On 12th April a defunct railway carriage arrived by rail, probably at Strathpeffer station, or perhaps Dingwall or Muir of Ord, bought from a farmer at Castletown in Caithness and presumably intended as an additional henhouse. On the same day John’s father paid out £33 for 10 tons of seed oats. With government pressure on farmers to extend land use and increase crop yields the Marginal Production Scheme was established in the spring of 1943 with grants provided to encourage farmers purchase fertilisers to try to increase fertility in previously designated poor marginal land.
The next letter I have finds John in work camp Stalag IV A, near Dresden in southern Germany. Stalag means soldier and stalags (stammlager or base camp for enlisted personnel) were camps for non-commissioned allied troops. Camps for commissioned officers were called oflags. There were two Stalag IV-As – the original one at Elderhorst but from February 1941 the camp at Hohnstein Castle began taking in increasing numbers of prisoners and became Stalag IV-A. The 1941 number of prisoners under Stalag IV-A was 22,000, later rising to 32,000. Many Soviet prisoners were confined here. They and Polish prisoners were provided with the smallest food rations and allocated the most difficult work assignments.
Some officer POWs were held here for a time but nearby oflag, Colditz Castle, became famous for the daring escapes from there. All camps had their own stories of daring escapes. John had a low opinion of POWs in Colditz because their confinement was cosy compared with the desperate conditions of men in the stalags. As well as stalags and oflags there were several other types of internment camp designations: intelligence, civilians, maritime, air force etc.. Each German military district was identified by a Roman numeral. IV was the Dresden military district covering many camps. By 1942 the district had about 700 work camps – a flexible number that altered according to labour requirements for different industries.
Every kind of industry and occupation in the region employed POWs – coal mining (lignite or brown coal), transport, chemical production, shoe manufacture, horticulture, cement works, timber yards, textiles, hospitals – psychiatric, medical, surgical, convalescent. Hohnsetein POW camp was an administrative centre for a huge network of external camps with its main task the distribution of POW and forced labour to workplaces. Hohnsetin castle was the area’s command headquarters.
John writes to his mother, in pencil on a plain letter postcard on 21st November, 1943 –
“Dear Mam, Here is another post card to let you know I am all right. We are getting our Red Cross parcels now. I have not had any letters yet but I should get one for Christmas. I hope everybody at home is well. The weather in this country is similar to home so I should not feel the cold much when I come home. Well, I must close now. I am, your loving son, John.”
POW mail was often stamped several times over, going through various checks. There’s a Stalag IV B stamp on this lettercard and I think because John passed through IV B as a transfer prisoner around the time of Italy’s collapse. Military district IV referred to Dresden. John was also held in Poland for a time but I know nothing about the circumstances.
On 17 December 1943, John’s mother was sent a letter from the Scottish Branch of the British Red Cross. John was then in Stalag IV B.
“We are sorry we are unable to change the camp address of the parcel, as it had already been despatched. We do not think you will have any anxiety regarding its safe arrival, as we feel sure it will be forwarded on to him at his new address. We have noted the new address on our records and trust you are having good news from your son.”
Stalag IV-A
In recent years it has emerged that when Italy was on the brink of collapse that British officers stepped in as de facto guards to prevent POWs escaping and attempting to rejoin their army units that were spread here, there and everywhere. An order was issued from within a secretive branch of Britain’s Ministry of Defence and transmitted as a religious broadcast on a BBC programmed called The Radio Padre that all British POWs should remain in Italian camps and wait for the arrival of UK forces. Perhaps in London they didn’t realise Germans could understand English but whatever an order went out for some 50,000 allied POWs to be transferred to Poland and Germany. POW deaths were high during the transfers and subsequent years in Nazi labour camps. The original order subsequently disappeared from the War Office archives at Kew. The 1940s equivalent of deleted Whatsapp messages.
By February 1941 Germany’s Afrika Korps commander, Major General Rommel, had landed a force at the Libyan capital of Tripoli in support of the Italians who were struggling to contain the British. Rommel’s tank companies proved a formidable enemy and within a matter of weeks British forces had retreated to the Egyptian border.
Far from the heat of war in the Western Desert Scotland was suffering severe winter weather during which many of the farm’s lambs died of exposure to the extreme conditions. Grass sickness stopped the breeding of horses on the farm and the numbers of their working horse fell with some of the tasks previously undertaken by horses transferred to a paraffin-fuelled tractor.
John’s uncle, Duncan MacRae, awarded the Military Medal for bravery in the First World War, and grieve (foreman) on the farm during the Second lived with his family in one of the farm cottages close to the steading. In addition to firewood and farm produced food such as oats and potatoes, eggs etc he was paid £11. 10s a month in 1941. The farm employed five other men – for example cattleman Frank McLeod who received £105 a year and others whose wages ranged between 48 shillings and 54 shillings per week. John’s young brother, Roy, was paid between £7 and £13 per month, dependent on hours. John’s sister, Margaret, when not away working as a nanny earned the occasional £7 or £8 at busy times.
John’s father’s farm diaries rarely include any references to family events but on 3rd December 1941 he noted –
“John sailed. Cable sent from Glasgow – 2nd Feb about 9 weeks at sea.”
John had been transferred from the Seaforths to the newly formed Royal Armoured Corps, a tank corps that replaced the old horse cavalry regiments. In April 1939 the Royal Tank Corps had been renamed the Royal Tank Regiment, part of the RAC. John was recruited into the Reconnaissance Corps which was setup in January 1941, to carry out reconnaissance – scouting ahead of infantry divisions before they advanced – and disbanded in 1946. Recruits into this corps were selected through an intelligence test before being trained as drivers, wireless operators, mechanics and assault infantrymen. Many failed the test and were sent back to their own units. During World War 2 the Reconnaissance Corps served in the Middle East, East Africa, North Africa and the Far East.
During 1941 B battalion 3 RTR were in Greece fighting Italians but I have no evidence John was stationed there although some family members believe he was in Crete where fighting had spread from mainland Greece. Both were terrible bloody encounters and defeats for the Allies despite Britain’s determination to hold Crete which was regarded as essential to British interests as a vital refuelling base in the eastern Mediterranean since 1940. (The first reference John makes to being with the RTR is the following February).
The 3rd December 1941 is the date on the first of John’s letters I have.
Dear Mam,
We are safely aboard at last. I’m afraid the paper you was sending on is a bit late now. Well it will be sent on later I suppose. We had a sing-song last night and we had a fairly early reveille this morning. Has Roy got busy pushing the pram yet. He can hitch it behind the motor bike he was to get. They will all be settled down for the winter now at home at the neeps. This letter may take some time on arriving as it will be censored and perhaps kept back for a while. Well I am afraid I cannot say much more.
