History Archives - Page 6 of 15

Six Degrees Of Separation: Tea Trolleys And Space Exploration

Oct 042013

Somewhat surprisingly, the humble tea trolley is still available at a high street outlet or an online store near you, writes Duncan Harley. For readers under 25 years old this fact will perhaps mean little, but the Cambridge Dictionary Online is helpful as always and defines a tea trolley ‘as a small table on wheels, sometimes with an upper and a lower shelf, for serving drinks and food’.

Cambridge Dictionary Online uses cookies and invites the casual enquirer requiring more information to read its Privacy and Cookies Policy.

The irony of using cookies may be lost on those who have never encountered the tea trolley first hand.

Suffice it to say that no tea party was ever complete without cakes, currant buns and
indeed cherry-topped cookies gracing the lower shelf.

The US definition is seemingly ‘a tea wagon or cart’ which seems more laidback given the pinkie-raised image of the afternoon tea trolley-equipped brigade of mid-20th century Scottish middle class suburbia.

All of this, however, meant little to HG Wells. Indeed he may never have used or even seen a tea trolley.

A prolific writer and former drapery assistant, Wells penned hundreds of stories, ranging from War of the Worlds to The Time Machine, during his lifetime. Born in 1866 during the reign of Queen Victoria, many of his books are still in print and his stories remain in the popular imagination as cultural icons.

A key figure in scientific and popular fiction, Wells wrote about rockets, submarines and amazing discoveries. He gathered a readership that, in the main, could never have imagined such impossible ideas as time travel and the invasion of earth from outer space. Aliens and monsters of the deep were his currency and his readers could not get enough of the stuff!

Cremated at Golders Green Crematorium on August 16 1946, he lived just long enough to see the end of the second war to end all wars and indeed the beginnings of space travel, as Hitler’s rocket scientists were feted and recruited into the US Space Programme. This was just months after they had been working on the so called Wonder Weapons which the German military believed would turn the tide of defeat into a victory surge for the Nazi regime.

But The History of Mr Trolley must surely be Wells’s greatest and lasting literary achievement.

According to some sources, Mr Trolley is based on the author’s early experiences in the drapery trade. Alfred Trolley is a bumbling and directionless young man with an innate sense of epithet. He uses phrases like ‘dejected angelosity’ when referring to the stone carving on a cathedral and ‘the shoveacious cult’ when referring to youth.

The tea trolley remains one of the great cultural icons of the 20th Century

George Orwell, in Coming Up For Air, portrays a man breaking out of the mould, just for the one day.

Wells writes about Mr Trolley in a similar vein.

Mr Trolley hates his wife, hates his shop and in general hates ‘that vast mass of useless, uneducated, and altogether pitiable people that we contemplate when we use the term, Lower Middle Class’.

The comments leave no doubt at all about Mr Trolley’s views on humanity.

The novel is perhaps a parody of Wells’s own life. Encouraged into the drapery business by a devoted father, Wells had failed academically. His numerous affairs and failed marriages are testament to his unrest.

In 1934 he wrote ‘I was never a great amorist, though I have loved several people very deeply’.

The tea trolley remains one of the great cultural icons of the 20th Century as indeed it should. Cakes and high tea are a part of the true Scottish heritage.

Mr Trolley may, of course, be an anachronism in the 21st Century.

However, it does seem somehow reassuring that Argos, Ikea and Tesco Direct still offer the aficionados of pinkie-raised taking of tea the option to use the things.

Available at £39.99 or below, and in various shades of grey, the tea trolley continues to amaze and delight those who still take tea of an afternoon.

A quick search on Google failed to return any useful results regarding how many tea trolleys are being manufactured in the UK these days, but there is little doubt that in some factory, in some god- forsaken district in China, there are lines of workers diligently assembling the ‘small table on wheels’ at the rate of dozens per hour.

As for Wells, he would have taken tea with the best of us.

With grateful thanks to HG Wells, Michael Rayne, Ikea and Golders Green Crematorium.
Photo credit: Janice Rayne

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Montrose Sculptor’s Biography Reviewed

Featured, History, Opinion 1 Response »

Sep 272013

‘I want to be there, there being no top of tree, no glory or honour, simply working good and well, and producing stuff that will last the ages.’ (William Lamb, 1923)

As a young lad growing up in Montrose in the 1960s I first came across William Lamb’s work when my uncle used his old studio. Surrounded by statues of massive figures, disembodied heads and nude young boys, the place had a strange, neglected atmosphere. These days, his large bronze figures are proudly displayed in the town and the studio is open to the public. John Stansfeld’s new biography can only add to the reputation of an important artist, often described as ‘a Scottish Rodin’. Graham Stephen reviews.

Lavishly illustrated, the book details Lamb’s artistic achievements and gives us insight to a complex man who, despite a reluctance to leave his beloved home town, once solo-cycled over 4000km through Europe on his trusty Raleigh, had a trial for Aberdeen FC and briefly became a playmate of the current queen.

From a variety of sources, most notably the Simms’ family archive, Stansfeld examines Lamb’s struggle to create superb work despite personal hardships.

Rooted in his community and landscape, Lamb chose to ‘starve among (his) own folk’ rather than dilute his native culture by moving away in search of a more lucrative market.

