Note: It is often difficult to assess the heritage left to SY local historians by the memory banks of the late James Shaw Grant. His innate ability as a journalist to set down on paper his intimate knowledge of the Stornoway scene, stretching over almost a century, has been a valuable resource for those interested in the town’s past years, to say nothing of the individuals whose often eccentric characteristics made Stornoway the rather unique community it was in bygone years. What follows is an article which first appeared in the ‘Gazette’ which is typical of the manner in which he encapsulated both people and events which many of our more senior readers might have forgotten.
As soon as I started reading Tom Clark’s series ‘Behind the Bamboo Curtain’, I was transported from China in 1995 to Point Street before the First World War. To a little shop in Point Street, a barber’s shop, presided over by a man named Turpie. The face of Stornoway changed slowly in those days and the same shop was presided over for many years, at a later date, by a barber known to us all as Bogey, a noted piper, and later again by a councillor known universally as John the Barber. Once, when I was going abroad on holiday, I presented my passport at Heathrow. The Custom’s Official looked at it very closely, then looked quizzically at me. What on earth was wrong? Finally, he handed the passport back, saying as he did so “Stornoway’ That’s a hell of a place to be born in. Do you know John the Barber?”
The Custom’s Official was not a Lewisman. He was the next best thing – a man from Applecross, to which we were linked by the mail steamer to Kyle of Lochalsh, which hove to off Applecross each night to pick up passengers or goods from an open boat. At the same period another mail steamer used to stop outside Rodel Harbour for a similar precarious exchange. I have a little lithograph by a Swedish artist of the exchange in progress at Rodel. Just a few deft lines on a piece of paper but you can feel the boat heaving beneath your feet.
Point Street in my youth was given over to barbers and shoemakers. Many more shoemakers than barbers. They had one thing in common. Talk! Masculine talk! Who says men don’t gossip? In Bogey’s day you would almost certainly find John Morrison, Assynt House, at some time of the morning and the talk was of pipers and piping. In John the Barber’s day the shop served much the same purpose as the Lobby in the House of Commons. Tittle tattle from the County Council, the Town Council and the Harbour Commission was exchanged, and occasionally deep-laid stratagems were planned. At the end of the last century, the shoemaker’s shops of Stornoway were the theological college of the town. By my day practical jokes had taken the place of theology. Dolan’s shop could almost have been described as a community theatre in which gentle real-life comedies were manufactured while you waited. Like the night when the streets were solid ice and would remain that way, because gritting was a yet to be discovered art. Dolan commanded everyone who came in to doff his shoes. Quickly he hammered in sufficient sharp pointed studs to anchor a battleship. This went on until Peter ‘Pope’, a cousin of my own, arrived. He was not asked to doff his shoes.
Instead, Dolan suggested they should all go for a walk. So, they set off down Sandwick Road and round Goathill, the whole party walking with confidence on glassy streets while Peter slithered and tumbled like a drunken man and was mercilessly chided by the others for his instability.
‘Coachman’, who, despite his nickname, was the local pilot, was the central figure in a long-running farce at Dolan’s ‘Little Theatre’. To arouse Coachman’s jealousy Dolan was built up by the regulars as a very wealthy man and a navigational genius. They went to great lengths to work out the script. Bank clerks were induced to come into the shop when Coachman was known to be there to ask for Dolan’ s instructions about his investments. On one occasion, during the Second World War, they even persuaded an officer from the Naval Base to ask Dolan, in Coachman’s presence, to adjust the compass on a warship lying at the pier, a task which, he said, had defied their own experts. Now we get our ‘soaps’ on television. In those days we made them for ourselves.
Point Street was so much the street of the shoemakers that when the Town Clerk, Alastair Macleod, and I began a quiet campaign to have the main streets in Stornoway given Gaelic names, he said translating Point Street into Gaelic would create the impression that there was some link between the street and the Point District. He suggested instead that it should be officially called the Street of the Shoemakers to record a piece of local history. When the shoemakers finally moved out, Dolan took the tradition of practical joking with him and some of it still survives in the workroom above the shop on Cromwell Street.
Some of the barbers began to move out of Point Street at the same time. Johnny Thomson, a neighbour and playmate of my early childhood, had the barber’s shop on the corner of Kenneth Street and Church Street. When Stornoway got electricity, he installed an electric clipper which caused some confusion among his older clients. One bodach sat in the chair gazing in the mirror at the flex dangling from the barber’s hand. What, he asked, would they say in Bernera when he told them that in Stornoway they were now cutting hair with a rope?
I have made a long detour from China and I better get back to Tom Clark’s article. It was the reference to spitting and spittoons which set me off One of my very earliest recollections is of my first visit to Turpie’ s barber’s shop, with my father, for a haircut. It was a great adventure, sitting on a long bench with a crowd of men, waiting my tum, and then being hoisted on to a plank of wood, set across the arms of the barber’s chair, to raise me up to the working level but the greatest wonder of all was the huge spittoon by the fireplace and the unerring aim and tremendous velocity with which the tobacco chewers present scored bull’s eyes from every corner of the room. Later, and more surprisingly, when I was big enough to see over the counter, I realized that there was also a spittoon in Murdo Macrae’ s shop on the corner of Keith Street and Church Street. Murdo Macrae was our family butcher and reckoned to be one of the best in town. Nobody seemed disturbed by the fact that the process of mincing a pound of steak, with the hand operated mincer on the counter; flight be interrupted at any moment as a parabola of tobacco juice traversed the sawdusted floor.