I am your loving son John.
I don’t associate John with sing-songs as the John who returned from war was quite reserved but at twenty and surrounded by comrades he comes across as carefree and with a keen sense of humour. Roy was his young brother and the pram reference is to their sister Chris’ recent baby. Neeps are swedes and it’s clear John is thinking about the life he left at home on the farm.
Just over two weeks later John writes home again, he’s contemplating the turn into the new year of 1942 but otherwise has little to say partly because of the army’s strict censorship rules, though he does hint at where he currently is –
“I can’t say where I am but it’s hot enough anyway. I have hardly anything on but I am sweating like a pig. We may not be here long and I think it may be a lot hotter yet.”
This is a partial record of one man’s war divided into seven parts.
Part 1
Thursday 10 May 1945. A postcard written in pencil.
“Rested here overnight when making our way back to the American lines from near Dresden.”
Here being Lederan in Gasten Chemnitz in eastern Germany. The picture postcard was written by 24-year-old John Munro and it appears he was accompanied by several others: Tom and John Whitehead, Chris Simmons, Norrie Thompson, Bill McKay. C. Simmons, Tom S Whitehead who have added their signatures to the reverse of the card – all survivors of the Nazi work camp, Stalag IV-A. On the defeat of Germany that May the camp guards simply abandoned their posts and left the gates open as they hurried away.
Eastern Germany around Chemnitz was a centre of war-time industries producing military hardware so became a focus of allied bombing aimed at disrupting production and destroying German lines of communication in the east of the country. Some forty miles away was the famously beautiful and culturally important city of Dresden which had escaped direct attack while bombs targeted the region’s manufacturing sector but on the night of 13th/14th February Operation Thunderclap changed that when Dresden became the prime target for one of the most controversial Allies’ decisions of the war. The Soviet army approaching from the east and their allies, the British and Americans, were keen to create confusion to prevent German concentration of power in the region and possible resurgence of strength. Punishing the German people was also somewhere in the mix and a curiosity over the effectiveness of firestorm in conflict. As well as Dresden’s own citizens thousands of refugees were also passing through the city (fleeing from approaching Soviet troops), and prisoners of war (POWs) – one of them the American writer, Kurt Vonnegut, later wrote about the terrible scenes he witnessed in his novel, Slaughterhouse-Five. He was one of a number of POWs put to work recovering the tens of thousands of bodies of people who had been burned to death or suffocated in the firestorm that engulfed Dresden when Allied aircraft dropped tons of incendiary bombs on its civilian population. The following night Chemnitz was the target.
Prisoners at Stalag IV-A camp would have been well aware of the increasing assaults on the cities of eastern Germany from the flames that leapt into the sky and, presumably, been given hope that the end of the war was close. At the same time allied bombardments created interruptions to food supplies and Red Cross parcels were stolen more than was usual. Camp guards as well as prisoners were near starving and by early May with the Red Army progressing across country guards abandoned their posts and left the camp gates open. By 8th May 1945 Chemnitz was occupied by Soviet troops.
C. Simmons and Tom S. Whitehead jotted down their names on a scrap of map of the Freiberg region that John Munro took home with him. Did they use maps to find their way across country after liberation? Possibly.
*
John Munro came from Ross and Cromarty in Scotland where his parents were farmers just north of Inverness. As a farmer John would have been exempted from military service at the beginning of the war but he was barely 18 and headstrong so he enlisted as a private in the Seaforth Highlanders at Strathpeffer without telling his parents four months before conscription was introduced in 1939.
1939
There must have been a lot of talk about war around the Munro kitchen table that May. While to some the country north of Inverness might suggest an idyll of out-of-the-way peace it was far from it – nearby Strathpeffer, Jamestown, Achterneed, the Heights, Blairninich became centres of military activity throughout the war and were restricted areas which meant travel passes were required for everyone, locals included. Private homes as well as hotels and public buildings were commandeered by the military – officers setting themselves up in the smartest of houses – other ranks were accommodated as available and the overflow put up in camps of wooden huts and tents. Land was allocated for military training – rifle and shelling ranges. People came in from across the UK and the world: Newfoundlander and Honduran foresters brought to Scotland to boost the country’s forestry workers (lumberjacks and lumberjills), to provide essential timber supplies for building, aircraft, shipping, mining, telegraph poles and so on. Immediately west of the Munro’s farm practice trenches were dug out on either side of the Black Water, the river that ran through their land. To assist the professionals, locals either too old or in reserve occupations, were able to provide back-up and feel they were contributing to the defence of the country through participation in the Home Guard. John’s father signed up with them and was issued with a pair of boots of different sizes. I expect another volunteer had a similar pair.
On the eve of a war that would transform so much of British life resonances of the past endured. Horses were important means of working muscle. On John’s family’s farm there were 5 working horses plus 2 young ones and a foal that summer of ’39, along with a Shetland pony that was taken as a mascot by one of the military units, likely the Lovat Scouts or Seaforth Highlanders. Horse numbers were decreasing with the advent of the tractor. Just a year or two earlier no fewer than 11 horses were being worked on the family farm. The horses all had names and some of the cattle (mainly Highland and Galloway) on this mixed farm – big cow, broken horned cow, teen, Bonnie, Captain Smith’s, old red cow, old blue cow, roan dairy cow, little red cow. Flocks of sheep were predominantly Cheviots and Leicesters. There were also 140 hens, 30 ducks and 25 turkeys – for people used to eat turkey eggs back then. And crops that included oats, barley, swedes and potatoes.
At just 18, John was surely regarded by his father as a permanent member of the farm’s workforce which he hadn’t expected to lose. As a farmhand John was paid the average wage for a male farm servant of £4 per week (housing and perks were provided on top of basic pay) and £3 for women. That May he received £15 for three weeks work before he left for military service. John’s father, always very involved in local affairs, assisted in assessing damage to Strathpeffer’s Kinettas grass parks and Kinnellan Avenue by Lovat Scouts – broken verges, fences, abandoned water troughs for their horses and general rubbish from their camp.
1940
North Africa became a main theatre of war between Allied and Axis powers over that essential trade route, the Suez Canal. At the outbreak of war the canal was controlled by the British who depended upon it for oil supplies from the Persian Gulf and it became a target for the Axis powers of Germany and Italy. In June 1940 Italy declared war on Britian and France and in September Italian troops invaded Egypt from Libya which had been colonised by Italy in 1911.
John had swapped working as a farmer for working as a soldier. He earned a soldier’s pay now and paid income tax the same as he would have at home. He would be liable for income tax throughout his time at war, as a prisoner of war. Had he been wealthy or an officer he could have claimed tax relief on investments held outside the UK curiously enough.