His portrayal of working men and women, real people often struggling with life and the elements, are a particular feature of his work.

The Lamb who enlisted in 1915 was a skilled stonemason, respected artist and all-round sportsman. He returned a broken man, temporarily struck dumb, physically and psychologically devastated and, tragically, with a permanently damaged right hand.

By sheer force of will he taught himself to work again with his left, skilled enough to win commissions to create the war memorials which funded his European travels in 1923. His surviving letters from this trip are one of the highlights of the book, an insight into a man with a meticulous eye for detail, realising that art would be his life, never taking the easy path.

Stansfeld’s detailed research unearths intriguing aspects of Lamb’s life. He was almost perpetually penniless, relying on friends to feed him, often on a daily basis. Any money he made was invariably used to fund materials, or help fellow artists like Ed Baird, another undervalued Montrose talent.

The local council, disturbed by his nude figures, suggested adding kilts for a major exhibition, and Lamb reacted predictably. He was a lifelong teetotaller, disgusted by his alcoholic father, supressing his probable homosexuality, living alone in a freezing attic. His attendance at fledgling Nationalist meetings held by poet Hugh MacDiarmid in the 1920s was more likely for the heat of the fire than for the rhetoric.

Lamb later took his revenge on the arrogant MacDiarmid by making his bust look ‘like him’.

Most intriguing is his commission to sculpt Princess Elizabeth in 1932 when he spends many hours alone with the future queen, playing house and crafting plasticine tea-sets, before returning to Montrose, and his ultimate decline.

In a rare speech in 1930 William Lamb described Scottish sculpture as ‘hopeless’, unappreciated and unloved by the majority of the population. Even today it would be hard to argue against him. This fine book should help to bring his achievements to a wider audience.

The People’s Sculptor: The Life and Art of William Lamb (1893-1951)
John Stansfeld
Birlinn Ltd
£14.99

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The Bees’ Knees of Maggieknockater

Aberdeenshire, Featured, History, Information 4 Responses »

Sep 272013

We all love the web. Information undreamed of by our parents and grandparents is just a short search away. With just a few mouse clicks we can research the history of the transatlantic ice trade of the 1840s, the life and times of Field Marshall Edmund Ironside, and the reason why a chap by the name of Verner Sebisch lies buried in a Moray cemetery. Duncan Harley writes.

The web can advise us what our normal blood pressure should be, whether it would be wise to host a barbecue next Sunday, weatherwise; and, if we search hard enough, what the average person in Torry eats for lunch on a typical wet Tuesday.
Then of course there is Maggieknockater.

For those not in the know, Maggieknockater, or in the Scots Gaelic, Mathg an Fhucadair, is a village on the A95 between Craigellachie and Keith.

Well known in country dancing circles and part of the extensive lore of the Whisky Trail, it’s quite a mouthful.

When asked where they live, locals often tell the enquirer Craigellachie, or even Dufftown, rather than the truth. Seemingly if they say Maggieknockater, the enquirer often falls down laughing.

Folk in the North East villages of Glass, Lost, Jericho and Knock apparently have the same problem.

For those living in the village of Premnay just north of Inverurie, the situation is even more problematic since both the Ordnance Survey maps and the roadside signposts spell Premnay as Auchleven, meaning that no one can even find the place, never mind laugh at the residents!

If you check the web for the name Maggieknockater you are likely to find explanations ranging from ‘arable land on the forest’s lower slopes’ to ‘the fullers field’. However there is much more to the place than that. For a start, Mary Queen of Scots may have stayed at the nearby Gauldwell Castle during her tour of Scotland in 1561.

Mind you, she stayed at some seventy Scottish castle residences during her travels, so perhaps Maggieknockater requires a somewhat greater claim to fame to justify the long name.

The Maggieknockater school was of course closed in the 1960s and the local church was famously turned into a home in the early 1970s. What was once a smithy is now a garage but still in the hands of the MacLean family, which has lived there for quite a few generations. Maggieknockater formerly had a post office which seemingly opened in June 1876 and closed in the mid-20th century.

Not much going for the place perhaps, unless you count the bees.

It seems that up until the late 1960s there was large apiary in the village.

It was started by an Aberdonian by the name of George McLean who made heather honey on a grand scale and sold it far and wide.
Crate loads of the stuff went to Ireland and outlets all over the UK, but the best was sold at the roadside to passing motorists who saw the Maggieknockater Apiary as a welcome pit stop on the road to either Craigellachie or Keith.

George was in fact one of the most prominent beekeepers in Scotland.

A farmer, grocer and blacksmith, he was also the secretary of the North of Scotland Beekeepers’ Association for a time.

The man died some years ago at a very ripe old age but his legacy lives on in the Scottish country dance “The Bees of Maggieknockater”.

Internationally famous and a favourite of those in the know, it runs something like:

‘1- 8 1s cross RH and cast 1 place, dance RH across with 3s and end 1M+3L also 1L+3M in prom hold facing out to pass corner person RSh. 9-24 All dance 4x½ Reels of 3 on sides (to right to start, then left, right and left) with 1s+3s changing partners in centre at end of each ½ Reel to progress Men clockwise and Ladies anticlockwise. End in centre 1s facing down and 3s facing up. 25-32 1s dance between 3s turning 3s with nearer hand 1½ times, crossing over to own sides and turn 4th person 1½ times (Men RH and Ladies LH). 2341.’

