The story, of course, is based on truth. At 7.40 a.m. on 5 February 1941, an 8,000-ton cargo vessel called the SS Politician ran aground on a reef in the Sound of Eriskay between Barra and South Uist while en route to New Orleans. Though subsequent attention has focussed on only one particular part of her cargo, the Politician was in fact carrying a mixed load including Jamaican banknotes, cotton, motorcycle parts, tobacco, medicines, and various other items including school exercise books and baths. But cotton or schoolbooks were never going to be as appealing as the 264,000 bottles of finest malt whisky from two bombed-out warehouses in Leith and Glasgow stacked in Hold no. 5.
In the confusion of wind, rain and conflicting chart data immediately following the grounding, the Politician’s captain lost all sense of place. When radioing for help, he initially gave his position as south of Barra instead of north. Pounded by heavy seas and by now immovably lodged on a submerged reef, the ship was in imminent danger of breaking up beneath his feet. The captain gave the order to abandon ship and made his way with the crew across the Sound to South Uist. Having reached safety, he made a full report both to the Admiralty and to the insurers, who sent out a group of Glasgow salvors to inspect the damage. Having concluded that the ship itself was now a write-off, the man in charge of the salvage operation, Captain Kay, took off as much of the general cargo as possible. He refused the request of local customs officers for an armed guard to protect the whisky left on board, believing it to be both contaminated and irretrievable.
Kay was wrong. It had not taken long for news of the grounding—and of the cargo—to be transmitted across both islands. Within a few hours, small parties of ‘liberators’ began visiting the stricken Politician. Within a couple of days, everyone on both Barra and South Uist knew what Captain Kay did not: that the whisky was not only salvageable, it was drinkable too. So drinkable that it was soon rumoured to possess almost magical qualities. It was said that whisky from the ‘Polly’ did not cause hangovers, that it was a sure-fire cure for rheumatism, and that it would sort any disorder in cattle from croup to warble fly. With or without the aid of magic, the Polly’s fame spread fast. Within days of the grounding, boats were arriving not just from those islands closest to Barra but from Lewis, Mull, and the mainland. For a few sublime weeks, there was so much whisky to be had that people drank themselves to stupefaction and the hold still did not run dry. In fact, the sheer quantity of whisky gave the islanders a new difficulty: there were simply not enough hiding places for it all. Raiding parties were taking off thirty or forty cases at a time and hiding them as best they could in the fields and barns back home—down rabbit holes, round the backs of matchboard walls and propping up the centre of corn stooks.
John Macleod, an ex-RNLI coxswain who still lives on the edges of Barra’s main town, Castlebay, is eighty-four, with clipped grey hair and a voice half-sunk by age. One eye is blind, and the thumb on his left hand is lopped off at the knuckle. For much of his day, he sits watching the cars turning off the road towards Vatersay outside his windows. The flotsam around the house tells the tale of a life lived on water: gateposts topped with fading pink plastic buoys, fish boxes used to store firewood, a coven of cats waiting by the door.
Macleod remembers the Polly well: ‘There was a terrible shortage of whisky in the war. If you went into a bar in Castlebay, they had only about a dozen wee tots a day, first come, first served, and that was it for the night. So they were in short supply. And oh, the Politician was a godsend! It was meant to be going to New York for to improve the American’s morale in the war. But it was much more needed to improve Scots morale!’ He laughs long and happily. The day the Polly grounded ‘was at the beginning of the war, like, and I happened to be at home at the time. I came from being at the fishing at the time, and there was all the fishing boats there from Eriskay. There was a lot of excitement when they realised it was whisky, you see. Aye. She had all kinds on her—rayon, tyres, all kinds of general cargo. There was rolls and rolls of rayon. And there was the Jamaican money there, swilling around.’