I can scarcely remember my grandmother’s voice – neither of my grandmothers’ voices. Like everyone I had two grannies and in my case both my grannies are now long dead for they were born into a different world, in the late 1900s. I like having that link, however tenuous, with a Scotland that’s gone forever.
My paternal Granny, Harriet (Hetty), was a strong woman, and tall as befits a McHardy from Braemar. In common with lots of folk I didn’t take much interest in either of my grannies lives but filed away in my subconscious were the odd name and incident and these aided and abetted by a few photographs and internet access to census returns, marriage, birth and death certificates have meant I’m able to better place my grannies into their family settings preceding the years I knew them. A wee bit, at least.
Top row: Harriet as a child with her parents at Braemar; at home in Aberdeen, early 1930s; a day out on Deeside with Granda and dog Glen; McHardys at home at Tomintoul, Braemar late 1920s. Bottom row: Harriet with daughter Hetty on Union Street in Aberdeen, 1920s; at home in the 1950s; Braemar pipe band rehearsing; McHardys at the croft on Morrone
Harriet, let’s call her Granny 1, was born on the humble croft her parents worked on the slopes of Morrone, a hill behind Braemar. A bit lower than a Munro, Morrone is a Corbett, which means it’s between 2,500 ft and 3,000ft – an unlikely place to try to farm but somehow a community of five households did just that and they called their wee fermtoun, Tomintoul. This is a different Tomintoul from the well-known village of that name. The McHardys worked 7 acres of this the most elevated cultivated land in the whole of Scotland so it must have surprised a few people that in 1864 Braemar’s Tomintoul had the unlikely distinction of producing the country’s biggest golden yellow turnip – thirty-three inches in circumference and weighing in at a whopping 14 lbs – some achievement for land tilled from under heather, trees and boulders though as far as I know it had nothing to do with my family. For the area to sustain five families would have taken immense effort in clearing a stretch of the hillside of its heather, trees and boulders and neutralising its acid soil – they did this with lime produced from limestone in communal lime kilns. Life on Morrone would have been idyllic in spring, summer and autumn but a mighty struggle to survive in during winter in what is one of the coldest areas of Scotland. Granny’s children – my dad, aunty and uncle – spent childhood holidays on the old croft and retained strong attachment to the area. My husband and I climbed up Morrone one fine summer’s day and were astonished to discover my dad who had driven out to Braemar with us, and was then about seventy and in poor health, struggling up behind us. He made it up that purple remembered hill he’d scampered over all those decades earlier – made it up one last time.
The Tomintoul crofters were poor folk so that everyone had to do their bit. The young tended to go into service – girls became cooks or house servants while boys found work on the big estates of Balmoral and Invercauld or went into a trade. When no local jobs were available the connections made through these landed estates opened up jobs elsewhere in the UK. Granny became a cook to a wealthy London family and on her return to Scotland she cooked for a family in Stonehaven. One of her older sisters, Hellen, became the lifelong companion of ‘a lady’, a Miss Poole from Shepton Mallet, and the two young women travelled extensively abroad and in the UK. When Miss Poole died, as an old woman, the also elderly Hellen returned to Scotland, to Aberdeen near to Granny and the rest of her family.
Census at Tomintoul, Braemar, 1881
But I’m getting ahead of myself. First there were two world wars to contend with. My grandfather, Granny’s young husband, joined the Royal Army Medical Corps (I have his notebooks from that time in which he scribbled down treatments for everything from shell shock to chilblains along with his wallet containing baby teeth from his children back home). I can only imagine the anxiety Granny suffered during the long years of the Great War guessing what her husband was enduring for he was a stretcher bearer in some of the worst fighting at the Battle of the Somme. But he survived it all. They lived in a tiny tenement flat in Skene Street in Aberdeen until the 1930s when bungalows were built on the west side of the town, off Mid-Stocket Road. It’s a mystery how they afforded to buy one but buy one they did and it remained in the family for over seventy years, nearly unchanged in all that time. It is in this house that I remember the only word spoken by Granny – whenever we arrived on holiday (when I was a bairn) she would pick me up to gauge how much heavier I’d got since our last meeting and call me Tina. I was Tina to no-one else but her. One word isn’t much of a vocal memory but there is a phrase that became something of a family legend though I can’t claim to have heard Granny speak it since I hadn’t then been born. It was during World War 2 when Granny expressed her resistance to the Nazis as the German Luftwaffe flew over Aberdeen dropping their bombs on the city, she’d be out the backdoor shaking a fist at them and shouting defiantly,
“Awa ye buggers!”
I think I take after Granny. Now I can’t claim to have heard her then but I recognise that spirit that stayed with her through her latter years. I don’t know what else Granny was doing through the war while her sons were abroad on military service and her daughter fulfilling her civic duty alerting Aberdonians to air raids but she appears to have made a point of stocking up on food for more than thirty years after her death we found tins of wartime food stored in her cellar. Unopened.
Unusually, my grandmother was ten years older than her husband, my Granda, and considerably taller, but for all their unconventionality theirs was a long, and as far as I am aware, a happy marriage that began in 1911 when my grandfather returned from a spell working in New York to marry his Hetty. He was 21 and she 31 and they had met when he was working as a young baker in Braemar.
Granny was a woman of her time – such a silly phrase as everyone is. She wore her skirts long, often to her ankles, over red flannel petticoats. The beautiful costumes I found in her wardrobe may not have been hers but her sister Hellen’s (though I don’t know for sure).
Harriet as a young woman and with some clothes found in her wardrobe
It is a pity photographs are silent. Sometimes it is a pity. Granny’s voice will always remain in my imagination, an odd word captured in a rather high-pitched, thin, reedy tone and a smile behind each one. If only I could capture more of them.
***
My other granny, my maternal granny (Granny 2), has also been more or less silenced since death. She was about ten years younger than Granny 1 and was also a daughter of a crofting family but hers lived in the Black Isle which enjoys one of the mildest climates in Scotland. A Highlander from Cromarty, Granny 2 was Isabella (Bella), a Miller (sometimes Millar) whose extended family included the geologist Hugh Miller. Like Granny I, Granny 2 was tallish but otherwise they were very different types of women. For one thing, Granny 2 would never have thought of much less uttered Granny 1’s immortal commands to the Luftwaffe.