It’s a fun dance indeed, which was devised by an Englishman by the name of John Drewry. The dance is a 32-step jig, requiring four couples to dance facing each other. Forres Country Dance is the usual tune used. Seemingly John, a computer programmer from Aberdeen, was inspired by the banks of beehives at Maggieknockater; although in fact he never took the time to stop and buy any of George’s honey!

John wrote some 300 Highland dances but perhaps this is his finest. While in Banff, Alberta in the 1980s, he witnessed a comedy sketch of the dance written to Rimsky Korsakov’s ‘Flight of the Bumble Bee’. Sadly George McLean missed it by a few years, but he would probably have been proud of the spectacle.

As regards the web, Edmund Ironside was the man in charge of Britain’s coastal defences in 1940, Verner Sebisch was one of 4 crewmen who died when their Junkers ju 188 bomber crashed 5km northwest of Rothes in the midsummer of 1944, and the folk of Torry eat various things for lunch on a typical Tuesday.

As regards blood pressure? Make an appointment to discuss this with your GP, since you can never completely trust the web.

The Bees of Maggieknockater is a lovely Highland dance. Next time you are on the A95 between Craigellachie and Keith, take a wee minute to remember George and John, as you pass the village.

After all, they combined to make Maggieknockater internationally famous.

The Bees of Maggieknockater (Japanese version): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmtsrFuiPHA
The Bees of Maggieknockater (Traditional version): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4tRQr7604w
The Bees of Maggieknockater (Pudsey Bee version): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJaR_TCbQG0

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Crovie: The North Pole?

Community, Featured, History 6 Responses »

Sep 192013

By Duncan Harley.

In Crovie, the fisher folk were quite used to the effects of the sea. They had, for generations, lived with the seasons, and felt that they knew how to survive the furies of the winter storms. These were hardy folk indeed.
In February 1906 they had risked life and limb to rescue the crew of the SS Vigilant when, after engine failure it was driven ashore onto the Rotten Beach just down from the village.

A joint effort with the folk of nearby Gardenstown enabled the rescue of all six crew, despite the terrible conditions during a severe winter storm.

The boiler from the stricken vessel lay in Crovie Bay as a landmark for over 90 years, before being removed by the local council after a storm washed it onto the shore.

There is a memorial to the event on the coastal path between Crovie and Gardenstown.

Then there were those German spies.

During April 1941, two armed men landed at Crovie pier from a rubber dinghy. It was a time of distrust. Road signs in the North East had been removed and the Emergency Coastal Defences were in place. General Ironside’s Innes Links Coastal Battery was yet to fire a shot in anger, but the general mood was fear of invasion and distrust of foreigners.

It was just before 6 a.m. on April 8th 1941, and three hours earlier the two men had been dropped a few miles offshore by a German flying boat. When climbing into their rubber dinghy, they had lost their means of transport when the Luftwaffe aircrew panicked and threw their two bicycles into the North Sea, where no doubt they lie to this day.

As they watched the seaplane take off for the return trip to Norway, they must have wondered what had possessed them to volunteer as German spies and what fate would await them when they made landfall in the North East of Scotland.

The two men were in fact Norwegians who had been recruited by the German security services to report on the Moray coastal defences. It’s a well known story: they rowed ashore to Crovie pier and asked the man at number 27 how to get to Banff by bus.

It was April 1941. Very few locals spoke a foreign language despite the influx of Polish personnel into the Moray area.

Crovie Village Moray 170. Credit: Duncan Harley

The coastal village of Crovie, Moray.

Mr Reid at number 27 seemingly dialled 999 and reported the incident to the Banff Constabulary.

The rest is history.

Used as double agents, the two Norwegians fooled their German masters for a few months before being allowed, in one case, to join the Norwegian Army and in the case of the second agent, to live out the rest of the war in an internment camp.

They were nicknamed Mutt and Jeff after two cartoon characters of the time, whom they were thought to resemble.

Mutt and Jeff? Cockney rhyming slang for deaf perhaps, or a reference to a then popular American newspaper comic strip created by cartoonist Bud Fisher in 1907 about “two mismatched tinhorns.”

Both were lovable losers however, and the good folk of Crovie still remember them with relish.

Crovie is one of only two places in the world to be blessed with a North Pole.

Mind you, the Crovie North Pole is easier to reach. To get there simply walk to the far end of the village, to the drying green past the Mission Hall. A green metal clothes pole awaits, and visitors are advised that “if you don’t walk around the North Pole, then you haven’t done Crovie.”

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Scrotum, The Wrinkled Old Retainer

Aberdeenshire, History, Opinion No Responses »

Sep 132013

I spent a day in Elgin this week researching the news from 1964 at the town’s local history resource centre, reports Duncan Harley. Quite a gem. Full of information from the present day to goodness knows when in the past. Run by enthusiastic and helpful staff, it is a Scottish national treasure!

Elgin is a grand town full of rich history. William Joyce, better known as Lord Haw Haw went to speak there in the 1930s, in an inspired effort to recruit for the Blackshirts.

The sensible folk of the town heckled him, but he chose to tell the assembled crowd of around seventeen that he appreciated their support and knew that they were for his cause. He was, of course, later hanged for treason despite being an Irish-American.