Were people interested in that? He shakes his head. ‘Ach, no, they were just pushing it out of the way. They were mostly after the whisky. We got such a lot we were giving it away. There was people giving it out on the mainland, people sending it to their friends, you know, as a Christmas present. It was a great cargo, indeed aye. My gosh yes. But it was hard work, taking the whisky off. The boat was full of oil, she was holed, and she’d burst her tanks. Heavy duty fuel oil, you see—she was a steamship with the boilers, and the bottles were bobbing about in this thick stuff, like tar, like treacle. Oh, ho . . . what a mess!’ He laughs again. ‘So everyone who went down to look got covered in the oil. So people knew when you’d been down to her, because you were covered in the stuff. You were well prepared, though, with oilskins and sea boots and all that. You could clean the oilskins, but the other clothes, you couldn’t. You just threw the lot over the side.’
So how much did he personally manage to take off her? ‘Loads. And I wasn’t drinking then.’ Really? What, none of it? ‘No. I was giving it away. I was only twenty, twenty-one at the time. No, wait, I was twenty-four. Now I would, I’d have maybe a pint of beer or suchlike, but at that time, no, I was over twenty-four before I went into a pub. My father was never in a pub in his life, never smoked in his life. It wasn’t a religious thing; he just couldn’t be bothered with it. That’s the way we were brought up, like, and three of my uncles too, they never touched the drink.’
But surely he must have tried some of the Politician’s stock? ‘Oh, yes. You shared it out. And when I tried it, I didn’t like it at all—I’d drink it now, I’d take a shot of whisky now, at night time before I go to bed. And I’d take a pint of beer in the pub now. But when I tried it first, oh gosh, I mind I couldn’t believe it what the hell they were drinking that for!’
Macleod’s temperance marked him out. As with the rest of the Highlands, Barra’s affection for whisky has been a theme throughout all its histories. The geologist John MacCulloch’s account of the Western Isles, published in 1819, notes that, ‘It is a drawback on the merits of the Barra men, that they are addicted to the use of whisky . . . the quantity of this strong spirit which they could drink without apparent inconvenience is incredible . . . A damp climate is considered not only a justification for the morning dram, but as the disease for which whisky, whenever it can be got, is the only remedy.’
Dr Jeremy Hidson, who works both as one of Barra’s local GPs and as an auxiliary coastguard, still considers the drink to be a major part of island life. Hidson has customised his surgery in Castlebay with a bright Victorian rug, a selection of prints and an old tin spinning top. The impression given is one of both officialdom and informality, which is exactly how Hidson comes across himself. He is a rumpled, middle-aged man, with a habit of closing his eyes when he’s speaking and of absently brushing his hair back into place across his forehead. The gestures are all those of a shy man, though Hidson, when he speaks, is not. He has been living and working on the island for twelve years, and his fondness for both the place and the people are palpable.
So does Barra have any unique medical problems? Hidson nods: ‘I think the further west you go in Scotland, the more people drink. I used to work in the Borders, and there was never nearly such a big problem with it. And it’s not just the men; it’s the women, unfortunately, who we don’t come across—it’s more hidden. But if you did blood tests on people to see what their liver function was like, the women would be not that far behind. It’s difficult to tell what proportion of people are drinking seriously. But if you try to find fit, reliable people for things like the lifeboat crew, the coastguard, the airport fire crew, that’s ten of us, twenty for the lifeboat, it can be a struggle.’ By fit and reliable, presumably he means sober? ‘Yes. I mean, everyone will have a drink—I’m not saying that, but to be rendered incapable . . . And if you’re not capable of driving a vehicle, then you’re not going to be capable of any emergency services.
You spend half your time thinking: can’t have them, because of the drink. And then of course there’s all the drink-related accidents. We know that there are ten deaths on the road in the UK per day, but because everyone knows each other here, it’s more focussed.’ Does he think the high level of alcoholism is connected to the hard winters and the early nights? Hidson rubs his forehead. ‘Er . . . they don’t usually wait till it gets dark.’ He smiles. ‘When I first came here, I think people were a little bit reluctant to say they were bored here, but if you actually talk to locals here in February, they’re bored out of their minds. They really are. They’ve had Christmas, the weather’s still bad, it’s a long time till Easter—people will admit that they’re bored. It’s hard going.’