While not being able to very clearly recall Granny 2’s voice I should because when she was old and had succembed to dementia she would near-endlessly recite rhymes remembered from her childhood or those she shared with her own children. “Here we go round the mulberry bush was often shortened to “on a cold a frosty morning” recited with gusto, as our daughter remembers. “Losh, losh” she’d repeat over and over again – losh being a Scots word for surprise though Granny didn’t say it with any sense of its meaning but more a lament, for what I can only wonder. It was a sad end to her life, drawn out over many years – she seated day-long with nothing to occupy her mind and slipping inevitably into a world of her own, living with her family but separately.
I imagine because I wasn’t there the night she called out in her sleep for her recently dead husband – “John!” was uttered urgently but softly in that light way people with the Gaelic have of talking with a soft palate so that words trickle from the front of the mouth. Bella’s vocabulary was well sprinkled with the Gaelic though she disdained Scots for her generation were encouraged to be ashamed of their own traditional language. A generation before young Bella was born her family were cleared (a polite term for being driven off their land) from Strathconon and ended up in the Black Isle and it was instilled into the people that progress equalled English and backwardness equalled Scots. So Bella venerated the English language and I recall her urging me to say ‘yes’ instead of ‘aye’ – but I cannot remember how she said it.
Bella’s wedding at the Glenalbyn Hotel in Inverness in 1912. Bella and her husband John are surrounded by family and friends – Bella’s sisters on her right. John’s father is the exhausted-looking man with beard fourth left of Bella. He died in 1914, the year following the death of one of his sons of blackwater fever in Mozambique. I don’t know if his son, Rod, is in the picture.
For all that she was a kind and gentle woman, more stoic than her appearance might suggest, encouraging her young farmer husband to take the plunge and rent a bigger farm and in time buy it. They were a team. In common with all farmers’ wives, Bella was responsible for some farm work as well as her domestic duties – eggs and dairy products which she sold at markets each week loading loading eggs, cheese, butter and cream onto the trap and driving the horse the twenty or so miles to Inverness for the weekly market – and presumably Dingwall and Muir of Ord, too.
She and my grandfather married in 1912. Like my Aberdeen grandparents they were 21 and 31 but unlike them the bride was younger than her husband. Unlike Harriet’s husband, Bella’s man was not active abroad during the Great War as farming was a reserved occupation and he had carried out pre-war training in England when he was introduced to the joys of motorcycling but couldn’t work out how to stop his bike so drove round and round the compound until it ran out of fuel. Family members who were at the front included Granny’s cousin whose letters from the trenches are shown here. Many Scottish women were forced to give up their jobs to travel to England to manufacture munitions during the Great War. Bella’s sister, Anne, was one of them conscripted by the government but she was allowed home towards the end of the war to take care of Bella and her children who were suffering from the deadly Spanish ‘flu of 1918. They all survived.
Top row: Bella as a young woman; Bella seated left with family including her mother at Rosemarkie beach in 1923; Bella with mother, daughter and granddaughter c. 1941; in her garden in 1971. Bottom row: Bella at home c.1961; air mail letter for German prisoners of war; on pillion of her younger son’s motorcycle c.1946.
Bella had a passion for auctions or maybe it was a passion driven by necessity. She and John moved into their final home and farm near Strathpeffer in the 1920s and the rambling old farmhouse took a lot of filling. Bella furnished it with all sorts of weird and wonderful pieces purchased from the Dingwall mart, including a large glass display case of stuffed birds I spent so much time staring at as a young child. The house was a magical playground for us children with more than fourteen rooms plus bathrooms. There was a pantry where Granny’s home-made jams, jellies, chutneys and wine (lethal) were stored, a laundry with an enormous timber sink and a dairy where Granny turned the farm’s milk into the butter, cream and cheese she sold at markets. The dairy was always cold irrespective of the heat outside for it was built as a short wing lit by a series of small windows along a single wall shielded from direct sunlight. A row of meat safes and metal presses sat on long wide shelves to keep food cool and insect free. A large room with ample space for food on one side while the other was stacked with decades worth of Ross-shire Journals and editions of the Scotsman. And now I cannot access Ross-shires of that time. I could write a whole blog on the different rooms, some grand and others basic and functional but the lovely building that was always open house to so many in the area, friends, family, visitors and strangers alike was mysteriously destroyed by fire shortly after the farm was sold.
Bella was said to have had the second sight, based on a single incident I believe. The second sight is a phenomenon some believe occurs when someone ‘sees’ an event happening either in some distant place or in the future. In Granny’s case her experience came during World War Two. Her young son who’d lied about his age to join the army disappeared in North Africa after his tank was destroyed. The family didn’t know if he was alive or dead. One morning Bella confidently announced that he was safe for she had dreamt of her son as a baby in a cradle that rocked back and fore, quicker and quicker, until it slowed to a stop. Her confidence was well-founded and her son did eventually return home after four years as a prisoner in Nazi labour camps in Germany and Poland.
Letters to Bella from her cousin thanking her for her parcels sent to him in the trenches during WW1 in 1916 and 1917
Both Bella and Hetty grew up at a time shanks’ pony was the most common means of getting around and horse and trap for longer journeys. They lived into the age of motor cars and motor cycles, the replacement of paraffin and town gas with electricity, from a world in which correspondence meant letters and telegrams to one with near instantaneous communication, the wireless and telephone and eventually television. They lived through a century of incredible societal changes. Of devastating world wars and numerous other wars and conflicts and the crumbling of the British empire. It would be wonderful to be able to sit down and talk to them both about the world’s momentous events and little domestic dramas but that’s just idle contemplation. Now it is easy to record grannies in full flow so their voices can accompany those who care about them into the future and that can only be a good thing.
Duncan was a powder monkey, one of a team of tunnel miners, employed to bring electricity to the Highlands, north and west of Dingwall, through an immense hydro-electric scheme of dams, tunnels, lochs and power stations. While working at Strathvaich Duncan had gone into a shed to fetch blasting gear when the box of detonators he was holding blew up in his hand and with it the whole shed.
Duncan MacRae
“That Saturday afternoon in June 1911, Oskar Johansson lost all his fair hair. His left eye was ripped out of its socket by the force of the blast. The right hand was severed at the wrist by a shard of rock.”
As I read Henning Mankell’s The Rock Blaster I was pulled up short at his description of an explosion and injuries to the book’s hero, Oskar Johansson, for they were near identical to those suffered by a relative of mine, Duncan MacRae, in the 1950s in an accident not dissimilar to the one suffered by the fictitious Johansson and it got me thinking that Duncan, Duncie, deserved to have his story told as well.
My problem was that Duncan is long dead, he died back in 1991. And that generation of the family has gone and with them first-hand knowledge of the tragedy that befell Duncan that day at Strathvaich. Memories and anecdotes survive about Duncie, his horrific injuries – his left hand was blown off, he lost his left eye, his right eye was damaged and shards of metal and pieces of wire were lodged in his thigh, face and eyelids. He was supplied with a metal hook in place of his missing hand. He was twenty-nine.
