Memoir of Reverend Donald John Gillies
of St. Kilda published in Scotland
 PHOTO: Courtesy of Peggy Askew
THE PHOTOGRAPH ABOVE shows Reverend Gillies standing beside the First World War gun on St. Kilda in August 1980 when he and other St. Kildans revisited the island for the fiftieth anniversary of the evacuation and the re-dedication of the recently restored church.
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By HARRY McGRATH
EDINBURGH – I remember distinctly the moment when, on one of my many flights between Canada and Scotland, I detected the change in engine noise and slight dip of the wings that indicate the plane is beginning its descent and turning for Glasgow.
I lifted the blind to check out the window for the third indicator that Scotland is close by – the great bank of cloud that usually occludes its west coast even in summer time.
On this occasion, however, the air was crystal clear and below I could see a cluster of islands. The largest had a great crescent shaped bay with a hill behind it. And beyond that there were two great rock stacks thrusting upwards from the sea.
I rubbed the sleep from my eyes and stared down until the plane ran into the inevitable cloud and the archipelago of St. Kilda disappeared. I hadn’t seen St. Kilda from the air before that day and haven’t seen it since. And yet I recognised its outline immediately.
Remarkably, I had spent the first half of that particular flight re-reading the seven notebooks that made up the memoir of Reverend Donald John Gillies of St. Kilda. In them he describes in considerable detail the geography of the place in which he was born and raised.
To see St. Kilda on the same flight that I carried the Gillies memoir to Scotland in my hand luggage may just be coincidence though I like to think of it as wyrd in the Old English sense of fate or destiny. At the very least, it was synchronicity.
The story also contains a milder symmetry. The flight took place in 2007, three years after the discovery of the memoir in Coquitlam, British Columbia.
Another three years elapsed before I was able to make my way to the offices of renowned Scottish publisher Birlinn to collect an advance copy of The Truth about St. Kilda: An Islanders Memoir by Reverend Donald John Gillies. It is sitting in front of me as I write this, a handsome paperback edition.
St. Kilda is the remotest part of the British Isles and is more than 40 miles west of Benbecula in the Outer Hebrides. It is one of the few places in the world that has UNESCO World Heritage status for both its natural and cultural qualities.
The evacuation of its entire population in 1930 (including Reverend Gillies’s mother and one of his brothers) has become the stuff of legend.
Editor John Randall points out in his introduction to the memoir that St. Kilda has had over 700 books or articles written about it which is “a remarkable and possibly unique quantity of writing for one small group of islands”. Yet, almost all of it was written by outsiders rather than native St. Kildans.
This is a situation that Reverend Gillies was keenly aware of and seems to have been part of his motivation when, in his eighties, he sat down to record his memories of St. Kilda. On the inside cover of the first notebook he wrote “The Truth about St. Kilda by Rev. Donald John Gillies who was born there and lived there.”
The other interesting aspect of the story, and one I tried to explain in my foreword to the book, is what the process of the discovery of the Gillies memoir revealed about the close-knit nature of the Scottish community in Vancouver.
It was a process that stretched back to St. Kilda itself and visits made there in 2003 by my friend Professor James Russell of the University of British Columbia.
These visits stimulated James’s interest in St. Kilda and he began to lecture on the subject around Vancouver. Soon he learned of Reverend Gillies and, through a connection made by kenspeckle local Scot Lew Ross, he contacted Gillies’s daughter Peggy Askew who lives in Coquitlam.
At the same time the Simon Fraser University Centre for Scottish Studies had started an archive project to find and preserve material related to the history of the Scots in British Columbia.
It was this conflation of circumstances and associations that led James Russell and myself to Peggy’s house and the discovery of “a seam of gold” as Lew aptly put it.
The brief glimpse from a plane in 2007 is still as close as I’ve got to St. Kilda, but not as close as I’ve felt to it.
As I walked to Birlinn Publishing yesterday, sticks, branches and even garbage bins barrelled down the street past me, driven by a gale force wind that pummelled the face with sleet. Spring had come to Edinburgh.
There must have been many such days on St. Kilda where, unlike the modern city, there were no conveniences to ameliorate the effects of nature, no food other than the occasional ship delivery and what ingenuity, courage and skill could muster and no assurance of outside help if accident or illness should strike.
In an age of instant communication, such a life is unimaginable now even in the parts of the British Isles that are still considered remote. When Reverend Gillies gathered up his school jotters and different coloured pens and sat down at his dining room table in Coquitlam to record his memories of St. Kilda, he was writing about another world. Thank goodness he did.
[The Truth about St. Kilda: An Islanders Memoir by Reverend Donald John Gillies is published in Britain by Birlinn under its John Donald imprint. It will be available in North America from October through Independent Publishers Group]
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