SERVICE ABOVE SELF


OCTOBER 2019: ISSUE 126


The Day School Was Out Forever was the subject of the presentation, given by member Anne Tait on 3rd September. As Anne is a former teacher, the audience expected a talk on matters concerning current educat ional practices but they soon learned differently… Anne had borrowed the title from a newspaper headline which in fact described the last days of the occupation of the remote Atlantic island of St Kilda, which lies 41 miles west of Benbecula. The article had prompted a deep interest in the subject for Anne and her husband Hamish. So much so, they arranged a sea cruise which allowed them to visit St Kilda in person and learn much about the island’s 4000-year history. The last day of school there was August 29, 1930, when the entire population of St Kilda quit their island home forever and were transported to mainland Scotland. In March of that year the school roll numbered 8 pupils, which had gradually reduced from a high of 24 pupils in the early part of the 20th century.


wild birds which were the population’s staple diet. Fulmars were the preferred diet, although these birds, plus puffins and gannets, were often used to make some very strange foodstuffs – such as a soup fashioned from Fulmar fat which usually ended up as unpalatable grey mass called “gibeon”. “Yeugh”, springs to mind……


Life on St Kilda had never been easy, particularly for the children, who were regularly denied school when they were required to help in the snaring of


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Anne told of how, in the 1830s, a brave minister Reverend Neil McKenzie settled on the island with his family in an attempt to educate not only the children, but the adults. His aim was to persuade them away from rather Neol ithic forms of worship and superstition. He endured several years of hardship, finding that no supplies of either birds or ships were available for months, leading to dreadful smells and dangers from the rotting remains of the dead birds stored as winter supplies then discarded. He also discovered that some 60% of St Kilda babies born in those times died of “eight-day sickness”. The cause was later discovered to likely be “neonatal tetanus” from soil tainted by bird carcasses and/or from knives used in food preparation which had also been employed to kill and skin wild birds.


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