Elgin also has a ruined cathedral and some very fine statuary, including a monument on the hill just west of the town centre, comprising a Doric column topped by a statue which might just be mistaken for a second Nelson’s Column.

Nothing could be further from the truth however. It is in fact a monument to one George Gordon, who in 1794 raised the famous Gordon Highlanders.

The Gordon regiment joined an army under the command of General Moore in the Netherlands campaign, and fought at the Battle of Bergen in 1799 in which Gordon was severely wounded. He was presented with the Grand Cross of the Bath in 1820.

In 1964 there was, of course, the grand opening of the Forth Road Bridge by the Queen and the death of, thankfully, a very few unfortunate folk in the NE from typhoid, so in general life went on.

Many were surprised that after the event – that is the typhoid epidemic, not the opening of that road bridge – when Michael Noble MP and then Secretary of State for Scotland, chose to set aside funds to allow local authorities in Scotland to provide ‘hand washing facilities in public lavatories’.

Vivian Stanshall famously drew attention to the issue on an early 1970s John Peel Show when, in an episode of Rawlinson’s End, he wrote a script which read in part,

FLORIE: Perhaps you’d care to wash your hands?

OLD SCROTUM: Arr, no thank’ee ma’am, I already did that up against a tree afore I came in ‘ere.

Stanshall was found dead on 6 March 1995, after a fire broke out at his Muswell Hill flat. In 2001 Jeremy Pascall and Stephen Fry produced a documentary about him for BBC Radio Four.

Some typhoid facts –

A few weeks after the end of the typhoid epidemic, Elgin hosted the Annual Congress of the Royal Sanitary Association
During the typhoid epidemic, many NE caravan sites refused to take bookings from folk from Aberdeen
Grantown Town Council banned Aberdonians from the locality
In 1964 you could have purchased a nice black and white TV for less than £25
Corned beef can still be found on supermarket shelves throughout the NE
The Elgin Marbles have very little to do with Elgin

Vivian’s full sketch can be read at: http://www.vivarchive.org.uk/images2/Rawlinson-End.pdf

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The Wizard Of Gordonstoun

Featured, History, Information No Responses »

Sep 132013

In 16^th and 17^th Century Scotland literally anyone could be accused of dealing with the devil and practising the black arts, relates Duncan Harley, one of Voice’s local history research wizards experts.

These were times of great superstition backed up by the force of what now appears to be a cruel and brutal legal system which commonly used torture and trial by water and fire to determine the guilt or innocence of those unfortunates accused of consorting with the devil.

Taking her lead from a Europe-wide inquisition leading to the mass burning of heretics and those thought guilty of witchcraft, Mary Queen of Scots had officially banned witchcraft in Scotland in 1563.

Known as Mary’s Law, the Witchcraft Act of 1563 defined witchcraft as sorcery and described a witch as a person considered to have supernatural powers granted by Satan in exchange for the giving up of their soul.

Under Mary’s Law, both the practice of witchcraft and consulting with witches were capital offences.

Although repealed in 1735, by which time the House of Lords considered the crime of witchcraft to be ‘an impossible offence’, witchcraft was an offence which, in fact, remained on the UK statute books in various forms until 1951.

Historians’ estimates of the numbers of people executed in Scotland between 1563 and 1735 vary widely, but the numbers are likely to be in the tens of thousands and most towns and cities have both tales and historic sites related to this period of terror.

In Keith, there is the notorious Gaun’s Pot, a pool just under the present A96-bearing Union Bridge, where alleged witches were once drowned. Forres has the Witches’ Stone where according to the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland, ‘from Cluny Hill witches were rolled in stout barrels through which spikes were driven. Where the barrels stopped they were burned with their mangled contents.’

It may be no accident that in Macbeth, Shakespeare placed his three witches on a heath near Forres!

It wasn’t just the ordinary mortal who could be accused of doing the devil’s work in the 17^th century, however, as the tale of Robert Gordon illustrates.

Better known as the Wizard of Gordonstoun, Sir Robert Gordon, the 3rd Baronet of Gordonstoun, was born in 1647 and lived out his 57 years during a highly-superstitious and God-fearing period in Scottish history. Educated in Italy where he studied chemistry and mechanics, he had somehow acquired the reputation of being a wizard. It was said he ‘gave himself away’ to gain more knowledge.

Sir Robert Gordon

Some said he had sold his soul to the devil in exchange for thirty years of life and the understanding of science. An inspiration for Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray perhaps?

The rumours followed him home to Gordonstoun, where he was seen to conduct scientific experiments in a round house connected to the sea caves at Covesea beach via a secret tunnel. Seemingly, he supped with the Devil and danced with naked women.

He was said to have no shadow and was rumoured to have learned the mysteries of necromancy during his residence at the University of Padau in Italy.

Many other rumours circulated and Robert’s reputation was perhaps not enhanced when it emerged that he had slow-cooked a salamander over the course of seven years to persuade it to reveal scientific secrets.

Fortunately for Sir Robert, his great wealth and not a few lofty connections meant that those who would have tried him for wizardry, or indeed witchcraft, were powerless to act against him. In the light of history he was probably just a rather eccentric but dedicated scientist who lived in a highly superstitious age.