These reminiscences do not show that Stornoway was behind the times. Spitting in public places was much more common in America than Britain. The Americans sometimes called their spittoons cuspidors to give them an air of elegance, but their purpose was just the same. One of the first cities to take a real stand against spitting, as part of an attempt to root out tuberculosis, was Glasgow. The first thing you saw on a Glasgow tramcar, in the twenties and thirties, was a large notice prohibiting spitting and threatening severe penalties for anyone offending. Lest we become too complacent about modem hygiene, I should add a query: which is more offensive, to spit out a squirt of tobacco juice, which will disappear in the first shower of rain, or to spit out a gob of chewing gum, which will remain on the pavement permanently, germs and all, as a memorial to our having passed that way? I never go into Inverness without being astonished by the manner in which every pavement is marbled with chewing gum wherever people congregate, like the bus station or the cinema queue.
When I had reached this point, the mail arrived with a letter from a friend in Stornoway recalling that, in her schooldays, it was possible for the girls to skip in the middle of Matheson Road. That was their playground. She contrasted that with the stream of traffic to the new Ferry Terminal. On one occasion, she recalled, when the girls were skipping merrily, a boy appeared from Ropework Road on a bicycle. As he approached them, the bike got out of control, mounted the pavement and crashed into the wall. When they dashed over to see if the cyclist was hurt, they were horrified to find him covered in blood from head to foot. Then they realised he was a butcher’s boy, with two pails of blood for marags on his handlebars.
It was not only slaughterhouse blood which was carried through the streets in those days, exposed to the wind and the dust. Milk was sold from door to door from little carts. You brought your own pail and a pint, or a quart was ladled out of the milk churn into your containers which, as like as not, had no cover. That dust was a real menace is proved by the fact that Stornoway had a water cart, which patrolled the main streets in dry summer weather, dowsing the dust, while a score of boys walked along behind it with their bare legs in the water jets. Admittedly it was not often needed in the wet Lewis climate but, when it was needed, the dust was of a peculiar richness. All transport was horse drawn, and most of the goods carried were herring, in one form or another, of which not a few were generally lost in transit. The glaur o’ my childhood was vibrant organic mix, smelling of horse dung and shimmering with little pools of iridescent herring oil.
Today we are used to having jags for all sorts of diseases, especially when we travel abroad. In my 85 years I have had only one jag, apart from local anaesthetics at the dentist’s and that was so long ago I don’t even remember it although I still have the evidence on my arm. As a baby, just a few months old, I was vaccinated against smallpox. Smallpox has been eliminated but, in my childhood, it was still the great killer: the disease that terrified. In some areas people were hostile to vaccination, for religious or political reasons. My uncle, who was a Medical Officer of Health in a mining community in Durham, had great difficulty in getting people to vaccinate, although smallpox was endemic in the area. Finally, he got a photograph of a lovely young girl, as she was before she caught smallpox and as she looked at the very peak of the disease, when her face was a mass of putrid sores. The photographs were hung in every doctor’s surgery in the district and mothers at last began to bring their children in for vaccination.
While I was still at school there was a smallpox scare. The epidemic did not reach Lewis, but it seemed to be spreading rapidly north and, and, as a precaution, Lewis school children, who had not been vaccinated within the previous ten years, were called in for re-vaccination. I attended with the others, in the old Infant Hall, but I had a heavy cold that day and the school doctor refused to vaccinate me. I was to be called later, when my cold had gone. Before I got the call, the scare was over. That, I think, was the last smallpox epidemic in Britain
Not surprisingly, given the standards of hygiene at the time, typhoid was a real danger. There was an outbreak in the early twenties which I remember well. Several prominent citizens of Stornoway died, including Charles Orrock the Chamberlain. The outbreak was eventually traced to a carrier employed in the dairy at the Manor Farm, where the Cabarfeidh Hotel is today. Neither she nor anyone else had any idea she was a carrier until the outbreak occurred.
Our problems today are different, but in some ways more insidious. A few weeks ago, I boasted to a friend that I hadn’t had flu since the great pandemic of 1918 which killed more than 20 million people. Needless to say, I had flu a few weeks after my boast. Today, when I ventured out for the first time, using a walking stick because the streets were snowbound, I filled my lungs with crisp polar air. Every breath was a joy and invigoration until a stream of cars drove past, and I was enveloped in a cloud of noxious poison. I turned for home: coughing and distressed. In my childhood we suffered through ignorance and poverty not, as now, through affluence and stupidity.
James Shaw Grant
This article first appeared in the Stornoway Gazette in 1995. It was reproduced for Issue 28 of the Society’s Journal (June 2007) and also issue 55 of SY Gone By (Winter 2020/21). The short introductory note is by the Society’s first Secretary and Journal editor, the late Frank Thompson.
Jim Grant notes the name of a Mr Turpie, barber. This was David Shaw Turpie born in Glasgow in 1876. He married Catherine Mackenzie of Laxay in 1907 and the family settled at 11 Garden Road. Although JSG says his shop was on Point Street, he had started at 10 South Beach Street. He was a keen wrestler (in Drill Hall competitions and also described himself as an inventor). He was also a member of the Lewis Pipe Band and served as a Sergeant in the 14th Hussars during World War One. He remarried after his wife’s death in 1919 and returned to Glasgow in 1925. He died aged 85 in 1961. Source: Article in issue 35 (December 2010) of the Journal by Margaret Nicolson (MacInnes).
Photograph of John Macleod, Gravir aka John the Barber is originally credited to the Stornoway Gazette from a copy in the Society’s archive.