One of my earliest memories as a very young child is watching my aunt, a nurse, using tweezers to pluck bits of metal out of Duncan’s studded face. They stood before the farmhouse kitchen window to capture the best light, Duncan stoic throughout scarcely wincing though the pain must have been excruciating.
The Scottish Highlands mythologised and derided in equal measure; dramatic, romantic scenery or barren wilderness of no use to man or beast. But the Highlands aren’t called highlands for nothing. Mountain ranges that trap winter snow that melts into the burns, rivers, lochans and lochs. And rain that isn’t unknown especially towards the west. Water in large quantities described as a wasted resource that should be exploited to produce electric power – hydro power to provide light and heat to Highlanders dependent on Tilley lamps and open fires.
The Conon Valley hydro scheme was one of several planned during WWII and the baby of Tom Johnston, a Labour MP who became Secretary of State for Scotland under Churchill in 1941. Johnston was determined that electric power would be provided to people in the north of Scotland who had no access to the Grid which he regarded as unfair and a deterrent to the Highlands attracting industry and employment. Not everyone agreed.
Proposal after proposal to produce hydro-electricity there was blocked by the House of Lords. The greatest opposition to electrifying the region came from influential wealthy interests who were well-represented in the Lords – sporting estates and coal mine owners (the latter afraid of competition from hydro-electricity). Some objectors cited the loss of the area’s dramatic scenery since dam construction would involve ripping up glens to create new lochs and dams. Land that remained more or less the same for eons would be filled with concrete and bird and animal habitats lost forever. There was less concern for the few people still living in the glens being forced off land generations of their families had inhabited.
A Professor Gruffydd (MP) feared the Highlands would be turned into something akin to a –
“Dublin slum. That has already happened in the rural parts of Scotland and in the Lowlands.”
(27 May 1943, House of Commons)
A habitual critic was MP Sir Gerald Nabarro, a crashing bore with a constituency near Birmingham who took every opportunity to rant in the House of Commons about English taxes having to provide a few Highlanders with electricity. Speaking in July 1958 he had the Strathfarrar scheme in his sights –
“This is not a parochial Scottish issue. This is a matter of an expenditure of £14 million by a nationalised industry.”
One of the bees in his bonnet was his insistence that producing electricity by hydro in the Highlands was far costlier than it would be in England (theoretically) – as if England would agree to such monumental changes to its countryside and ecology and had the physical conditions for such schemes. His complaint that hydro was costlier than coal and nuclear were challenged on grounds that costs of coal and nuclear production kept rising while they fell for hydro power.
In 1958 Conservative and Unionist MP, David Robertson, must have still been wearing his London constituency hat when he switched to Caithness and Sutherland and described the Conon scheme as –
“the unwanted extravagance in the far north”
Supporters of the Conon hydro scheme worried the intended benefits for the Highlands would be diverted south to the central belt to boost industries, incomes and utilities there. This did eventually happen but not before the great hydro venture provided exclusively for the north of Scotland, to the Highlands and islands and the northeast cities of Aberdeen and Dundee.
Under Johnston’s plan the body set up to operate the Conon Hydro scheme, the North of Scotland Hydro-Electric Board (NSHEB), was given temporary ownership of sections of rivers running through the region’s three estates and at the completion of the works the majority of fishing rights were transferred to local angling clubs, but fishing rights on the rivers Conon and Blackwater were sold to private owners (though locals did not always bother going through official channels, including at least one serving police officer who was partial to a salmon from the Blackwater). Three landowners held much of the land between Contin and Ullapool: the Lovat estate, the Fairburn Stirlings and Spencer Nairns of Struy. They were concerned about intrusions onto their land and loss of revenue from fishing and shooting.
With little infrastructure beyond Contin about 160 publicly-funded new roads were constructed so lorries and materials could get into the glens and straths and on completion of the scheme there was a fair amount of anger when some roads were then handed over to the estates as their private property.
Tom Johnston was always aware that business interests outside the Highlands would be eyeing up the scheme’s potential money-making opportunities so he ensured the NSHEB was independent and had control over its own finances in order that Scottish people and businesses would benefit first and foremost and lucrative contracts would not be picked off by bigger English competitors. In 1943 a bill to bring light to the Highlands eventually made it through parliament. The whole scheme was phased in three parts; each requiring a parliamentary act.
And so crofts, houses, roads, tracks, bridges, burns, plants from trees to tiny flowering species and the insects, birds and animals they provided for were forever lost beneath concrete and water. Six dams at Glascarnoch, Vaich, Luichart, Meig, Torrachilty and Orrin and six power stations at Achanalt, Grudie Bridge, Mossford, Luichart, Orrin and Torrachilty along with new lochs at Fannich and Luichart were built in 350 square miles of Ross-shire. Rivers were diverted. Land was dug out. Land was raised. Millennia of rock blasted out of the earth. Part of the Dingwall to Kyle of Lochalsh railway line was submerged and rerouted.
Such a huge undertaking required labour. Lots and lots of men and a few women were hired. Many were local – lorries picked men up (including recently demobbed soldiers and former prisoners of war still in the area) from around Strathpeffer, Dingwall, the Black Isle and miles beyond very early in the day and transported them along winding single-track roads to the building sites and start of usually 12-hour shifts, sometimes longer depending on the job that day. Outside work, summer and winter. Labourers flocked in from around Scotland, Ireland and around Europe. The initial involvement of politicians and planners, men in velour-collared coats and Homburg hats, gave way to men in donkey jackets and tackety boots.
Workers who were not local lived in camps that might comprise ex-war Nissan huts or forestry commission cabins previously occupied by Canadian lumberjacks stationed in Scotland during WWII. Through once silent straths and glens save for the cry of eagles and trickle of burns burst the relentless din of industry – explosions, drilling, excavating and hammering.
Before the coming of the Conon Hydro scheme Duncan ran a mobile shop. His cousin, Don, remembers –
“He had a little Ford van, BGA 555, in which he used to sell fish, fruit and vegetables starting at Brahan P.OW. camp and going up the West Coast nearly up to Ullapool calling at all the crofts along the way. That wee van was an Aladdin’s cave for me. When we stopped to eat, I would have an Arbroath smokie with a choice of Irn Bru or American Creme Soda to wash it down.”