One of Sir Robert’s significant achievements was the design of a ‘better sea pump’ for the British Navy. Samuel Pepys, Secretary to the Navy during 1687, obtained a warrant from King James II to pay Sir Robert £318 in recompense for the new and improved pump design, which was, according to Pepys, ‘beyond what has ever been achieved by the present ordinary chain pump.’ Praise indeed.

The last convicted witch in Scotland, an unfortunate lady by the name of Janet Horne, was burned at the stake in Dornoch in 1722. The last successful trials under what had become The Fraudulent Mediums Act were heard in 1944 when two separate cases involving mediums were brought to court resulting in the convictions of Jane Rebecca York and Helen Duncan.

72 year old Ms York was fortunate in being punished by a fine amounting merely to five pounds after being convicted of falsely claiming that her spirit guide, a Zulu warrior known as Guide Spirit Zulu, could contact the dead.

The slightly more unfortunate Ms Duncan received a nine month prison sentence following her quite-detailed revelations about a highly-censored and extremely secret report about the wartime sinking of the battleship HMS Barham off Dakar in 1941, in which a great loss of life was sustained. Seemingly the authorities chose to view her powers as a medium as a threat to national security during the run up to the invasion of Europe.

Whatever the truth about mediums, warlocks and witches, Sir Robert Gordon was probably not in league with the devil. He probably did cast a shadow and was almost certainly endowed with scientific knowledge far advanced for the times he lived in.

He did invent a better sea pump for the Navy after all.

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Food Hygiene, Hand Washing And Remembering Typhoid

Aberdeen City, Featured, History, Information No Responses »

Sep 082013

2014 will be the 50^th anniversary of the then-terrifying outbreak of typhoid in Aberdeen, once commemorated by the scallywags of Scotland the What, ‘I can mind the typhoid epidemic at its worst, we never washed wir hands unless we did the lavvie first’. Duncan Harley muses on food hygiene then and now.

Sadly, three patients being treated in Aberdeen’s City Hospital died, but it could have been much worse indeed had the authorities been slower to act.

There have been several such public health epidemics since 1964 but the 1996 Lanarkshire E. coli O157 food poisoning outbreak must rank as being among the most devastating, both in terms of deaths and of the failure of those charged with keeping our food supplies safe.

A total of twenty-one people died in the 1996 E. coli outbreak after eating contaminated meat supplied by a butcher’s shop in Wishaw, Lanarkshire. In 1998, Sheriff Principal Graham Cox concluded after a two-month inquiry that the shopkeeper, John Barr, had been ignorant of food hygiene procedures and had also deceived food inspectors.

Sheriff Cox also severely criticised the Environmental Health service as acting too slowly in linking the outbreak to Mr Barr’s shop.

Both the Aberdeen and Lanarkshire E. coli cases were, of course, public relations disasters for the businesses concerned. John Barr’s shop was closed for three months but it did reopen at the end of February 1997 after remedial work had been carried out. However, the shop closed again in April 1998 when the building began to collapse because of old mine workings.

The source of the Aberdeen typhoid epidemic was a Granite City supermarket which unwittingly sold on contaminated supplies of corned beef imported from a cannery in Rosaria in the Argentine. The shop closed for good in the light of the episode and a good few folk breathed a sigh of relief.

Dr Ian MacQueen’s use of the words ‘leper colony’ may have been particularly unfortunate

The economic effects on Wishaw are difficult to calculate. It was not a tourist Mecca nor was it endowed with copious volumes of North Sea oil. On the other hand, over a decade before the oil started coming ashore, Aberdeen suffered great economic hardship in the years following the 1964 epidemic.

Hotels and restaurants were perhaps the worst affected and the area Tourist Board’s attempts to encourage folk back to the Granite City were not helped by the proclamation of the then Medical Officer of Health, Dr MacQueen, “we’re not a leper colony!” His subsequent advice to Aberdonians and holidaymakers alike to avoid swimming or paddling in the sea led to a local paper headlining on ‘Beach Bombshell’ and pretty effectively killed off any short term prospect of the return of the lucrative ‘Glasgow holiday trade’ to the beach seafront area.

Dr Ian MacQueen’s use of the words ‘leper colony’ may have been particularly unfortunate though. Perhaps lacking an in-house spin doctor, he may have imagined that the proclamation would have had a more positive effect. After all, the epidemic had more or less been contained and, from a health perspective, the battle was all but won.

The word leper however, then as now, is closely associated with grotesque suffering and disfiguration leading to the shunning of sufferers and their treatment as outcasts.

Leprosy is an infectious disease causing severe disfiguring skin sores and nerve damage in the arms and legs. The disease has been around since ancient times and is often associated with some quite terrifying negative stigmas. Outbreaks of leprosy have affected and panicked people on every continent.

St Fitticks Church on Nigg Kirk Road reputedly features a leper’s window

The oldest civilisations of China, Egypt and India feared leprosy as an incurable, mutilating and contagious disease. According to recent World Health Organization estimates, around 180000 people worldwide are currently infected with leprosy.

Even today, over 200 people are diagnosed with leprosy in the US every year, mostly in California and Hawaii. There was even a recorded case in Eire a few years ago.