There is an old rule—backed up by statistical evidence—which states that the further north one goes, the higher the incidence of alcoholism and depression. Summer in the Highlands is enchanting enough to make even the most fundamentalist urbanite run away to a lonely sea isle, but the endless confining nights of winter can be hard. The twenty-first century has made the outside world more accessible, but that accessibility has not meant that life on the islands has got either easier or cheaper. Which, of course, provides an extra incentive for the locals to get hold of materials by more creative means. What does Hidson think Barra’s inhabitants would do if a general cargo vessel struck the rocks tonight? ‘I suspect that if they thought there wasn’t much chance of being found out, they would go for it. One can see why, really. I think it’s a long distance from the centres of power, and if they knew that something was there I don’t think people would have any qualms at all. And other people would turn a blind eye. I think at the moment we’ve only got one policeman here, and he may well be doing something else—he can’t be on duty all the time. So it would be easy enough to do things, especially when you’ve got Barra, Vatersay, and the islands south of it, which is a fair-sized bit of coastline that people could go down to.’
In the past, visiting officials have usually taken one of two attitudes to the islands. Either they have embarked on puritanical vendettas against Highland debauchery, or they have gone native. It was just Barra’s bad luck that the customs officer who eventually dealt with the Politician’s cargo was one of the first type. The islander’s bacchanalia was interrupted by Charles McColl, who, like his fictional equivalent Captain Waggett, comes across in print as a scrupulous, honest and entirely humourless man. Furious at Captain Kay’s refusal to remove the contents of Hold No. 5 and having recruited the help of Ivan Gledhill, his customs superior on Skye, McColl began hunting down the whisky liberators. McColl galvanised a second salvage company into re-examining the chances of retrieving the whisky and eventually recovered 13,500 cases of whisky. Several cases were sent over to the mainland to be stored in customs warehouses; some were drunk by the salvors themselves. McColl arrested as many wreckers as he could round up and handed them over to the mainland police, insisting that they should be charged under the punitive terms of the Customs and Excise Act.
The police, who had better things to do than prosecute men for having a drink, ignored McColl. McColl persisted. In total, nineteen men were eventually sentenced to between twenty days’ and two months’ imprisonment. So passionate was McColl’s one-man temperance campaign that he insisted on having what remained of the Politician blown up in order to ensure that no-one could retrieve the few stray bottles left from the second salvage attempt. The zeal with which McColl and Gledhill had sought to apply the law turned the final chapters of the Politician’s saga into something far more rancorous. Even now, some residual anger still lingers against McColl and Gledhill and still inclines the most law-abiding West Highlander to doubt the wisdom of officials.
But once in a while, it is possible to feel some sympathy for those officials charged with preventing wrecking. Part of Whisky Galore’s success was its expression of a wider truth. Life in the Hebrides was—and is—hard, sometimes unbearably so. As Hidson points out, the costs of importing almost all goods and raw materials puts a heavy premium on island life. ‘If you think of the amount of money it costs to transport anything here . . . you have a small box that you want on a carrier here, it will probably cost you £5 just for the carriage. I’ve got a small lawnmower I’ve just ordered from Argos in Oban, and that’s £11.50 carriage charge extra. The mower’s only £30. There’s a big extra whack on everything. All food, all materials, everything. There’s not much to be had for a living here—natural resources are fairly low, and everything has to come in by sea. If you go into the local shops, you’ll probably find that the prices are the highest you’ve seen anywhere in the UK.’
And though the land may look bewitching in the summer sunlight, it is stony and difficult to work while exposure to the Atlantic winds makes it almost impossible for trees to grow. Those plants which do survive skulk close to the ground, gripping the clefts between rocks and taking shelter in gullies rather than facing the full salt fury of the sea. Lack of anything from which to build boats, roofs, fence posts, window casements, floorboards or carts would alone have been enough to turn most people into wreckers; poverty and resourcefulness did the rest. And so the Hebrideans became adept at turning their disadvantages (remoteness, delays in communication, high cost of raw materials, a small population) into advantages (adaptability, secrecy, a tight community, seafaring skill). Everything that could be used, would be used. Seaweed made good fertiliser, driftwood became fuel or fencing, sand and seashells turned into concrete and mortaring. Ships carrying heavy deck cargos—timber, containers, ropes, pallets—would often lose them overboard during rough weather. Whatever then washed up on Hebridean beaches was, as far as the islanders were concerned, theirs for the taking.
