HAPPY DAYS. A man from St Kilda.
We usually called him the St Kildan. His name was Neil Ferguson. There are lots of mentions of St Kilda in the internet. The name Neil Ferguson comes up a lot. Very few tell much about the lives of the St Kildans, after they left the archipelago. I was a neighbour of Neil for about ten years of my young life. I remember him as a cheery old guy who kept himself very much to himself. He worked in the nurseries of Tulliallan Forest, now called Devilla Forest. He lived with his wife in the house shown above. He is remembered by those who knew him as the man who went round singing, “Happy Days Are Here Again”.
There are a couple of anomalies in the above paragraph. Why should a man, torn from his island home, go around singing, “Happy Days”, while wedged between the smoke of the coal-burning Kincardine Power Station and the burn-off fumes of Grangemouth oil refinery. And why should these people, who had lived in an island without trees, be considered suited to working in forestry. Why was he living in Kincardine, when the records show he went to live first in Morvern, Argyll-shire and then in Strome Ferry, Ross-shire.
When Neil left his island home forever, he was among those islanders who saw the real need to make the move. His father, also Neil, wasn’t so keen. Neil Senior was king pin on this little archipelago out in the wild Atlantic. He was the representative for the Laird (landowner) and in charge of the little hut that was the post office. Besides, he had just finished tilling the soil of his croft and sewing seeds for the year ahead. But the islanders, including, Neil Junior, had written to the Scottish Office of the Government, asking to be rescued and taken off the island. Life was no longer sustainable. Although a close-knit community, they accepted that it was unrealistic to expect to find a vacant community just waiting for them.
The solution came in the shape of the Forestry Commission who had acquired large tracts of land across Scotland. These were to be planted with trees, replacing the sheep that had once been quite profitable. Along with the land, they had taken possession of several houses and, more importantly, crofts. They could offer each family a croft, like they’d had on St Kilda, and work for the men in forestry.
On the 29th of August 1930, the islanders bade farewell to their home on the edge of the world and boarded a ship that took them to the peninsula of Morvern near the Island of Mull. From there, they were allocated homes around Scotland. Neil Ferguson Snr (aged 54) and his wife were housed in the little village of Culross in the Firth of Forth. This was just a short distance from the forestry nurseries of Tulliallan that were being established to supply young plants for the expanding forests of Scotland.
Neil Ferguson Jr (aged 30), meanwhile, went north with his wife to Strome Ferry, Ross-shire. I cannot be certain exactly how Neil Jr later came to live at Tulliallan near his father so the next part is guess-work.
Just after WW2, the Forestry Commission acquired Tulliallan Estate, land that once belonged to the Black Adder and where Macbeth and Duncan fought the army of the King of Denmark. The Castle became the training college for police in Scotland and retained the gardens and some land. The forest land became part of the Forestry Commission along with the home farm which was incorporated into Tulliallan Nurseries. The farm steading was used for the processing of pine cones and spruce cones to obtain seed for the nurseries. The farmhouse (seen in the photo above) became available for a forestry worker.
So, at some point. Neil Snr died and Neil Jr came south to Tulliallan. I have no way of knowing how or when this took place. Did he come south to join his father or had his father first acquired the farmhouse. Next to the farm buildings, new houses were built to accommodate forestry workers; sixteen of these were called Westfield and eight were called New Row. My family came to live at number 15 Westfield in 1955 and my father worked in the nurseries and the forests alongside Neil Ferguson Junior. I and my brother and sister attended Tulliallan Primary School in the nearby village of Kincardine on Forth. Both my brother and myself worked a short time with the forestry. He was at Tulliallan and I was at Devilla Forest, a couple of miles to the north. So my brother worked with Neil Ferguson. The two forests merged and are now together called Devilla Forest. On any map, you can find Westfield and the house, standing alone to the east, which was the home of Neil Ferguson and his wife.
Now to the second anomaly. Why should a man, who’d spent his young life collecting puffins’ eggs on the cliffs of St Kilda, be singing happy songs amidst the belching fumes from Kincardine’s coal-fired, power station and the sulphurous flare-off from Grangemouth’s oil works, that he could see from his window. The answer’s complex. My family hated living in Westfield; we never felt part of the community. It’s in Fife and we were from the Highlands. Neil was an islander but his house was separate from the cluster of eighteen and it was the original farmhouse, much grander that all the rest. He could do his day’s work and, in the evenings, retire to his own island. There is also a natural connection between growing vegetables on a croft and growing trees from seed in a nursery. At that time neither Tulliallan nor Devilla were real forests, like now. It was all a young plantation. I know; it used to be my playground. Now it’s the playground of red squirrels.
But here’s a quirky thought. Happy Days are Here Again was written in 1929. In 1930, the year St Kilda was evacuated, a film called Chasing Rainbows was released with the closing scenes accompanied by the song. I think that Neil must have seen the film or maybe just heard the song on the radio. It’s an easy sing-along and it would have resonated with the young islander. The last few years on St Kilda were tough for everybody. In truth they would all have felt happy just to be alive. The population on St Kilda was dwindling fast. Just look at the lyrics.
So long sad times
Go long bad times
We are rid of you at last
Howdy gay times
Cloudy gray times
You are now a thing of the past
Happy days are here again
The skies above are clear again
So let’s sing a song of cheer again
Happy days are here again
All together shout it now
There’s no one who can doubt it now
So let’s tell the world about it now
Happy days are here again
In another story published here in Medium, Sitara Morgenster speculates on the decline of moral and population on St Kilda. It certainly adds to the notion of why Neil was so happy to be away from there.
“That tourists and their germs had an unintended hand in the last islanders’ final departure seventy years ago is a popular myth. Epidemics had indeed thinned the population with regularity, but there were always new arrivals from nearby islands such as Skye and Harris. The leading cause of depopulation was in fact the arrival of Puritan preachers from 1822 onwards. The population began assembling in church for hours each day and were not allowed to work on Sundays, despite the need to use every minute of daylight to stock up on food. Traditional poetry, music and dance, critical counterweights to the hard island life, became taboo.”
Thank you Sitara. The “Wee Free Kirk” certainly tried to make highland and island life more miserable than it already was.