Leprosy died out in Scotland several hundred years ago although there are a few sites in Aberdeen associated closely with the disease. The Grampian Fire and Rescue Service headquarters, for example, was constructed on the site of an old Leper House just off Kings Crescent. Bede House in Old Aberdeen also has associations with leprosy and may be situated on the site of a lepers’ hospital.

St Fitticks Church on Nigg Kirk Road reputedly features a leper’s window although this is now in some dispute since the disease may well have died out in the area well before the small opening in the northern wall was formed.

St Fittick was of Scottish or Irish descent. He may have been a son of the Dalriadan King Eugene IV and might have been brought up on Iona. Equally, he may have been born into a noble Irish family. What is certain though, is that as a young man he lived in France.

Scottish tradition suggests he was sent by the Bishop of Meaux to deliver Christianity to the Picts in the North of Scotland. He was seemingly swept from his ship during a storm and washed ashore at Nigg Bay, where he refreshed himself from a well which took his name and caused the church to be built. Some accounts relate that he was thrown overboard by the crew of the ship who feared that he was unlucky.

The truth may never be known.

What is known is that St Fittick became the patron saint of gardeners, having performed a miracle in instantly clearing a large area of forest for cultivation.

St Fitticks Church, Torry. Credit: Duncan Harley

St Fitticks Church, Torry, Aberdeen.

He is also, seemingly, the patron saint of Parisian taxi drivers, which is hard to explain unless you are a Parisian taxi driver.

St Fittick’s Day is usually celebrated on 30 August in the UK and a day later in Ireland.

As well as having a long and fascinating religious and social history, St Fittick’s Church in Nigg is also where William Wallace, or at least the relic of the man which was sent to this corner of Scotland, is said to be buried.

But, back to the events of 1964.

We frequently hear complaints from restaurateurs and publicans about the strict food hygiene rules and the cost of training staff to adhere to the standards required by Environmental Health Inspectors.

It is most unlikely that food inspection or hygiene courses will cause either E. coli or leprosy, but they may prevent us getting sick. If Dr MacQueen had been more astute in the PR department in 1964, then perhaps Aberdeen would now be the tourist destination of choice for the cognoscenti of Europe instead of the Oil Capital of Europe.

Described by a colleague as ‘a bulldog with the hide of a rhinoceros’ Dr MacQueen’s strategy of innovative traditionalism has been seen by some as an attempt to protect and extend his department’s services. He was deemed to have made excessive use of the media and to have turned the outbreak into an event approaching a national crisis.

Compared to the human cost of the Lanarkshire E. coli outbreak, Aberdeen’s typhoid epidemic pales into insignificance, except that we all remember it.

The legacy of Dr MacQueen lives on, even after fifty years.

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A Terrible Beauty Is Born

Featured, History, Information, Opinion No Responses »

Aug 272013

Duncan Harley reflects on the art of street protest.

Belfast remains a sectarian mess. Hatred of the folk next door or over the road, plus a sense of outdated history divides folk who might otherwise be best of friends given the need for a simple cup of sugar. The religious divide may be just a smokescreen for something deeper though.

I well remember an interview with a Serbian who had thrown an old man off a bridge in the “Safe haven” of Sarajevo during the multi-ethnic Bosnian War of the 1990’s. Asked why he had murdered the man he said quite simply that in around 1637 there had been a conflict in which the man’s family had done something similar.

The so called peace walls are a stark reminder of the divide. Belfast has quite a few of these. Symbols of division and hatred, they are reminiscent of the Berlin Wall and the 230 mile long, six metre high wall topped with barbed wire lined with guard towers which the Israelis have constructed in the West Bank. The walls say much about the intolerance of those who rule towards those who are ruled and speak volumes about the state of Israel, Ireland and the UK.

Banksy’s feelings about such barrier’s are made explicit in a statement which says the wall “essentially turns Palestine into the world’s largest open prison.” Many including the Moray street artist Pantsy wholeheartedly agree. In a rare interview the reclusive Pantsy echoed the sentiments of his mentor.

We met at the Innes Links on the coast midway between the Moray village of Kingston and the township of Lossiemouth. Innes Links for those not in the know is a party place with some attitude. During the 1940’s it was a focus for the defence of the realm. In those dark days there were quite justified fears that the Moray coastline was the soft underbelly of Scotland.

Norway had been invaded by the German’s and with air raids over Moray and Aberdeenshire a daily menace it seemed logical to expect invasion from the sea. Nowadays however the coastal defensive structures are a mecca for those intent on a few beers and a wee barbeque.

The Innes battery ( pictured above ) features a couple of gun emplacements, a couple of searchlight casements plus a rangefinder housing. There are the obligatory latrines plus a few thousand anti invasion blocks manufactured by Polish troops employed as forced labour by a local building company who got the contract for General Ironside’s anti invasion plan.

Pantsy has added a few pieces of his art to brighten up the somewhat outdated 1940’s décor of the Innes Links Battery.

In fact his spray paintings put to shame those who like the anonymous “FU” reflects “Mo Mo is fat”.

Pantsy told me “My art is simply a reflection of what humanity does to the underdogs and I don’t need to defend it”.

I asked if he was expressing something deeper.

The response came fast and sharp.

“Keith lads suck, Lossie lads are much better, in fact ten times as good, maybe even more. Try them at darts is all I can say. But I’m not sure.”

When further questioned Pantsy revealed his Irish heritage.