Those who attempted to prevent local communities from picking off occasional loads of deck timber or stripping a wreck had a hard task. Not only did they have to contend with the difficulties of policing an immense area of remote coastland but they were forced to deal with a population who had more right than most to regard shipwrecks as a God-given bounty. Some sense of the difficulties can be gained from a nineteenth-century list outlining the areas of responsibility for the Receiver of Wreck for Greenock. As well as dealing with all wreck on the Clyde, the Receiver also had to cover Arran, Tarbert, Skerryvore, Tiree, Ardnamurchan, Sunart, Lismore, Appin, Bute, Mull, Coll, Islay, Jura, and ‘all other islands, bays, lochs, rivers, harbours, creeks, roadsteads, sounds, and channels, lying or being within the said limits respectively’. Undermanned, underfunded and underequipped, it was probably not the officials’ faults that many of their attempts at enforcement came closer to comedy than to law.
Thomas Gray, an official at the Board of Trade’s Wreck Department, paid a visit to the Outer Hebridean islands in August 1866. On his return to Glasgow, he submitted the following report:
I regret to have to report that matters relating to wreck and salvage in those islands [the Hebrides], especially in South Uist and Barra, are as unsatisfactory as they can be. The inhabitants are mostly very poor; they frequently live in huts with their animals and subsist from hand to mouth. They look upon a wreck as a common right, and do not fail to appropriate what they can . . . Some of the highest class, the tenant farmers, are, I learn, but little better than the poorest class in their dealings with wreck. It is true that they proceed in a more indirect manner to obtain any benefits likely to arise from wrecks, but they work towards the one end, of making the most they can. There are no Customs or Coastguard officers in South Uist and Barra: there is only one policeman in Barra, and he works with the inhabitants, and the coast guard cruisers have, so I am informed, only visited the islands three times in ten years . . . From what I have seen, and from what I have heard, I am satisfied that an occasional visit by the coast guard would have a great moral effect. As it is, the people might, so far as the authority of the Board of Trade is concerned, be in Greenland or the Cape of Good Hope. Wrecking in Barra far exceeds anything reported of wrecking in the Bahamas, o
r anything arising out of the wreck laws of Heligoland.
Matters were not much helped by the apparent ignorance of captains and locals alike in the duties of a Receiver. When giving evidence to an enquiry at the Board of Trade in 1866, the shipmaster Alexander Coulter, whose ship the Bermuda had been wrecked on Vatersay, claimed that, ‘It was only a day or two before . . . that I ever heard of there being such an official, through Mr McLellan (a local farmer), and I then said, “I don’t see he would be of any use”.’ Worse even than local indifference was the difficulties posed by traditional bureaucratic enmities. Coastguard officers would argue with the police; the police would argue with Customs and Excise; Customs would argue with Board of Trade officials; the Board of Trade would take issue with the Receivers, and the Receivers would fight with the Lloyd’s agents. Two undercurrents run through much of the official correspondence: firstly that tackling the enemies within took up more time than investigating shipwreck, and secondly that each official department believed that every other official department was either in league with the wreckers or too stupid to know one end of a ship from the other.
After the wreck of the Harmony on Vatersay in January 1866, Thomas Gray made another journey out to Barra. ‘It is a good pull to the nearest land,’ he wrote later,
And it became quite evident to me that no plunder could have taken place if the slightest attempt had been made to stop it. In the first place, anyone at the wreck can be seen from the adjacent land and islands, and anyone coming away from it could be intercepted before he had time to make off with property. On examining the vessel, I found her to be very large, and to have an old wooden sheathing over the greater part of her hull. She was evidently an oldish vessel from the way in which she was built, and the copper in her was very valuable . . . The labour in getting the copper bolts out of this vessel must have been considerable. They all had to be hammered out from the outside with driving pins and sledge hammers. To do this the men at work must have stood conspicuously on the hull. It must also have been a work not of hours or days, but of weeks. Some of the driving-pins are left about the wreck by the people who stole the bolts . . . As I came along from Vatersay, I saw a man running about and shouting, and was informed that he was a watchman employed to look after the remains of the Harmony; he was two and a half miles away from her.
The Wreckers Page 18