Don was much younger than Duncan and he recalled getting a hurl to Loch Luichart on the crossbar of Duncan’s bike to poach fish with an ‘otter’ (a sort of wooden kite with baited lines that floated across the water). A few miles beyond Loch Luichart lies Loch Vaich and it’s here Duncan was employed as a ‘powder monkey’ handling explosives to blast a tunnel through the rocky landscape so that water from a dam built at Vaich could flow into Loch Glascarnoch.
The ambitious project succeeded enabling hundreds of thousands of Scots easy access to electricity. Before the Conon complex only 1 out of 14 farms and 1 in 100 crofts had electricity. By the late-fifties the vast majority were linked up. Areas most difficult to connect such as the western isles were provided with calor gas in the interim.
New electricity lines at Elphin on the Ullapool-Inchnadamff road with Cul Beag, Cul Mor and Loch Veyatie behind. Mrs MacLean hay-making at her croft near Elphin with poles bringing electricity in the background.
One ambition for electrification was it would attract industries to the north but that never really materialised. However, having electricity at the flick of a switch was overwhelmingly welcomed by the majority of people in the north who could largely dispense with paraffin lamps and local industries such as farming and boat building benefitted greatly from the availability of electrical power for operating machinery.
A decade on from the transformation of the Highlands Tom Johnston’s early concerns remained valid. The nationalised and autonomous North of Scotland Hydro-Electric Board was always under threat but it wasn’t until Thatcher in 1989 that the real damage was done when the Board and its sister in the south of Scotland were privatised as Scottish Hydro Electric plc and Scottish Power plc, freeing these companies to sell their electricity anywhere in the UK – and charge the folk of the straths and glens and everywhere else in Scotland more for their home-produced electricity than consumers of it in the south of England. And so it has remained to this day.
For his devastating injuries; the loss of one eye, one hand, metal shards embedded into his body, his personal and working life devastated, Duncan received £12,000 not the £15,000 his solicitors sued the civil engineering company Reed and Mallik for. Still, it was a considerable sum in 1958 but for a young man with his whole live in front of him paltry compensation. Duncan was invariably upbeat and smiley, a kind and fun man but he must have suffered terrible torment over what his future could have been.
Duncan’s nephew, Rory, at Tarvie Croft which Duncan rented after his accident
I only managed to find one very brief mention of his pay-out, not the accident itself, in newspapers and couldn’t trace his damages case at Edinburgh’s Court of Session (Common law was altered in an 1958 Act to introduce discretionary powers that would allow courts to include interest on damages awards calculated from a date earlier than the decree). Then something odd happened – the name Macrae began to pop up on my computer screen alongside other compensation cases in Scottish courts – Macrae v Reed and Mallik Ltd 1961 SC 68, 74. Lots of claims for personal injury compensation referred to Duncan’s case, including Tommy Sheridan’s appeal for interest on damages he won from News Group Newspapers in 2018 on grounds the pursuer was being deprived of his money through no fault of his own. Duncan’s solicitors had appealed his compensation but in 1961 the court decided greater discretion should be available to the court over the 1958 judgement leaving pursuers of damages back at square one.
However, my attempt to obtain access to the court papers have been stymied and I’ve been told the record of Duncan’s case is closed under section 38 of the Freedom of Information Scotland Act. Closed until 2061! I may put in a Freedom of Information request but am not confident that will be any more successful.
Duncan’s future life was tragically blighted by the accident but he was not alone. Many men suffered life changing injuries and several died carrying out their work on the hydro dams to bring electricity into Scottish homes, farms and businesses. With none of the plant machinery available today, the Conon scheme was achieved through hard, exhausting labour, often in freezing weather conditions. Men were crushed, buried, drowned and blown up and most are long forgotten except by their families – these are the men in boiler suits and donkey jackets while those men involved who wore velour collar coats and Homburg hats have their names recorded for posterity.
Duncan
Duncan’s cousin recalled the man he’d loved –
“So you can see how much he meant to me and imagine how I felt about the accident and then how I admired his long battle to get back to normality. Who needs Superman when there is Duncan?”
He describes Duncan as “that fine fellow” who “brought a lot of happiness to a lot of people.” I remember Duncan. He was indeed a fine fellow with a constant smile and his good humour sure did bring happiness to old and young. This blog is for Duncan.
Duncan is buried along with his parents, Dunc and Anne, and brother, Roddy at Contin cemetery
Further reading – The Dam Builders, Power from the Glens by Jim Miller.
Bit of unusual activity this week of eased lockdown number 15. Nothing that would warrant much of a mention outside of a far from average year but I suppose for many people whose lives have not been personally affected by Covid19 there’s a growing sense of confidence that it’s not so bad or it’s probably passed us by. Neither impression has any logic to it. Fact is Covid 19 has not gone away. It will not be going anywhere for years and years and years. Some of us have, fortunately, not contracted it. One day some of us who mistakenly think we’ve beaten it will be nonchalantly rounding a corner and walk slap bang into the virus.
But, as I was saying, there is a feeling among some of us that it might be okay to go out a bit more. Now, I don’t mean go to a crowded beach, a crowded shop, any sort of pub or the hairdresser. I mean meet up with a handful of tried and tested family members.
Diver and Mexican on gates at Dunecht Estate
So, this week we did just that. Met up with our daughter and son-in-law and went for a walk – a very long walk as it transpired – through Dunecht Estate. Hot day and there were lots of exquisite damsel flies flitting about. Dunecht Estate was owned by the Cowdrays who made their cash in Mexican oil and salvage hence their arms on the gate. The body of one of the Cowdrays disappeared from the family vault at the Aberdeenshire estate. This particular wealthy Earl was fond of travelling, a hobby he carried on after his death, in Italy in 1880. His corpse journeyed across the Alps, across the North Sea, and was driven by coach up through Scotland to Dunecht – during one of the worst snowstorms ever to hit this country, it is said, so delaying his arrival by weeks. Hope he was well embalmed. Local poacher/rat-catcher led police to the shallow grave where the body lay for many months and was sentenced to five years penal servitude – as poor people often were.
Next day we travelled a little further afield to visit a relation of my husband who lives down the coast. She’s on her own and has ‘neighbour trouble.’ Boy has she got ‘neighbour trouble.’ I think that subject should be avoided for the present. During a brief visit we took a quick shufty at a track one of the village folk restored down the steep slope to the shore. A bench at the top includes names of local people who have died – a nice touch and a map of the world next to the bench so you can find your bearings between Aberdeenshire’s coast and a’wy else. The sun was shining. The day very warm and the sea was sparkling blue but it was time to leave and westwards we headed, over that marvel of the northeast, the bypass, and home.
But in the way of these things – the relief of scarcity comes in threes – like buses. Our third and final outing of last week was closer when we took our old cat to the vet. As usual our travel-averse cat threw up during the short drive there. He was handed in and duly handed back out with some expensive eye drops. He really is nae keen on eye drops.