He told me of his grandparent’s experiences during the Irish rebellion of 1916. How those patriots were mistreated by the Black and Tans. How the ordinary folk of that island, were mistreated. How the folk in his country were vilified by a war torn Britain who only saw the rebellion as a treason in the face of the common enemy who threatened death and destruction from the air, land and sea.

Seemingly his great uncle was murdered by the men of the Staffordshire Regiment and a cousin far removed met a similar fate in rural Cork.

It’s really no great surprise though that the Irish needed their independence. There had been the British indifference after the harvests failed and folk in the south began to starve. There had been the issues of the setting up of a general election set up by the British authorities in 1918 where 70% of the voters decided to support candidates pledged to abstain from the ties of English authority but were ignored.

There had also been the issues of Easter 1916 when a “terrible beauty was born” and many good Irish folk died by shooting and hanging in the cause of shedding the yoke of an oppressive and often uncaring ruling elite.

Tom Barry wrote in “Guerrilla Days in Ireland” about those dark but somehow progressive days. Tom was Commandant General of the West Cork flying column and in his early career was pitted against the combined might of the British Army in the days just after the first war to end all wars.

People like Major Percival and Montgomery were on his hit list.

The first, who was later to surrender his entire army to the mercy of the Japanese in Singapore, due to his extreme anti-Irish attitude and encouragement of torture. The second because of the man’s habit of allowing his troops free reign to murder and pillage at will.

Percival survived the assassination attempt seemingly due to his habit of raiding and murdering IRA sympathisers at random, he was out on a raid on the night in question it seems.

Montgomery simply went to tea with a new mistress on the night in question thus avoiding the assassin’s bullet.

One ended up as a prisoner of the Japanese and the other ended up as the heroic general who led his troops to victory in the Western Desert at El Alemain.

After Montgomery’s desert victory, there were many prisoners a number of whom were brought back to the UK to live out the rest of the war in captivity. The Italians were the most numerous. Their leader Mussolini had neglected to provide them with much transport and their German allies stole what was left forcing most of the Italian desert troops to surrender at the first opportunity.

Out of over one hundred thousand Italians who surrendered in 1942, around 1300 were sent to Orkney and housed in three prisoner of war camps tasked with building the Churchill Barriers following the disastrous sinking of the HMS Royal Oak in Scapa Flow by the U 47.

From the desert heat and water issues they then faced the freezing winds and belting sleet of an Orcadian winter.

This beautiful chapel is their legacy.

Built using found materials and the parts from two Nissan Huts it survives to this day as a memorial to the spirit and resourcefulness of the people of Italy in the face of the defeat of Fascism.

If Tom Barry had succeeded in the assassination of General Montgomery then in all probability this chapel would not exist.

Now there’s a thought.

With grateful thanks to Wm Yeats, Pantsy and Tom Barry without whose help this article could not have been written.

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Wilson’s Last Stand: Fochabers Fountain Commemorates

Featured, History, Information, Opinion 8 Responses »

Aug 152013

Michael Caine may have successfully defended Rorke’s Drift against the Zulu army but the truth of the Zulu War turns out to be slightly different from the Hollywood version. Duncan Harley examines a slice of Scottish history commemorated by a Fochabers fountain.

Over the years, I have often driven past this Morayshire fountain, never thinking to stop and read the inscription. Today I took a wee look and discovered that it is a tribute to Major Allan Wilson, late bank clerk of Fochabers.

Lord Chelmsford had famously invaded Zululand without the knowledge of the UK government in the hope that he could capture Cetshwayo, the Zulu king, before London discovered that hostilities had begun.

Things however did not go smoothly, and this monument is a link to those events.

The fountain erected in memory of Major Wilson was commissioned by the Duke of Richmond and Gordon and is inscribed:

Erected by the natives of Fochabers to commemorate the heroic stand made against the forces of the King of Matebeleland by Major Allan Wilson of this town who with a small band of comrades fell bravely fighting against overwhelming odds near the Shangani River in South Africa on the 4th of December 1893.

Allan Wilson (1856-1893) was born in Glen Urquhart, Ross-shire, and is best known for his leadership of the Shangani Patrol during which he met his death, making him a national hero in Rhodesia.

On completion of his bank apprenticeship in Fochabers, he went to the Cape Colony and joined the Cape Mounted Rifles. He fought in the Zulu War and the First Boer War and was promoted to Sergeant. After taking his discharge he became a trader and gold prospector and earned a commission in the Basuto Police.

Later, he joined the Bechuanaland Exploration Company as Chief Inspector and was sent as their representative to Fort Victoria (now Masvingo) in Matabeleland, serving as the senior officer in the Victoria Volunteers. He became a Major and was killed while leading the Shangani Patrol during the First Matabele War.

Wilson is buried, along with most of his patrol and with Cecil Rhodes, in Matabo Hills, Zimbabwe.

When the First Matabele War broke out in 1893, Wilson was given command of the Victoria Column and appointed to the rank of Major. He led the Shangani Patrol in search of King Lobengula and on 4 December, he and thirty one of his men were cut off from the main column and killed by the Ndebele warriors.

In desperation, and only hours before his death, Wilson sent Frederick Russell Burnham and two other scouts to seek reinforcements from the main column commanded by Major Patrick Forbes.
Unfortunately, the battle raging there was just as intense and there was no hope of anyone reaching Wilson in time.

