managed to conceal a full-size dining-room table, I wondered? ‘They
aren’t concealed,’ says Stogdon, ‘they’re in their houses. They’ve come off a casualty so long ago that they’re safe using them now. And the clocks and all that kind of thing were only on view when a long period had passed. Is what I imagine.’ James Simpson remembers a number of different hiding places, including a hatch underneath the font in the local Baptist kirk. There were also alternative tricks when the customs made an unexpected raid. ‘I remember one story when the customs came to this house. They were smuggling—it was a Dutchman, a Dutch ship that had just come in, lying off by a couple of miles, and they were selling off the booze and the tobacco cheap, duty-free. And the customs had heard about this and they made a search, and they had a whole lot of loot in the house. The old wife went to bed with all this tobacco and bottles round her, and when the customs came the family says, “Oh my God, it’s an awful sad house. Old granny’s about to pass away, please don’t harass us.” And here she was lying in bed, nothing wrong with her, hiding all the loot, the booze and the fags under the sheets.’ In the days when there were frequent outbreaks of cholera, typhoid or smallpox, it was easy to assure the curious customs officers that a house was under quarantine and one or other member of the family was inside, burning with fever. Likewise, a pious party of well-dressed men could also convince officials that it was an act of profanity to search the kirkyard for wreck.

  James Simpson considers the islanders’ particular character. ‘The Stroma pirates, they call them, but they were no pirates in any way. My father never locked the door, nobody ever locked their doors, there was nothing ever under lock and key. But if a ship went ashore, and they thought there was a boat at the bottom of the sea, by jings they would work hard to salvage what they could from the wreck—and quite rightly so. I suppose it was a great provocation for an island to see all these things. These wrecks lasted a couple of days, and then it all went to the bottom of the sea, and nobody got any benefit.’