There was also a flurry of phone calls this week. North to Strathpeffer and south to friends in Tunbridge Wells in England ( a place whose name I can never remember, Tunbridge Wells that is.) Most of the talk was Covid related, though not entirely thank goodness. Doesn’t sound like anything major is happening in either place.
We also had three deliveries this week. Our new garden chairs arrived. Well-packaged in large boxes lined with insulation that would have made perfect plant-rearing containers were they not made out of cardboard. Our self-assembly Adirondack chairs proved challenging. Between bewildering written instructions and absurd illustrations what should have been a straightforward assembly turned into an afternoon of scratching heads to the point my husband was about to drill out a larger hole for one set of screws when I suggested swapping over a couple of things – it worked. Second seat was put together in no time. We like them.
A second delivery was also due from Royal Mail. I didn’t worry when it failed to arrive ‘next day’ since where we live there is no such thing as a ‘next day’ delivery. But when it didn’t come the following day I was getting a bit pee-ed off. About tea time my husband called down from upstairs asking if I was expecting a delivery as there was a man walking about the garden. On looking out our front door in that tentatively Covid way, hoping not to bang heads with someone round the other side of the porch, I spotted the said man, large box in hand, about to go back to his car at the end of our drive (it’s a very short one.) I shouted to him and he shouted back that Royal Mail had dropped parcels at his place, they’d opened my box but they hadn’t got Covid. I thanked him for driving it to us and he dropped it where he was, at the end of the drive. Now despite my gratitude to him for taking it to us and not just arranging for Royal Mail to uplift it, it occurred to me it was a funny place to leave the heavy box, it being much too heavy for me. And open by now.
The third delivery was our fortnightly grocery delivery. We’ve never yet received an order exactly as we’ve selected but they usually come there-abouts. Substitutes are fairly normal so what was unusual was that no coffee arrived. Not even a substitute. Now I don’t drink coffee but luckily I’d ordered ground coffee from the supplier of the box in the drive so not all was lost. The perils of online shopping.
There was a less-than-dramatic thunder storm around 5 am on the Saturday. Saturday being the day I won the family virtual quiz at night!! But before that I got up and unplugged just about everything that runs on electricity for the duration of the thunder and lightning. We’ve lost electrical stuff previously to lightning strikes so don’t take chances.
Well into eating our last-minute-let’s-grow- salad crops. It is the way to eat if you can manage it. Radish contest ongoing. More on that next week, hopefully.
All quiet on the house martin front. They’re still active and so far the nests are holding up. Long may that continue. Hearing a cuckoo occasionally and owl at night (suppose it’s a night owl.) Just the one I think which is a bit sad. Those starlings that persisted in nesting in a tree hole frequented by jackdaws appear to be proven right for there are lots and lots of starlings flying around here now and quite a few are feeding off the seeds and nuts in the garden. Such striking plumage when the sun hits it. Haven’t seen the heron for ages. Don’t know what that means. Certainly whenever I look down into the burn that runs alongside our garden there are no fish – which is unusual. Think we know who to blame for that Ms/Mr Heron.
Made some pancakes half and half with banana and ordinary SR flour and added a handful of some freeze-dried raspberries which were delivered last week. The pancakes rose beautifully but were not dissimilar to shoe leather texture. Eaten fresh were fine. Left a day or two – forget it. Those raspberries are strange. Astronaut food, our son described them which I suppose they are. Like instant coffee. Freeze dried, that is, not the taste. Disappointed with the pancakes I decided to bake what turned out to be a large consignment of flapjack-type biscuits made from a huge amount of porridge oats, dark sugar, sour cherries, a handful of aronia berries, lots of chopped up dried apricots, desiccated coconut, ground ginger, cinnamon, syrup, marg – think that was about it, oh sunflower seeds. Message here is bung in what you like, mix it up, drop spoonfuls onto baking tray and bake for about 15 to 25 mins depending on how chewy or crunchy you want them. You cannot go wrong with anything that uses porridge oats. It is the best food ever.
Just time to tell you to watch the 1933 film of Alice in Wonderland with Gary cooper as the White Knight (funny scene on horseback), Cary Grant as the Mock Turtle (doesn’t look a bit like him,) W.C. Fields as Humpty Dumpty (absolutely brilliant) and Edna May Oliver as the Red Queen (pitch perfect performance.) Alice (Charlotte Henry) is good as well. Some very funny lines. Amazon Prime or YouTube. But, whatever you do, do-not-watch The Sinner on Netflix. Annoying and stupid.
Nearly finished biography of Walter Benjamin. It’s a tragic tale of victims of fascism in the 1930s but the guy would have driven me mad. More on it next time, hopefully.
This Pictish stone currently sits on a brae at Strathpeffer in Ross and Cromarty. Allegedly this brae is called Nutwood Lane which sounds horribly twee straight out the pages of Enid Blyton so we’ll draw a suitably lacy curtain over that dubious name.
The area’s rich Pictish heritage includes many symbol stones including this one with carvings of an eagle and a horse shoe arc. It is also known as Clach an Tiopain, Gaelic for the stone of the echo, from its hollow ring when struck – a bit like listening to the wit and wisdom of Gordon Brown.
The stone is a greyish blue gneiss and stands 32ins tall by around 24ins broad and 10ins thick. The shape of the stone was presumably selected by the carver but it has not been dressed into a particular shape. It is an example of a carved fallen stone, a feature of early Pictish art, dating from the 5th or 6th centuries, or perhaps it was a rush job. Why it was carved with a horse shoe and eagle is anyone’s guess. Some say it commemorated a battle and others that it signified a marriage – a lucky horseshoe is still associated with weddings and the eagle is the symbol of the Munros – but this is all conjecture.
The stone was carved at least 1500 years ago and originally stood where Fodderty cemetery is, between Dingwall and Strathpeffer, and was used to mark the burial place of the local Munro clan killed in a battle with the MacDonalds in 1411. The Munros won and the Eagle stone was an appropriate monument to mark where their clansmen fell in battle.
As the information notice by the Eagle stone explains a century later the Brahan Seer (Coinneach Odhar), Scotland’s equivalent of Nostradamus, fortetold of a great flood across the strath if the Eagle Stone fell three times – when it had fallen twice it was thought advisable to move it higher up the strath from Fodderty to its present position and set it in concrete, just in case.
The predictions of the Brahan Seer are, of course, cobblers and instances of old Brahany hitting the nail on the head are only the ravings of delusional simple folk. The Brahan Seer was dispatched in a horrible manner that involved a barrel of boiling tar at Chanory Point at Rosemarkie. Didn’t see that coming did poor old Coinneach.
