Foreign News: St. Kilda

Rolling in the grey North Atlantic swell, His Majesty’s sloop Harebell and the steamer Dunara Castle lay off the bleak precipitous island of St. Kilda last week. Plunging out through the surf. Royal Navy lifeboats carried to the Harebell 35 passengers, the entire population of St. Kilda, which the Harebell’s precise commander reported thus: Men, able bodied 8

Men, aged 2

Wives 5

Widows 6

Girls, able bodied 2

Children, of school age 8

Children, under school age 3

Old Woman 1

35

Meanwhile the captain & crew of the Dunara Castle were working like demons, stowing the pitiful furniture and belongings of the St. Kildans aboard ship, pulling from the icy water 590 bellowing, redeyed, shaggy little Highland cattle and bleating sheep, which had been made to swim out from St. Kilda’s gravelly landing beach (St. Kilda has no harbor). Left behind were hundreds of other sheep, too wild to catch, hidden away in the island caves with the seamews and the puffins. Reason for the exodus: St. Kilda’s new owner, the Marquess of Ailsa and the British Labor Government had both decided that bleak St. Kilda is unfit for human habitation. Said Lord Ailsa’s son, Archibald Kennedy, Earl of Cassillis:

“My father and I will never again permit the island to be settled.”

Returning travelers are at one with

Lords Ailsa and Cassillis in their opinion of life on St. Kilda. A tiny peak of rock in the North Atlantic, 40 miles west of North Uist in the Outer Hebrides, it is stormbound for eight months of the year. No trees can grow there, no cats can live there, no horses, no rabbits, no rats. The St. Kildans (a population of 30 to 100 has lived there for centuries) speak nothing but Gaelic, do not bother to shear their wild sheep but pull the wool out by the fistful. They live on potatoes and sea birds. In winter, when the island is inaccessible, the St. Kildans maintained communication with the outside world by means of “sea messages.” Letters placed in strong wooden boxes were thrown from the sheer cliffs. The prevailing westerly winds generally carried these to the Hebrides or the mainland of Scotland in one week. For hundreds of years St. Kilda has belonged to the MacLeods, who, living on the nearly as rigorous Isle of Skye, have seen nothing untoward in life on St. Kilda (Norman Magnus, present MacLeod of MacLeod, is hale and hearty at 91). The Marquess of Ailsa* bought St. Kilda last year, immediately decided to move the population to Ayrshire where he owns 76,000 acres. Ayrshire’s temperature seldom rises above 60, but to the St. Kildans it will be as Florida.

* Reporters last week could find nothing to connect 7 5-year-old Andrew William Mellon, whose daughter bears the name of Ailsa, with the 83-year-old owner of St. Kilda, but found much to connect Lord Ailsa with the U. S. The Marquess of Ailsa, whose title comes from Ailsa Craig, a precipitous rock at the mouth of the Firth of Clyde, is a direct descendant of a Captain Archibald Kennedy, R. N., who inherited an estate near Hoboken, N. J. in 1763, married into New York’s Schuyler and Van Rensselaer families, was said to own “more houses in New York than any other man.” From Ailsa Craig come curling stones, slithered over the ice by winter sportsmen.