1945 and beyond ~ the regeneration

Written by Steve Webster with assistance from Tom Forsyth & Morag Hepburn. With thanks to Nigel & Ross for Roy & Jack's photos, and Scoraig primary school for scanning facilities

________________________________

It is one of the tragedies of this remote North-West that the fishing has declined along with other economic and social conditions of the crofting areas. We are short of safe harbours, of boats and of men to make up crews. At that time, the spring of 1936, there was only one boat on this lochside with an inboard engine - a launch of twenty feet long which was probably never built for work off this awkward coast. This was owned by our friend Scoraig, who keeps the store in the small isolated community of that name. I walked down the track on the north shore of the Loch and found Scoraig behind the counter of his shop.

Here in this little whitewashed building is none of your chromium-plated shop fittings and aids to selling, nor has Scoraig the air nor the arts of the counter-jumper. This is a man's shop. You can buy butter and sugar there, and crockery and stuffs, buckets and girdles and rope and tackle. There are shelves and benches of bare deal, hooks from the rafters for stuff that will hang, and the stone walls and the window are hygienically festooned with cobwebs to catch the flies. It is such a shop as a man lingers in unashamed to discuss the affairs of the world.

~ Island Years, Frank Frazer Darling.

Island Years was written in 1938, just before World War II took another bite at what was left of a crofting community on Scoraig. After the men left, many of the women and children were relocated into Scottish cities for the duration of the war. Many families never came back, and Scoraig might have gone the way of other remote crofting townships along the west coast and in the islands. Night falls in Ardnamurchan is a fine book written by Alasdair Maclean, a son of the last working crofter on the Ardnamurchan peninsula down the coast from here, who packed up the croft for sale after the death of his parents in 1961, and took away his father's journals going back to the days of his own childhood, leaving behind him an empty township. The book was published in 1984.

Still, the regeneration of Scoraig began with the arrival of two Englishmen who had refused to fight in that war. There were not so many in Britain who refused to fight Hitler, and the authorities treated them relatively gently, preferring to handle at least some of them as harmless eccentrics, and at least one of Roy and Jack was eccentric to say the least. They have left us historical records to prove it, such as a letter written by Roy to the Post Office complaining that the postman, who in those days had to walk over 15 miles to pick up and deliver the mail across Scoraig, every day, was stopping off at his house for a cup of tea and making their post late. They were probably not the first and certainly not the last difficult characters to live on Scoraig.

Roy and Jack were sent to serve out World War II in farm work. Soon after the war, they came to croft together on Scoraig.

Roy and Jack, at some time maybe around 1950, before they planted trees in front of the house.

Scoraig after World War II was unlikely to attract anyone young who was not eccentric. Just one young man who lived on Scoraig at the end of the war, Billy Macrae, born here around 1930, stayed on long enough to see more new people arrive before he moved to Ullapool in the 1960's. Apart from him, by the end of the 1950's the only ones left of the old community were old themselves. Meanwhile, whatever Roy and Jack's quirks, these photos from two albums they left behind show they were fiercely energetic and organized. The photos also show in those early years an almost total absence of trees. Roy and Jack, long before it was fashionable, began to change that.

Click here to see more of Roy and Jack's photos

Roy and Jack were drawn to Scoraig first by reading about it in Frank Frazer Darling's writings. Alun Bush, his wife Asa and three young children came to live here in 1963. Alun and Asa were of a different temperament from Roy and Jack. Thirty seven years later, both of them still have friends across Scoraig and the world. With their arrival, Scoraig became a more attractive place for another young family to live. In 1964 they were followed by Tom Forsyth, a Scots botanist, and his wife Ray, and with their active encouragement more came. As of December 2009, Alun and Tom still live here.

Among those who came around 1974 were Alan Beavitt ("Bev"), who left behind a career in research physics, and Topher Dawson and Hugh Piggott, who had recently graduated from Cambridge University, Topher in engineering, Hugh in natural sciences. Scoraig in those days boasted one working television, and anyone wishing to view it had first to pedal a bicycle to charge the batteries. Aaron Forsyth, Tom's son, who was born here in 1968, one of the first children born on Scoraig after World War II, remembers vividly the walk home on a winter's night through a lightless Scoraig after watching Dr Who.

Bev was the first to build a wind generator to Scoraig. Topher and Hugh with the help of Alun Bush built the next, and went on from there to evolve a design and local manufacturing ability. Hugh Piggott went on to build a worldwide reputation in small wind generator design, and to this day runs a highly praised course on Scoraig on how to build your own wind generator. There is no more popular man on Scoraig than Hugh in the aftermath of a storm.

Scoraig Primary School was built in the 19th century, with an apartment upstairs to house a schoolteacher. It closed in 1956, when the last child of primary school age left Scoraig, and re-opened in 1965 with three children. The photo below was taken by Jytte Piggott in front of the school in spring of 1989. By then, Roy and Jack had died.

At the time this photo was taken, 93 people lived on Scoraig.

The population has aged and declined since then.

The above is a man-heavy account of Scoraig's recent past. Scoraig has been going through a phase in its evolution which involved a lot of hardware and heavy lifting, and as anywhere else where men are heavily involved it has brought some bickering. I do not dwell on Scoraig's troubles because anyone in reach of a computer to view this website is no stranger to interpersonal troubles. We have them, and our relative freedom from the world's scrutiny has not always brought the best out of us. Scoraig will continue to change. Meanwhile, here as everywhere else it is the women who put the curve in the world, and the children who begin it again.