And I don’t know if the Brahan Seer predicted the coming of a development of houses close to where the stone now stands that will necessitate the felling of mature trees as well as part of the distinctive beech hedging that lines the entrance to Strathpeffer.
As far as I know he didn’t mention the Earl of Cromartie and his housing ambitions but maybe he did. Seems like a lot of upheaval for 15 houses but then we know what happens when a few houses get permission – before anyone knows it there’s another 15, then no reason why another 15 shouldn’t be built too. I hope that cement around the Eagle Stone is solid because if one of those diggers gets too close there’s no knowing what might happen.
As for the beech hedge it may yet be saved, well not saved exactly because it will be dead when howked out, but local planners, we love them all don’t we folks?, have sought to reassure people that a ‘robust replanting plan’ for a replacement hedge is, well – planned. Robust? Can’t argue with robust.
Good luck to the future of the Eagle stone in its present location. I have a feeling it’s going to need it. Hey, the Brahan Seer thing is catching.
Perched between a few houses and one of the hills under which the delightful village of Strathpeffer nestles is a gothic gem of a graveyard.
Kinettas Graveyard has been in use since at least the end of the 18th century but may stretch back to an earlier period. It was sometimes known as Killetash.
Kinettas is one of the earliest Free Kirk burial grounds in the Highlands and was the cemetery for the Free Kirk in nearby Contin.
It is tiny and in a state of glorious disrepair although apparently does receive attention from the council.
Gravestones are apparently set higgledy-piggledy with many little marker stone, some with names and nothing else legible.
Stones are made from local sandstone and some granites, grey and red.
Two of the stones tell an interesting story.
John Mackenzie was a local man, from Auchterneed An Piobaire Ban – the fair-haired piper. He supported the Jacobite cause but was too old to participate. However his son George, also a piper, was involved in the ’45. George had been born at Achility near Strathpeffer in 1796.
Both father and son were highly esteemed pipers. John ban (ban means fair haired in Gaelic) won numerous piping competitions.
The little stone alongside marks the graves of Mackenzie’s infant sons who both died in 1847.
The larger stone was erected to the piper and three of his four surviving sons.
John Mackenzie had been piper to the Marquis of Breadalbane for 28 years before retiring to Munlochy where he died on 24th April 1864 at the age of 68 years.
The stone erected by his ‘sorrowing widow’ reads:
He was a real specimen of the true hearted Highlander esteemed and respected by all who knew him. He was known as chief and father of all the Highland pipers and had taught upwards of forty young men.
After a long and painful illness which he bore with Christian resignation he fell asleep in Jesus.
Also to the memory of her beloved son Donald, late pipe major 25th regt. Who died at Greenhill Cottage on the 13th of April 1863 aged 30. Universally regretted by all who knew him.
George had died from smallpox.
The story of John Ban Mackenzie goes something like this.
Mackenzie was taken on as the piper to the Davidson family of Tulloch around 1820. A few years later the laird turned his attention to a beautiful young heiress from Applecross called Maria Mackenzie. As Davidson was already married he got his piper, Mackenzie, to act as postman carrying letters between the two lovers.
Plans were arranged for Davidson and the young woman to elope but there was a dramatic twist to the tale.
John ban was tall, well built and one of the most handsome men in the area and his role as an intermediary meant frequent contact with Maria. And so instead of Davidson committing bigamy with the lovely Maria, the piper, John ban Mackenzie and she eloped, crossing the hills from Applecross on ponies they made their way through Strathconnon and down to Crief where they married in secret.
Mackenzie had gained a wife but lost his job – however such was his reputation that he was employed by the Marquis of Breadalbane and there he stayed until his retirement almost 30 years later.
A lot has been spoken about Fred Perry recently when expectation of a British winner of the men’s singles at Wimbledon, the first since 1936, fell on the shoulders of Andy Murray. To hear the tributes to Perry you might have thought he’d always been held in high regard. In that you’d be wrong. But let’s start with an interesting little anecdote.
We’re back in the 1930s at the point when Fred Perry was becoming famous as the winner of tennis majors.
It was a summer afternoon in the early 1930s when teenager Marnie Munro, her younger sister and a girlfriend strapped their wooden tennis racquets to their bicycles and cycled the steep hill to Strathpeffer . As they made their way into the Pavilion tennis courts a tall, good natured young man approached and asked if they’d like a fourth person to make up a game of doubles. That man was Fred Perry visiting the famous Highland spa and that’s how a group of teenage girls got to play with a Wimbledon champion one fine day 80 years ago.
There are similarities between Fred Perry and Andy Murray. Perry was a working class Englishman, the son of a cotton spinner, who was snubbed by the snooty, class-ridden tennis set at the All England Club for he was not regarded as being one of them despite his making British tennis hugely successful. He had consecutive wins at Wimbledon during the 1930s and won all four grand slams in the US, France, Australia as well as Britain. He also led the British Davis Cup to wins during the same decade. But Perry’s achievements were not valued.
He later recalled in his autobiography, ‘It shows how we have all mellowed over the years from the days when some elements in the All England Club and the Lawn Tennis Association looked down on me as a hot-headed, outspoken tearaway rebel, not quite the class of the chap they really wanted to see winning Wimbledon, even if he was English.
I’ve mellowed too. I think I’m very much a leopard who has changed his spots. Looking back, I have to concede that I was sometimes a little brash and aggressive about what I regarded as the class-ridden set-up there. But at the time, a young man with my background was bound to feel that snobbery very keenly, and I still get angry about the shabby way I was treated when I won Wimbledon in 1934, the first Englishman to do it for 20 years.’
After winning his first Wimbledon championship, Perry overheard a member of the All England Club congratulating his losing opponent, the Australian Jack Crawford with the words, ‘This was one day when the best man didn’t win.’ And they presented Crawford with a bottle of champagne.
There was no champagne for Perry. It handed him a club tie and a voucher for Mappin & Webb but failed to add their congratulations.
‘Instead of Fred J Perry, the champ,’ he wrote, ‘I felt like Fred J Muggs the chimp. I’ve never been so angry in my whole life. It really hurt. All my paranoia about the old-school brigade surfaced with a vengeance.’
Perry preferred the unstuffy life he found in the US and became an American citizen. He became an international tennis ambassador and reported widely on the game but still the British tennis set largely ignored him until relatively recently when 50 years after his first Wimbledon championship the Club commissioned a statue of him.
The memory of that afternoon’s tennis game with the best player in the world is still fresh in the memory of Marnie 80 years later.
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Lenathehyena's Blog from Lorna Corall Dey 