The incident achieved a lasting, prominent place in Rhodesian colonial history and is considered to be the British equivalent to Custer’s Last Stand.

A patriotic play, Wilson’s Last Stand, was written and it ran in London for just over two years. In the play, it was claimed that in killing Wilson and his men, Lobengula lost eighty of his royal guard and another 500 Ndebele warriors. Wilson seemingly, was the last to fall and the wounded men of the Shangani Patrol loaded rifles and passed them to him during the final stages of the defence.

When their ammunition ran out, the remaining men of the Patrol are said to have risen and sung, God Save the Queen. Once both of Wilson’s arms were broken and he could no longer shoot, he stepped from behind a barricade of dead horses, walked toward the Ndebele, and was stabbed with a spear by a young warrior.

The truth may have been slightly different, but that’s show business for you, I suppose!

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Nanny Abercrombie’s Windmill

Aberdeenshire, Featured, History 8 Responses »

Jul 262013

When Donald Trump began his tirade against Scotland’s renewable energy policy earlier this year, featured in Aberdeen Voice’s Tilting at Windmills article in April, he famously commented, ‘I don’t want to be standing on the first tee looking into an industrial wind turbine if I’m going to be spending all this money’ and ‘We will spend whatever monies are necessary to see to it that these huge and unsightly industrial wind turbines are never constructed.’ Perhaps he would be persuaded otherwise if he were to pay a even a fleeting visit to one of Banffshire’s hidden gems, the Glassaugh Windmill just east of Sandend on the Moray Firth coast, muses Duncan Harley.

At first glance, the windmill can easily be mistaken for a Pictish Broch or even a Martello Tower.
Set back 500 metres from the A98 Portsoy to Cullen road, the structure has a covering of ivy which masks the outline and suggests a tower house with a walled garden circling the base. Nothing could be further from the truth, however.

In common with much of the Banff and Buchan coastline, the area around Sandend is full of Pictish remains. These are often built over, or indeed incorporated in later structures such as farm houses, churches and dykes. The Glassaugh Windmill is just such a building.

General James Abercrombie of Glassaugh was, as his title suggests, a military man. He was born in 1706 to a wealthy Banffshire family and, as was the custom of the time, in 1742 he purchased a major’s commission to enter the army. He was promoted to colonel in 1746 and major-general in 1756.

He is credited with having good organisational skills but little understanding of the art of warfare and was known to his troops as Mrs Nanny Abercrombie because of his skills at provisioning and providing creature comforts like tents and hot food on the long marches through North America during the French and Indian War of 1689-1763.

Unfortunately, in the July of 1758 he had his own Charge of the Light Brigade moment when he rather rashly directed his troops into a frontal assault on a fortified French position without the benefit of artillery support.

More than 2000 of his force of 15000 were killed or wounded, resulting in the good general being recalled to Britain where he duly became a Member of Parliament, supporting the cause of British dominion over the Northern Territories of America and Canada. No surprises so far then.

When Major General Abercrombie MP returned to his native Scotland, he took over the running of the family estate at Glassaugh and, possibly lacking much to do in the parliament of the day, he began organising the improvement of the agricultural economy of the area.

This was a time of land improvement and land enclosure. Labour was plentiful and indeed cheap, as a large number of Irish Catholics had been uprooted by the influx of English and Scottish aristocracy and had in many cases sought work on the land in Scotland. What was Major General Abercrombie MP to do?

He had indeed been a poor general but possessed good organisational skills. In the true spirit of Jaroslav Hašek’s Good Soldier Švejk, which is essentially a series of absurdly comic episodes, Abercrombie decided to build a windmill.

In those far off days, most mills were powered by water. There are tens of thousands of watermills in the UK and at a guess there must be at least one in every inhabited town and village in Aberdeenshire. Transport was improving during the 1750s, but local flour and grain mills were still the order of the day and met the needs of the townships and small communities all around the shire.

Windmills were not unknown in the NE, but were not that common due to the ease and availability of waterpower. Abercrombie however, decided that wind was the way to go.

As any engineer will know, the biggest challenge in building large structures is the sourcing of building materials. If you need to build a wall then you will require large quantities of stone, heavy and difficult to transport. The shorter the journey from quarry to building site the better.

Well, it just so happened that Major General Abercrombie had a ready-made supply of building materials in the form of a bronze age burial cairn. The folk who had built the cairn would have no objections to its recycling after all, and of course Scottish Natural Heritage was not even a slight smile in the womb of the Natural Heritage (Scotland) Act 1991.

The Cup and Saucer was born. Using the materials from the ancient cairn, Abercrombie bade his workers build an enormous windmill four storeys high and with a tapering tower topped with white sails. It must have been the sight of the century for folk who had never travelled further than Sandend or Portsoy.

How long Abercrombie’s windmill was in full tilt is not recorded, but in a letter dated 23 August 1761, he advised his daughter that high winds had almost blown off ‘the pompon of the wind mill which was only set up yesterday’.

The ivy- covered stump of the structure is all that remains today to remind us of the man who had the vision to build it.

Although, when you think about it, you’re actually looking at a Bronze Age burial cairn undergoing a Tibetan sky burial.

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